The figures on show at ‘Vermeer’s women’ self-consciously act out domestic dramas. They know they are being watched. Light falls pointedly on an upturned face and a curtain is theatrically swept aside. If this is not reality, nor melodrama, then what is at stake?

Behind this series of eerie and contrived settings is, consistently, allegory. A woman stands facing away from a dressing table: she turns her back on vanity. She washes her hands and she is purified. References range from the subtle to the bizarre, via the intensely eerie: a shadow of a girl through a darkened window can send chills down the spine.

But something more perverse is at play. The works are almost too real: rug fibres are rendered in painful detail. We are charmed and seduced as if by real narrative. The result of so much illusion is that the gap between us and them gradually disappears. Continually confronted with thresholds between viewer and subject or reality and illusion, disorientation sets in. These artists have created something unnervingly strange and compelling.

And all the more unsettling for being enacted in an utterly foreign place and time. The silent stares of the women come distorted by a haze of convention and distance that, today, we cannot really comprehend. To look into a mirror or to laugh may have different implications here and now.

A small criticism: the title is misleading. The man of the title’s work plays a small but central role amongst a range of Dutch painters, each of whom offers a different reading of domestic life as allegorical ideal. As the show’s name suggests, however, Vermeer work is the most sympathetic and touching. ‘The Lacemaker’ presents an intimate portrait of a fellow craftsperson. Bending over a spread of threads a young girl labours unobserved. There is no story, only the moment of creation.

At once celebratory, surreal and mundane, these tableaus have stayed on my mind. Everyday life has never been so illusory, yet so real.