At the Vancouver Art Gallery until September 13

Naval battles and pastoral landscapes, grand houses and fish markets, sumptuous materialism and spartan piety—all are represented at the Vancouver Art Gallery this summer. Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art introduces us to 17th-century life and culture in the Dutch Republic. Carefully organized into eight sections, it reveals the social, political, economic, and religious conditions of the time and place.

The exhibition, assembled for the VAG by an international team of curators and administrators, boasts 128 paintings, drawings, prints, and decorative artworks from Amsterdam’s famed Rijksmuseum. At the media preview, the directors of both institutions asserted that the exhibition is the “largest and most significant collection of Dutch 17th-century art” yet seen in Canada.

We’re especially privileged to view Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter, which represents one quarter of the Rijksmuseum’s precious collection of Vermeer paintings—and one-36th of all known Vermeers in the world. While outstanding works by other acclaimed Dutch painters of the age, including Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen, and the greatest of them all, Rembrandt van Rijn, command attention at points throughout the exhibition, the Vermeer sings by itself at the very end.

This small, beautiful, and intriguing work, completed about 1670, five years before Vermeer’s death, is clearly the show’s climax. As Dutch curator Ruud Priem summarizes in the fine book that accompanies the exhibition, “Vermeer is best known for elegant, meticulously crafted interior scenes characterized by brilliant use of light, the subtle gestures and expressions of his subjects and an atmosphere of hushed calm.”

All those attributes are evident in The Love Letter, a work rich in both psychology and iconography. Two women—the wealthy mistress of the house, seated, balancing a lute with one hand and holding an unopened letter in the other; her maid servant, having just delivered the letter, standing behind her—are washed with natural light and viewed through a doorway from a darkened hall or anteroom. (The composition enhances the sense of voyeurism.) Undermining expected power relations, the maid, in her plain clothes, wears a slightly superior smile and her employer, adorned in silk, fur, and pearls, looks up at her with surprise and apprehension.

The painting is filled with visual clues: the lute, the slippers in the foreground, the broom leaning in the doorway, all symbolize a “carnal” or illicit love, while two paintings-within-the-painting, a seascape and a landscape hanging on a back wall of the interior, suggest the great distance of the letter sender and perhaps the stormy nature of the relationship. It’s an immensely rich work, and alludes within its small dimensions to many of the historical attributes of the Dutch Golden Age.

These include naval and colonial power, international trade, the rise of a wealthy middle class, urbanization, materialism, the desire of the newly rich to fill their houses with art, and a keen interest in scenes of everyday life, from middle-class home to city square to farmer’s field. Among a series of still-life and vanitas paintings, look for Jan Davidsz de Heem’s Still Life With Flowers in a Glass. The lush liveliness of the depicted bouquet is countered by suggestions of death and decay, as represented by insects crawling around the flowers. Indeed, the human skulls and snuffed candles seen in a number of the show’s still-life arrangements suggest that art collectors of the Dutch Golden Age liked to be reminded that earthly pleasures are fleeting and death awaits us all.

One of the most affecting works on view is Rembrandt’s Portrait of His Son Titus, Dressed as a Monk. Rembrandt’s only surviving child is depicted here as a young man in a rough brown robe and is possibly intended to represent St. Francis of Assisi. The painting is a work of superb skill and deep feeling. Hands folded in front of him, Titus looks peacefully downward, and Rembrandt’s love for him is like the light that shines upon his face. It articulates, with the greatest tenderness, his dark lashes, sweet mouth, and gentle character.

There’s much else to admire and esteem in Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art, although there are—let’s face it—some duds, too. Half a dozen paintings in the show are incontestably brilliant and a few dozen more are extremely good. So, yes, it’s a worthy summer blockbuster, inflected with visual delight and historical interest we wouldn’t otherwise encounter here. It’s also an experience to savour before our own candles are forever snuffed.