THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD

An expatriate chronicles his youthful discovery of the Dutch Golden Age.

In a luminous, splendidly illustrated melding of art history and memoir, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, translator, and essayist Moser pays homage to 17th-century artists whose works he discovered when he first settled in the Netherlands 20 years ago. For half of his life, he writes, “I felt that these artists were guiding me, carrying me, through their world.” Besides Rembrandt and Vermeer, Moser examines a host of less familiar artists, including Rembrandt’s neighbor Jan Lievens and his students Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, and Carel Fabritius, painter of The Goldfinch, a charismatic work that, for Moser, “emitted a force that was as real as the net of gravity.” The author ably conveys the radiance of genre paintings by Ter Borch, “famous for his ability to reproduce the shimmer of satin” and suffuse interiors “with the intimate glow of the happy home.” That evocation of warmth strikes him as particularly Dutch: Pieter de Hooch, for one, “showed spotlessly clean middle-class rooms where, bathed in warm light, brightly clad people were taking part in some peaceful activity: getting ready for school, chatting with neighbors, playing with the dog.” But Moser resists what he calls art historians’ “misplaced materialist fixation,” which ascribes to Dutch painting an obsession with the decorative, the ostentatious, the bourgeois accumulation of things. He sets artists’ lives in the context of violence and upheaval, as well as personal loss, poverty, grief, and longing. In Vermeer, he sees “a mind seeking.” In writing about art, Moser admits that he, too, was a mind seeking: to understand his identity as a writer and as a foreigner in a new culture. “My goal,” he writes, “was a record of my encounter with this culture, of how its great figures helped me explore my own questions: about love and death and art and money, about how to see and how to be.”

A graceful meditation on art.