Jacobus Vrel has been the most entirely elusive painter of seventeenth-century Holland, and remains so even after this careful, searching, and beautiful catalogue of his work. It is the first book ever published on him, and the authors are at pains to make clear that they have not solved the riddles of his life, although they have been able to do more with his oeuvre. Fifty works are here attributed to him: nineteen street scenes, twenty-eight interiors, two figure studies, and a single drawing. These include several now lost paintings and previously unpublished ones in private collections.

The attributions seem solid if occasionally surprising (cat. 46 being the most troubling). Extensive technical investigation has been carried out, and we now know about Vrel's habits of under drawing, his lack of interest in strict perspective, his methods of repeating and varying compositions, his occasional and unusual use of gold leaf. We know that his earliest work could date from the 1630s, and that he was painting at least into the 1660s. But of Vrel himself, of his family or his hometown or his training, we know scarcely more than we did back when Bredius first isolated him as a particular individual artist, separating him from Vermeer, to whom many of his works had previously been attributed.

Jacobus Vrel signed a number of paintings, and his name appears in one important seventeenth-century document, the inventory of paintings from the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. Many city archives have been mined for further records, to no avail. Even the surname Vrel does not appear. The essays in this collection end up presenting us with a lot of negatives: no documents, no landmarks in his street scenes, no source for quirky costume details. Even normal iconographic interpretation does not work for Vrel.

Terms like quiet, intimate, and anonymous are frequently used to evoke the odd feeling of his work. It is still difficult, as ever, to situate Vrel among his seventeenth-century peers. Many of the essays have no comparative illustrations, although Bernd Ebert finds distant comparisons in Jan van der Heyden's images of backstreets, Pieter de Hooch's liminal courtyards, and Elinga's still interiors. Karin Leonard's evocative essay on Vrel and modernity uses Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershøi as comparisons, and these feel unsettlingly more right, for they too create “empty rooms filled with inner space,” as she puts it.

There are a few stabs at the concrete here, but they seem not to take us very far. Piet Bakker points to a lost document of 1647 that placed a Jacob Vrel near The Hague in that year: this is such a unique item that I don't understand why more isn't made of it. True, other authors definitively attest that the architecture of Vrel's paintings does not resemble anything in the provinces of Holland, but it would be important if Vrel visited the area near Delft in his early career. Likewise, Dirk Jan de Vries and Boudewijn Bakker contribute an essay placing some of Vrel's architectural features in the town of Zwolle, but this isn't followed up in other essays. His absence from the archives suggests that Zwolle wasn't his long-term professional base, but it would be interesting if he spent some time there.

The most substantial contributions concern technical matters: Vrel himself remains an absence, but his paintings yield to examination. He repeated his compositions more frequently and systematically than scholars had realized, in an almost experimental way. Although his works are undated, we can now say that he painted both street scenes and interiors throughout his career, starting with more of the former and ending with more of the latter. He sometimes reused a panel on which another work had been painted. He made underdrawings, which differ between the first stab at a composition and its variants.

The book itself is a peculiar item, a relic of COVID-19 as much as of its own peculiar subject. Begun with the intention of serving as the catalogue of an exhibition in Munich, The Hague, and Paris in 2020–21, it is now published as a standalone volume that includes a catalogue raisonné of Vrel's work rather than a catalogue of an exhibition. The exhibition will finally be held in 2023 at the Mauritshuis and the Fondation Custodia, and is sure to be well worth a visit.