A room sits empty, save for a lone chair and a shaft of golden light. Yet in the details—a patterned marble floor, blue Delft tiles, a stained-glass window pane—the setting for George Deem’s painting Extended Vermeer (2000) is unmistakably a 17th-century Dutch home. What other period’s interiors have become so immediately legible, and psychologically captivating, to contemporary viewers? Thanks to the work of Johannes Vermeer, the quiet simplicity of a world four centuries removed from our own has come to stand for a distinctly modern subjectivity—one that is private, contemplative, and individual. Deem, an American artist who died in 2008, at the age of 75, is central to Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s new book about Vermeer’s legacy: Vermeer’s Afterlives, out next month from Princeton University Press. Deem copied Vermeer’s paintings but removed their figures, leaving more space for the kind of projection that Yeazell argues is essential to Vermeer’s enduring popularity and continued emulation, by artists from Vilhelm Hammershøi to Gerhard Richter. Vermeer is best known for tonally painted genre scenes, precise enough that he was …