青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer is beloved for his interior genre scenes immortalizing everyday moments through inimitable attention to light. Out of the few works in his extant oeuvre, this postcard book presents thirty-two that pull viewers into his world, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid, and The Art of Painting. “Why did he paint works with the same composition, over and over?” asks Fukuoka Shin-ichi, a life scientist and avowed Vermeer fan, in his preface. “My answer is simple: It seems to me Vermeer was not so much a painter as the possessor of a scientific mind . . . His sense of time, however, was different from that of other scientists. Rather than slicing time into static frames, he perceived it as a pregnant entity also embracing the past and future. And so the girl in the blue turban ever turns her head toward us, and the milk ever flows from its pitcher. Their motional beauty resonates in our hearts without cease. This was a spell that only Vermeer could cast.”