Andrew Graham-Dixon: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think of the quality of the restorations? Vermeer’s paintings were in fantastically good condition. I was lucky enough 28 years ago to film at the Mauritshuis with the BBC crew just at the point where the View of Delft had been restored, and the Girl with a Pearl Earring had been restored. I could see very clearly, and he talked me through it. It was a man called Jørgen Wadum who’d done the restoration. The minimal retouching necessary in a Vermeer, almost nothing wrong with the painting. There’s no controversial filling in of void space, which you normally have, certainly with a Renaissance painting. To what extent do you bring that area of loss back? How much do you harmonize it so that it doesn’t disturb the modern eye looking at the painting? You can’t really leave a gaping hole. In the case of Vermeer, there aren’t these gaping holes. One thing I remember that was fantastic, which is one in the eye for the people who are always going on about the camera obscura, which I think is one of the more boring things people talk about when they talk about Vermeer. Did he use a camera obscura and all that? If you look closely, as Jørg showed me, at the highlight in the pearl, in the Girl with a Pearl Earring, there’s a splash. He’s dropped the paint. He’s dropped the paint. Likewise, if you look at The Lacemaker, the painting in the Louvre, which I controversially describe as a painting about maternal love, and I say that the sewing cushion with all its red threads is a visual metaphor placed there by Vermeer for the woman’s placenta, nourishing the baby. She’s making a piece of lace for her baby, and she’s pregnant, and the sewing cushion. All of those red threads, they’ve actually been thrown. It’s like a little Vermeer Jackson Pollock prefiguration. He’s thrown the paint. What makes George Stubbs such an underrated painter?…

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