Washington — That artists can go in and out of style is not news. The interesting question is why? Why besides the fickleness of taste would a given artist's work be so desirable at one time and not at another?

Consider the 17th-century Dutch painter who is the subject of a modest but captivating exhibition called "Amorous Intrigues and Painterly Refinement: The Art of Frans van Mieris" at the National Gallery of Art. The 34-painting show was organized by the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague, in association with the National Gallery of Art.

Frans van Mieris the Elder's small, amazingly concentrated portraits and paintings of everyday life, often featuring mildly scandalous erotic interactions in which fabrics and objects were rendered with magic realism, made him one of the most successful artists of his day. Unlike his contemporary Johannes Vermeer, whose work had to wait until the 19th century to be widely appreciated, van Mieris was selling pictures to wealthy collectors for more than 1,500 guilders — the price of a house — during his own lifetime. (Born in 1635, he died at age 45, probably from the effects of alcoholism.) Any good collection of Dutch paintings had to include a van Mieris. And yet by the end of the 19th century, he had fallen completely out of fashion, and in the 1920's and 30's, German museums were unloading his paintings as fusty old kitsch. (The ups and downs of van Mieris's reputation are explored in the art historian Quentin Buvelot's catalog essay.)

Today, van Mieris's paintings, which tend to be the size of a hardcover novel or smaller, are enchanting to look at. But it is no mystery why they fell from favor. For one thing, they don't hang together formally. Van Mieris was less accomplished at and less interested in painting people than clothing, glassware and furniture, and this makes his pictures look fragmented. In "The Doctor's Visit" (1667), the outfit of a satin dress and ermine-trimmed red velvet jacket worn by the swooning woman in the foreground is realized in such brightly lighted detail that it looks as if it were pasted in. Relegated to the shadowy background is the human drama in which a doctor examines a glass container of what the catalog says is urine, by which some physicians thought they could diagnose many things, including pregnancy. Meanwhile, the rest of the family reacts with gestures and expressions of sympathy and anxiety.

Usually the clothes and the person wearing them seem to belong together, but even at best, as in "Portrait of Agatha Paets" (1665), a three-quarter-length painting of a lovely young woman in a spectacular, complicated white satin gown, the body is a mannequin on which to drape the real attraction.

The imbalance between technique and humanism is almost comically glaring in a Rembrandt-like self-portrait in which the lovingly painted voluminous sleeve covering the artist's shoulder and his glitter-trimmed red velvet hat upstage his routinely handsome face. Clothes make the man, indeed. Van Mieris produced many self-portraits, and he often used himself and his wife as actors in genre scenes. But you never have the feeling of deep introspection in his self-portraits that you do in Rembrandt's.

So in addition to his problems with form, another reason for van Mieris's fall from fashion would be his psychological shallowness. One hundred or so years after his death, Romanticism would make individual sensibility of utmost concern for art, and a soul-searcher like Rembrandt (leaving aside his far superior abilities and ambitions as a painter) rises to genius stature.

Another relevant comparison is with Vermeer, who was influenced by van Mieris. Van Mieris and Vermeer painted similar subjects, including pictures of pretty young women reading or writing letters, playing musical instruments and entertaining men in big hats. Van Mieris is coarser than Vermeer: one of his more engaging pictures shows a woman serving tea to a man in a brothel while a couple of small dogs copulate in the immediate background. But the more interesting difference has to do with representing perceptual experience. In Van Mieris you don't have the sense of seeing from a particular point of view. Objects are described in exhaustive detail, but there is not the sort of coherent light and focus that in Vermeer makes you feel as if you are seeing through a particular person's eyes in a specific instant in time.

The advantage of studying van Mieris at the National Gallery is that you can go right downstairs to where the Vermeers have been temporarily relocated and compare. In Vermeer's famous "Girl With the Red Hat," details and textures are not realized with such microscopic exactness as they are in van Mieris, but you have a feeling of being in the moment — the moment when you just walked in the room and the girl turned on you an expectant, enigmatic glance. That sense of presentness is absent from van Mieris.

Vermeer is commonly thought to have been ahead of his time because his paintings have an almost photographic attunement to light that would not be fully valued until the Impressionists began to produce their experiments in representing optical perception. There is also a deeper philosophical aspect. In Vermeer there is a recognition that reality cannot be known directly but only as it is processed by the human body and mind. Seeing is not only subjective, it is biologically determined; vision is slightly blurred because human eyes cannot see with perfect focus. Implicit in van Mieris is the idea that we can see reality without mediation; it is transparently available. Painting for van Mieris means copying things directly and objectively with the idea that he can see them the way they really are.

Another sign of Romantic individualism that is missing from van Mieris is the brushstroke. The 17th-century Dutchmen who later would be prized by Modernists were Rembrandt and Hals, whose emphasis on painting as a physical and emotionally expressive action would reverberate into the middle of the 20th century and the aggressively painterly works of the Abstract Expressionists. Van Mieris, one of a group of painters known as "fijnschilders," or "fine painters," whose founder was his teacher and friend Gerard Dou, carefully erased any evidence of the brush. This demonstrated superior craftsmanship, but the glassy smoothness would seem fussy and impersonal to later generations.

That van Mieris looks interesting today may be partly thanks to the postmodernist rejection of the big-egoed Romantic and his bravura performances and partly to revived interest in Salvador Dalí, magic realism and other forms of highly polished representation. The disjunction, artificiality and vividness of van Mieris's paintings appeal to our contemporary taste for extreme technique, pluralist complexity and supernatural illusions. So while it is unlikely that his reputation will ever eclipse those of Vermeer and Rembrandt, there may never again be a better time to enjoy his narrow but remarkable talent.