Vermeer: the mystery man

Art historians still don’t know some of the most essential facts of the life of Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), who ran the family’s inn before taking over his father’s art business.   There are many unanswered questions about his life: did he use his father’s name Jancz, Van der Meer or Vermeer (of the sea); what did he look like; where was he educated; what books did he read; where was he trained as a painter; did he ever travel outside Delft, where he lived and died; did he see military action as an active pike man in the Delft militia; did he remain a Protestant or become a sincere convert when he married his Catholic wife; why did he have fifteen children?

There are just as many enigmas about his art: why did he radically change his subjects; did he have students; did assistants grind the pigment and prepare the canvas; who were his models; did his wife break away from her teeming brood and pose for him; did his daughters pose; did he use a camera obscura to create perspective; why do we have only 37 of his paintings; how many were lost by war, fire, flood, destruction or neglect; what were his relations with Pieter de Hooch and Jan Steen who also worked in Delft; what caused his sudden death?

Pieter Roelofs concludes: “We know of no correspondence by him, he left no diaries behind, and no documents about his childhood and education have been found.”  He left no “personal writings about his artistic ambitions and intentions, and we are still unsure whether he used optical devices. . . . It is not likely that he was a learned painter with knowledge of the philosophical concepts of his contemporaries Baruch Spinoza [born in Holland] and René Descartes” who worked there.  Gregor Weber’s claim that the paintings “enable us as it were to read Vermeer’s mind and train of thought” contradicts all this and is quite mistaken.

Vermeer (Thames & Hudson), the catalogue of the highly praised exhibition in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from February to June 2023, has nine contributors from six countries.  Printed on matte, not glossy, paper that obscures the fine details and texture, it contains a dull 45-page chapter on the inventory of his widow’s possessions, including een koppere beddepan for excretion. The 75 pages of scholarly endnotes and bibliography will interest very few people.  It would have been much better if the contributors had spent more time analysing the paintings, and explained why most of them are marred by craquelure.  Vermeer’s four pictures in London are The Music Lesson, Royal Collection; Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, National Gallery; and The Guitar Player, Kenwood House, Hampstead.  The Concert was stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has never been recovered.

The Concert, by Johannes Vermeer, 1664, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. (Shutterstock)

The scholars in this catalogue do not discuss the historical setting of his life.  In 1648, after 80 years of war and during Vermeer’s lifetime, the Netherlands finally achieved independence from Spain.  Another war took place from 1672 to 1678 when France, England and two German provinces invaded the Netherlands, and were finally driven out of the country.  Between 1652 and 1674 the Dutch fought three naval wars with England.  In 1655 a plague devastated Delft. Again, we know nothing about Vermeer’s reaction to these overwhelming events.

The contributors sometimes contradict each other, for instance about the significance of folds in a letter.  One states, “The folds in the paper indicate that she cannot be reading a letter she has just written—on the contrary, it is one she received some time before.”  Another writes, “The letter’s creased folds . . .  suggest that she is reviewing or revising a letter already written.”  The absence of essential facts and desire to inject some drama into the tranquil pictures lead to some fanciful assertions.  One critic states that a subject seems “almost paralysed with shock.”  Another writes, “it is perfectly clear that we are observing the young woman . . . in a state of clear agitation.”

Vermeer, who enjoys an extraordinary reputation in our time, remained obscure until a revolution in taste led to his “discovery” by Théophile Thoré in 1866, two centuries after his death.  Susan Kaysen’s psychiatric memoir Girl, Interrupted (1993) may have taken her title from Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at her Music.  Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) and the film of the novel (2004) made Vermeer widely known and tremendously popular.

The features of Girl with a Red Hat bear a striking resemblance to Joshua Reynolds’ youthful  Self-Portrait (1749), with his raised hand shielding his eyes, in the National Portrait Gallery, London.  On his visit to Holland, he noted Vermeer’s The Milkmaid.  In addition to women, Vermeer’s main subjects, he also portrayed two intellectual explorers.  The Geographer with calipers in his hand leans over and studies a map.  The Astronomer, who places his hand on a celestial globe that can’t provide much heavenly knowledge, would be better off gazing at the stars through a telescope.

Girl with the Red Hat, by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665-66, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. (Shutterstock)

In 1654-56 Vermeer began his career with three rather conventional religious and mythological pictures.  In 1657 he changed to secular subjects, focused on one or two people and created his first great work, Officer and Laughing Girl.  Carpets, maps, letters, lacemaking, letter reading and writing, music and musical instruments with seductive suggestions of teacher and pupil playing together; paintings in the background; domestic interiors with servants engaged in household chores; wealthy, well-dressed, attractive ladies with dangling ringlets (very different from Rembrandt’s hefty Hausfraus), wearing yellow gowns trimmed with ermine and enhanced by jewels, are often seen from a distance and with faces partly covered by headscarves, as the light filters in from the lead-lined windows.  Unruly children are banished from his art, though the convex lady in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is pregnant.  The solitary women seem cloistered, “quiet as a nun, / Breathless with adoration.”  The calm atmosphere, untroubled by the violent events of the outside world, suggests stillness, contemplation and harmony.

Woman Reading a Letter, by Johannes Vermeer, 1663, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. (Shutterstock)

In The Procuress (1656, Dresden) the wide-browed, rosy-cheeked, faintly smiling woman wears a white embroidered headscarf and a bright lemon-yellow jacket over a low-cut chemise.  She’s seated on a sofa behind a lavish Anatolian carpet that falls to the floor, and holds in her left hand a green-tinted glass of wine almost touching a round blue-and-white Delft wine jug perilously perched on the edge of the table.  She extends her right hand to accept from the soldier behind her a bright coin — in the exact center of the picture — presumably for her sexual services.  He has a large tilted hat, coarse features and red jacket, and places his left hand with fingers extended on her left breast.  Intent on payment, she takes his bold gesture as part of her job.  Standing to the right of the paymaster is a lascivious voyeur, with a large tilted hat, lace collar and slashed sleeves, who smiles at the prostitute while holding a glass of beer in one hand and lightening the sordid scene with music from his lute.  The old procuress, in a black monk’s cowl, encourages the soldier to pay the smiling, slightly tipsy, innocent-looking whore, who’s surrounded by three evil figures who prey upon her.

The Procuress, by Johannes Vermeer,  1656, Dutch painting, oil-on-canvas. (Shutterstock)

El Greco’s tumultuous  View of Toledo (1600) and Vermeer’s tranquil View of Delft (1661, The Hague) are the greatest cityscapes in Western art.  View of Delft portrays the complex effect of sunlight and shadow on the town after a summer storm.  The sandy quay with its seven diminutive figures and moored barge are observed from a slight elevation just outside Delft.  A cloud-filled sky covers the top half of the painting, and the town of 25,000 people is spread out to the horizontal edges of the picture between the sky and the river.  The Schie River with its lucid rippling water flowing in front of the low bridge and reflecting the buildings, the red-brick walls of Delft, the pointed towers of the Schiedam and Rotterdam gates with their oval entrances, and the two balanced church towers piercing the cloudy sky in the far distance, are all irradiated by the overwhelming power of light.

View of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer, 1661, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. (Shutterstock)

In Marcel Proust’s The Captive (1923) Vermeer’s use of color represents the exalted pursuit of art.  The dying author Bergotte travels to The Hague to see Vermeer’s painting and is inspired by its characteristic colour: “He remarked for the first time some small figures in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the precious substance of the tiny patch of  yellow wall.  His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall.  ‘That is how I ought to have written,’ he said.  ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ ”

Vermeer’s masterpiece is perhaps The Art of Painting (1668, Vienna).  A thick folded curtain hanging from ceiling to floor drawn back like the opening of a play, a huge crumpled map on the back wall with bulbous weights on the lower rod, which covers half the picture, the increasingly small, black-and-white square marble tiles on the floor that provide perspective and a beamed wooden ceiling all surround and frame the two subjects.  The long golden curved chandelier, hanging from the ceiling and bisecting the painting, resembles the one in Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding (1434).  The artist is seated on a stool, his legs spread to balance himself, with his back to the viewer.  He holds his brush and mahlstick, and his canvas rests on a high easel that reaches halfway up the map.  He wears a floppy black hat, long brown hair touching his shoulder, and a slash-sleeved silk doublet over a white shirt, billowing trousers, red stockings, white gaiters and black slippers.

The Art of Painting, by Johannes Vermeer, 1668, Dutch painting, oil on canvas. (Shutterstock)

He has just begun to paint the crown of fluttering green laurels in the hair of the woman, who symbolizes Clio the muse of History, and the viewer can imaginatively complete the picture by looking at the model.  Standing a few feet away from the artist and wearing a huge blue satin gown over a small white collar, she faces left toward the light that illuminates the white wall behind her, and with downcast eyes turns her head toward him.  Her left hand supports a large yellow folio, the fingers of her right hand curve around the tube of a long trumpet whose horn is partly cut off by the curtain.  A sheet of drawings, musical scores and a heavy brown volume tied with a tape stands upright on a table next to a large white sculptural or theatrical mask that lies upside down at an oblique angle to the woman.  In this work, the art of painting captures the symbolic arts of poetry and music.  Despite the vast amount of writing on Vermeer, no one has ever solved the two great mysteries: how he did it and what it means.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.  His book on his writer-friend James Salter will be out in spring 2024.

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