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Verbal Vermeer: Updike's Middle-Class Portraiture, James Plath

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Of all the artists Updike mentions in his writing, none is cited more often than seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, whose near-photographic depictions of household scenes from everyday bourgeois life are recalled in Updike's own fictional portraits of upper-middle-dass domesticity-particularly those set in his native Pennsylvania, where the Dutch historically settled.