I think one of the appeals of 17th-century Dutch genre painting is that the narratives they present are familiar to us. Lutes may be in short supply today, but guitars and other stringed instruments abound. Women still fuss at their toilette. Today we read emails on our phones, instead of having the tactile experience of holding a sheet of paper. But human nature hasn’t changed that much.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) has assembled what may be the definitive exhibition of 17th-century Dutch high-life genre painting, which focuses on the daily lives of the elite. Among the 65 paintings are 10 by Johannes Vermeer, nearly a third of the 34 works attributed to him. The curators of this exhibition– Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Arts; Adriaan Walboer, head of collections and research, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, who proposed the current exhibition; and Blaise Ducos, curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings, Musée du Louvre, Paris–deserve high praise for accomplishing that, but by including works by 14 of Vermeer’s contemporaries 1, they’ve given us a framework by which to judge the master.

Today Vermeer is acknowledged as the star of Dutch genre painting of the mid-1600s, but he did not hold that position at that time. He was successful enough as a provincial genre painter in Delft, but he was not widely known.

Following his death in 1675, his reputation was not enhanced when he was nearly ignored by Arnold Houbraken in the second volume of his three seminal books on 17th-century Dutch artists, Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists, published in 1719. Vermeer was rediscovered in the 19th century by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, and is now considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

I think there are several reasons for Vermeer’s popularity today. A viewer, no matter how unfamiliar he may be with this period of Dutch art, can pick out the Vermeer in the gallery at 20 paces. What makes his work stand out from his compatriots who were painting the same themes and often using nearly identical compositions is, first, a question of light. Vermeer’s paintings are suffused with a soft natural light, often from a window on the left side of the canvas, and this softens the painting overall.