The notion of the painter of genius toiling away in needy anonymity may be a central myth of modernism, but it had precious little to do with the old masters. To a remarkable degree, the Italian artists whom Giorgio Vasari admired are the same artists we admire today, in nearly the same ranking and degree. And one could say as much for the French, Dutch, and Spanish schools.

One of the rare exceptions to this rule is Johannes Vermeer of Delft (1632-75). Only in the middle of the 19th century was he lifted from the deepest obscurity into the very pantheon of painting, where he now sits enthroned among a mere handful of his fellow Olympians, such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Poussin. In addition to his now-obvious excellence, Vermeer is conspicuous for the extreme rarity of his works, which even at the high end amount to fewer than 40 paintings in all, without a single drawing or etching among them. As remarkable as this scarcity, perhaps, is the fact that eight of his paintings reside in Manhattan, within a few blocks of one another on the Upper East Side. Five are in the Metropolitan Museum, and three are in the Frick Collection.

Through the beginning of November, the Frick is exhibiting all three of its Vermeers side by side in the South Hall, near the entrance. This proximity focuses the mind, as the saying goes, even though it cannot be called an epiphany.

That is because the three works in question (“Mistress and Maid,” 1666-67, “Girl Interrupted at Her Music,” c. 1657, and “Officer and Laughing Girl,” c. 1658-59), which went on display together on June 3, are sufficiently divergent that, despite their all being genre scenes, each is unique.

 

Perhaps as remarkable as Vermeer’s former obscurity is the fact that it resulted not from critical animosity, as with Caravaggio, but from pure ignorance of Vermeer’s ever having existed in the first place. That is to say that, whenever people bothered to look at one of his paintings, they were immediately impressed by the presence of something very special. As early as 1834, when the London art dealer John Smith saw Vermeer’s famous “View of Delft,” which the Dutch government had bought at great expense a decade earlier, he declared it to be “superb.” And when, in 1842, Theophile Thore, the man usually credited with rediscovering Vermeer, saw the very same painting, he wrote that this “superb and most unusual landscape captures the attention of every visitor and makes a vivid impression on artists and sophisticated connoisseurs.”

Though the three Frick paintings differ in style and quality, they abundantly attest to why Vermeer is now esteemed above other painters of the Delft School, such as Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch. In one sense, Vermeer engrafts the cool formal perfection of De Hooch upon the shadowy psychological nuance of Ter Borch. But in these two contemporaries we seem to see the world through 17th-century eyes. With Vermeer, by contrast, we see the world not through the eyes of modernity, but rather in a state of elusive, yet indefeasible presentness. That daylight, that unremarkable stillness of an average afternoon, pervades his work. It is nothing less than the mysterious, eternal nowness of the present instant, the eternal present in whatever land and in whatever age men have been alive to perceive it.

And yet, despite the brevity of Vermeer’s career, his style displays striking shifts, even in the three works at the Frick. Astonishingly, he was still in his 20s when he completed “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” and “Officer and Laughing Girl,” which, both in size and in formal conception, are much more typical of the Delft School than is “Mistress and Maid.” These small, intimate works depict that amorous tension in the proximity of man and woman that was a staple of the Delft School. Notwithstanding the wobbly two-point perspective of “Officer and Laughing Girl,” something of astounding vibrancy is taking place within the diminutive confines of its frame. And while “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” appears to have suffered from overcleaning shortly before entering the Frick Collection, there is a delicacy to the young woman’s hooded features that gradually commands our attention and respect.

“Mistress and Maid,” by contrast, was painted nearly 10 years later and is a masterpiece of Vermeer’s 30s. The seated woman of fashion and her humbly attired maid are more nearly life-size, in a manner that recalls the dimensions that Vermeer favored at the very outset of his career. It is also unfinished: He never got around to filling in the background, but left it black. Oddly, providentially, the resulting contrast between this apparently nocturnal ground and the gleam of the lady’s pearls and her yellow robe is perfection itself. In the almost moody shading around the maid’s face, we see a hint of the full-bodied aspirations of Vermeer’s earliest art, when, in the blaze of youth, he still imagined that it was his destiny to become a history painter — the highest ambition available to an artist of his time — rather than the “mere” genre painter we know today.

But the old hierarchies of painting, which meant so much to the men of the 17th century, mean nothing to us, and what is happening in the 2 feet of air that separate the glance of the lady and her servant is as charged with consequence as those synaptic inches that separate the hand of Adam from the hand of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.