Vermeer's frozen time draws pilgrims

Andrew Marr explains why Britons are journeying to an exhibition in the Hague

This wintry spring, Holland has been a place of pilgrimage. Some 20,000 British, as well as 100,000 French, 40,000 Belgians and very many others have trekked to a small, cramped art gallery in the Hague. There, crammed together, they have passed by 22 smallish paintings, mostly of mundane domestic scenes, made more than three centuries ago by a man of whom we know little. Why? Because many, the lucky people, will experience something extraordinary, something they will never forget.

Vermeer is beyond explanation. Like all the great artists, what he did escapes words. There are very few Vermeers in the world. Of the 35 known, here are 22. The last time a similar number of Vermeers were gathered together was in May 1696 at a public auction in Amsterdam. The like of this exhibition may not be seen again for another 300 years. Then there is the technical explanation, the description of Vermeer's daring techniques; his use of the camera obscura, and pins with threads to produce perfect perspective; the delicate washes and radical mixes of paint with grit to produce different surfaces; the complex and intellectual attitude to lighting. Vermeer is a risk-taking experimenter to delight in. He can use dribbles of pure colour (the scarlet lace in The Lacemaker) in a way that reminds one of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock. His flicks of highlight on lips or rich Turkish carpets are as flashily brilliant as anything in Manet. His later short-hand treatment of cloth, dividing it into blocks of tumbling fabric, is positively Cubist. There is hardly a painting there which doesn't at this technical level provide shocks and gasps of delight.

Yet, just as the size of the exhibition is really a curatorial curiosity, so the technical descriptions of Vermeer are only a start. The point of the pilgrimage is the search for something that comes close to spiritual revelation. What Vermeer did, with paint, was to halt time. Watching his silent women by windows, pouring milk, reading letters or examining pearls, is like seeing moments of ordinary life seized, held fast and broken open, revealing some inexpressible mystery.

Sometimes the mystery is unutterably sad, sometimes exhilarating. There is a painting from Brunswick of a drunk, leering woman being seduced - The Girl with the Wine Glass. It is a mundane enough scene. But stand in front of it and really look and it becomes a despairing image of vanity, a human moment stripped unbearably bare. In an entirely different mood is Girl with the Red Hat, a tiny thing, a luscious, dazzling moment of pure lust.

Then there's the famous View of Delft, which is a terrifying picture. The town is picked out in hyper-realist detail while above and below the clouds and shadows pour out of the frame toward the viewer. Change seethes around Vermeer's home town in a meditation about transience and extinction which cannot be properly described.

In Proust's Remembrance of Time's Past, the writer Bergotte goes to a Parisian exhibition where, standing before this very painting, he is driven into a mystical crisis and deep despair while staring at a patch of yellow wall: "In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter." Bergotte, the atheist author, then dies. Well, the painting is still there and the wall is still yellow and the townscape is as awe-inspiring as ever.

Proust, who loved Vermeer, is the writer who comes nearest to his genius and to explaining the pilgrimage. He too was obsessed by the possibility of staring into unimportant-seeming moments of life with a gaze of such intensity that one breaks through into a different moment. The French writer and the Dutch painter were both working on the edge where artistic technique meets mystical experience. If music is time decorated, they were masters of time frozen. And that, in the end, is why so many people have been drawn to Holland.