Baroque and Rococo

 

VERMEER





Veiled Emotions



 

Vermeer of Delft

 

The Art of Painting
(detail)
 

Vermeer's Life


We know very little about Vermeer's life. There is a tradition that he was baptised in Delft on 31 October 1632, the second child and only son of Reynier Jansz. His father was born in 1591 in Antwerp. In 1611 he moved to Amsterdam where he specialised in the silk trade. He married Digna Baltens in 1615 and settled a short time later in Delft; at that time he bore the name "Vos", and from 1625 to 1629 he leased an inn. the sign of which was a fox, an allusion to his name. He continued to maintain his connections with the silk trade, although he gave art dealing as his main occupation upon being admitted to the Delft Guild of St. Luke in October 1631. This indicates that he followed a variety of trades simultaneously.
J. M. Montias has discovered that Vermeer's maternal grandfather, a watchmaker named Balthasar Claesz. Gerrits, was involved in some shady business deals. From 1619 onwards he and his accomplices used bought moulds to forge coins. This developed into an affair of such proportions that even the Public Prosecutor and Prince Maurit's governor became involved. Two of Gerrits' accomplices were condemned to death and beheaded. Gerrits himself managed to get away, to The Hague, and finally Gorinchem, where he seems to have lived on undisturbed.
An entry in the Nieuwe Kerk registers shows that Vermeer's father bore the name "Vermeer" as early as 1625. In 1641 he bought the "Mechelen" inn, which lay in a good part of the town, on the northern side of the market square, for the sum of 2.700 guilders (not including the mortgage and high interest charges). The inn dated from the 16th century and, with a total of seven chimneys, offered luxurious accommodation. The patrons of Reynier's included members of Delft's refined and affluent bourgeoisie. These social contacts must have made quite an impression on Vermeer.
 

We know, from a document dated 1640, that Reynier had relations with artists such as Balthasar van der Ast (already famous in his own day for his paintings of flowers), Pieter Steenwyck, and Pieter Groenewegen. It may be that these gave the young Vermeer his first artistic leanings. Nothing is known about his training as a painter. All that we can say for certain is that he was admitted as a master to the Guild of St. Luke on 29 December 1653. This guild included painters in all genres, glass makers and dealers, faience makers, embroiderers and - art dealers, and until 1620 - carpet weavers too.
According to the statutes, a precondition for being admitted was a six-year apprenticeship to an artist recognised by the Guild. It has been suggested that this may have been Leonaert Bramer (1594-1674), but the stylistic differences between this artist (who went to Italy in 1614 and returned to his native town of Delft in 1624) and Vermeer are so great that there has been little support for the theory.
 

Vermeer Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (detail)   Vermeer's wife Because she was thought to be pregnant, the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter was formerly identified with Vermeer's wife; it is known that she bore fifteen children. However, attempts to work out the identity of this woman are superficial and do not contribute anything to our understanding of the meaning of this picture. The girl is wearing a farthingale which appears to be made of crinoline. This piece of clothing was highly fashionable at the time.

An alternative suggestion has been that Vermeer could have studied with Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) who was trained in Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio. Fabritius became a citizen of Delft in 1650, and joined the Guild of St. Luke in 1652. He was killed when the Delft magazine exploded, destroying much of the town. Dirck van Bleyswyck sang Vermeer's praises in a four-line piece in his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Delft (Description of Delft), calling him the "masterly" successor of the "phoenix" Fabritius. Although not too much emphasis should be placed on such an isolated comment, it nonetheless confirms that Vermeer was held in no little esteem in his own day.
 

Vermeer married Catharina Bolnes on 20 April 1653, in Schipluy, a small place near Delft. She was the daughter of Maria Thins, who was at first opposed to the marriage. It may be, given that she herself was financially well off, and given that Vermeer's father was at the time in considerable debt, that she did not consider the marriage to be on a sufficiently secure financial footing. Another possibility is that there were problems at first because of their different religious backgrounds: Vermeer was a Calvinist, while Catharina Bolnes was Catholic. Leonaert Bramer was also a Catholic and put in a good word for Vermeer, and it was thanks to him that Maria Thins finally dropped her reservations. It has often been said that Vermeer caused Maria Thins to think more favourably of him by becoming a Catholic; however, there is no documentary evidence of this.
At first, the newly married couple lived in the "Mechelen", but then moved to his mother-in-law's house on the Oude Langendijk in what was known as the Papists' Quarter, near a Jesuit mission. Vermeer appears to have been relatively well off at this time, as he had no difficulties supporting his growing swarm of children. Catharina bore him fifteen children, though four of them died when still very young. He produced two paintings a year on average and he could scarcely have met these high costs of living from that income alone. There is no definite information as to whether he continued to work as the landlord of the "Mechelen", though such a second job was not at all unusual amongst seventeenth-century Dutch painters. We might mention Jan Steen (In the Tavern), for instance, who leased the Delft brewery "de Slange" in 1654.
 

We can be quite certain, however, that Vermeer worked as an art dealer, like his father. He would have earned considerably more money by selling other artists' paintings than by selling his own. But he nonetheless continued to give his occupation as "painter" whenever he signed official documents. This tied in with his registration in the Guild of St. Luke; he twice held the office of Hoofdman (syndic) on the Guild's ruling body, from 1662/63 and 1670/71.
Vermeer's relationship with Maria Thins had improved noticeably, as can be seen from the fact that his family moved in with her. Maria Thins was separated from her husband, Reynier Bolnes, the owner of a brickworks, but received a very large income from real estate, stocks and shares, and credit notes. She inherited several farms when her sister Cornelia died in 1661, and she leased out one of them, the "Bon Repas" near Schoonhoven. The extent of Maria Thins' wealth can be seen from a notarial inventory made in February 1676. It is an extensive list of the furniture, clothing and household goods contained in the eleven rooms, cellar and attic. Vermeer's family lived downstairs, and his studio, with two easels and three palettes, was on the top floor. The studio contained the heavy oak table which appears in many of Vermeer's paintings, together with the equally familiar leather-covered chairs. Maria Thins owned a series of paintings which Vermeer employed as claves interpretandi, aids to the interpretation of his own paintings, and these included Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress, and a picture of Christ on the Cross, which is probably the same as the painting that appears in the background of Vermeer's Allegory of Faith. Vermeer also used items of clothing, such as his wife's ermine-trimmed yellow satin jacket, in his paintings; he sometimes altered their colours, just as he also tended to adapt any household objects included in his sets, adjusting their proportions to suit his purpose.

Vermeer probably painted very little for the public art market, most of his work being produced for those patrons who particularly valued his work. This may also account for the modest number of paintings he produced. One patron was the baker Hendrick van Buyten, who is probably the one whom the French nobleman Balthazar de Monconys visited when the latter stayed in Delft in 1663. He made the following comment in his journal: "I met the painter Vermeer in Delft, but he had none of his own paintings at home. We did, however, see one at a baker's, which had been sold for a hundred livres; I think even six pistoles would have been too high a price." (A pistole was ten guilders.)
Vermeer's other patron was the Delft printer Jacob Dissius, who lived nearby on the Marktveld. Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings are mentioned in an inventory of his property dating from 1682. It is almost certain that the majority of the twenty-one paintings of Vermeer's auctioned by the art dealer Gerard Houet in 1696 in Amsterdam are these very paintings belonging to Dissius.
A clear indication of Vermeer's reputation as an art expert is that he was given what was then considered an honourable commission, to authenticate a collection of Venetian and Roman paintings which had been sold to Friedrich Wilhelm, the Elector of Brandenburg, by the art dealer Gerard Uylenburgh, for the sum of 30.000 guilders. He rejected the pictures as being "clumsy, slapdash copies". Vermeer journeyed to The Hague in 1672, together with fellow Delft artist Hans Jordaens, in order to contest the ascription of the paintings to Raphael and Michelangelo before a notary. He explained that they were worth at most a tenth of the sum Uylenburgh had asked.
 

Vermeer
View of Delft (detail)
 

Vermeer
The Glass of Wine (detail)
His mother-in-law's house Vermeer's family lived in the lower storey of his mother-in-law's house. The solid oak table and the leather-covered chairs, all of which appear in many of Vermeer's paintings, were kept here.
 
  Important leitmotif
White porcelain jugs appear repeatedly in Vermeer's art.
They contained wine, which was supposed to act as a love potion and help men seduce women.

Vermeer's later years were overshadowed by a dramatic deterioration of his personal financial position. He got into debt and had to take out loans. On 5 July 1675, he went to Amsterdam in order to take out a loan of 1,000 guilders. War had broken out between the Netherlands and France in 1672, with French troops advancing rapidly right into the northern part of the United Provinces, and this had had a ruinous effect on Vermeer. Dykes were opened as a last form of defence against the French army, and this flooded enormous tracts of land, including the land that Maria Thins had leased out at Schoonhoven. As a consequence, Vermeer was no longer paid the rent which had, till then, been a regular source of income for his family. That disastrous year became known as the rampjaar, and from then onwards Vermeer did not manage to sell any more pictures. His wife later commented on this when talking about the destructive war with France: "Because of this, and because of the large sums of money we had to spend on the children, sums he was no longer able to pay, he fell into such a depression and lethargy that he lost his health in the space of one and a half days, and died."
Vermeer was buried on 15 December 1675, in the family grave at the Oude Kerk, Delft. He was survived by eleven young children, of whom about eight still lived at home. Catharina Bolnes now found herself hardly able to satisfy her creditors, and therefore felt it necessary to apply for the High Court in the Hague to take charge of the management of her properties. She relinquished all her rights of inheritance, ceding them to her creditors. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723; cf. p. 75) was appointed trustee of the properties. His main occupation was as a cloth merchant in Delft, and he was already internationally renowned for his inventions and discoveries in microscopy; he was made a member of the Royal Society in London in 1680.
At this time, the only paintings of Vermeer's which Catharina Bolnes still possessed were the picture known as Schilderconst (The Art of Painting), and the Woman with a Pearl Necklace. She gave The Art of Painting away on 24 February 1676, to discharge her mother's debts. Most of the other paintings were owned at that time by the printer Jacob Dissius, who died in October 1695. Several months after his death, twenty-one Vermeers were put up for auction in Amsterdam.
The 1696 auction catalogue, which included pictures by other artists (a total of 134 pictures were auctioned), is extremely useful, for it shows us that Vermeer was held in high esteem. It is striking that the estimates for his paintings are by no means low when compared to usual prices. For example, number 1 was the Woman Weighing Pearls, which is now in Washington; it was estimated at 150 guilders ("it is painted with great skill and vividness"). The price set at auction for number 31, the View of Delft, was particularly high at 200 guilders. Compare this with Jan Steen, who once received that amount for three portraits, or Isaak van Ostade, who in 1641 sold thirteen paintings to an art dealer for 27 guilders. During his best period, Vermeer was clearly at the top of the price structure of the Delft art market; it is even said that, in or shortly before 1663, he was paid 600 guilders for a painting containing just one figure.
 

Vermeer
View of Delft (detail)
The Schiedam Gale and the Nieuwe Kerk
The buildings in the foreground, such as the Schiedam Gate are in shadow,
while in the background buildings such as the Nieuwe Kerk's tall tower gleam brightly.
 

Maps of the Netherlands
 Vermeer's love of maps becomes apparent in the way he decorates his
 interiors. The role of maps was twofold: on the one hand, they
 indicated wealth (in the seventeenth century, maps were an expensive
 luxury); on the other hand, they refer to a good level of education.
 Cartography was still a new science, but was beginning to be held in
 high regard.