The Rediscovery of Vermeer
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Camille Pissarro in a letter written in November 1882 to his son Lucien:
"How shall I describe these portraits by
Rembrandt and Hals,
and this view of Delft by Vermeer,
these masterpieces which come so close to Impressionism?"
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Vermeer
The Milkmaid (detail)
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Vermeer and the Impressionists
Despite what has often been said in the past, Jan Vermeer van Delft was never
completely forgotten. He is mentioned with praise in the 17th and 18th
centuries; compared with other contemporary artists, though, this opinion met
with little response.
It is only since the middle of the 19th century that his art has enjoyed an
increasingly enthusiastic reception. It is no coincidence that this dawning
interest in Vermeer went hand in hand with the rise of Impressionism, whose
agenda was the rejection of a dark-toned, academic style of painting in favour
of brightly-lit plein-air painting using a full, unmixed palette. It was the
French socialist politician and journalist Theophile Burger-Thore (1806-1869)
who initiated the new appreciation of Vermeer's art.
During his travels through England, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland,
Burger-Thore concerned himself intensively with Dutch 17th-century painting and
its everyday realism. He found that it corresponded to the aesthetic ideas
expressed in the theories of Jules Champfleury (1821-1889) and Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809-1865), and in the art of the Barbizon school and Gustave Courbet
(1819-1877).
A major plank in the French realist platform was that present-day social,
cultural and political subject matter should determine content. This position
was adopted by the Impressionists, though they aimed for radical change in terms
of technique as well.
For the Impressionists, colour was a function of the response to light. Its
brightness, tonality and density were dependent on the wavelength of light (or
ethereal vibrations, as contemporary terminology had it). The Impressionists
drew upon scientific theory, with the result that colour was seen no longer as
intrinsic to things, but rather as a phenomenon subject to changes in the light.
Furthermore, it was also particularly dependent on processes of perception in
the eye of the beholder.
It was this theory of colour as a phenomenon of light that sensitized
Burger-Thore's eye for what was aethetically distinctive in Vermeer: "In
Vermeer, the light is never artificial; it is precise and natural, and not even
a meticulous physicist could wish it to be more exact (...)". Elsewhere, he
wrote: "It is to this precision of light that Vermeer owes the harmony of his
colours too." One might say that Burger-Thore was discovering "modern"
qualities in Vermeer, qualities in his artistic approach that had gone beyond
the scope of the reception in his own day, but offered an ample purchase for
appreciation two centuries later.
We now know that Vermeer used a camera obscura for most of his
paintings. What is more, far from hiding the effects of the instrument, such as
unfocussed outlines and the famous pointillist dots of light, he drew attention
to them. This lends his paintings an "abstract" quality, since they
do not pretend to be reproducing reality as it is, but show it as it is seen. In
terms of Vermeer's work method, this translates as using a medium of
reproduction to grasp the thing perceived - at a remove. We might
even say that the camera obscura became a source of his style.
This hidden tendency to abstraction in Vermeer's technique was the
cornerstone of his growing fame in the last third of the nineteenth
century. Today, he is generally seen with Rembrandt and Frans Hals
(the latter being another kindred spirit of the Impressionists) as
the third great Dutch artist of the Golden Age.
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Vermeer
The Love-Letter (detail)
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Vermeer
The Milkmaid (detail)
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In 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard:
"It is true that in the few pictures
he painted,
one can find the entire scale of colours;
but the use of lemon yellow,
pale blue and light grey together is as characteristic
of him as the harmony of black,
white, grey and pink is of Velazquez."
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Vincent van Gogh gave very close attention to Delacroix' theory
of colour, and, like the Neo-Impressionists, studied the problems of
complementary and contrasting colours in considerable detail. In a
letter to Emile Bernard, written somewhere around 1888, he waxed
lyrical on the subject of Vermeer's colour harmonies: "It is true
that in the few pictures he painted, one can find the entire scale
of colours; but the use of lemon yellow, pale blue and light grey
together is as characteristic of him as the harmony of black, white,
grey and pink is of Velazquez." In 1883, Henri Havard observed that
many of the figures in Vermeer's paintings seemed merely to be
"happy dabs of paint", commenting: "If they have any important part
in the harmonic symphony at all, it is due to the shape they make,
rather than the thought they express."
This new admiration for Vermeer is evident not only in the visual
arts but also in classic Modernist literature. The most famous
example is surely Marcel Proust's eulogy in A la recherche du
temps perdu, in Part V, La prisonniere, where the death
of Bergotte the writer is described. Shortly before, a critic has
told the writer that he will be able to see Vermeer's View of
Delft, on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague for an
exhibition. "At last he stood before the Vermeer, which in his
memory was more radiant, even more different from anything else he
was familiar with, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he
made out for the first time little blue-clothed figures, and
furthermore realised that the sand was tinted a rosy colour, and
finally discovered the costly material of the tiny yellow wall as
well. His dizziness grew; he fixed his gaze - as a child would on a
yellow butterfly it wants to catch - on that costly little corner of
wall. 'That is how I should have written,' he reflected. 'My last
books are too dry, I should have used more colour, should have made
my language as precious in itself as this little yellow corner of
wall is' (...)" For the writer nearing death, that detail becomes
the very definition of art: "(...) this yellow corner of wall, done
with such great skill and exquisite subtlety by a painter who
remains unknown for all time and is only identified for convenience
by the name Vermeer."
One could continue the list of quotations. Artists and theorists of
nearly all avant-garde types of art have praised Vermeer's feeling
for real colour and his principle of avoiding all unnecessary detail
in his compositions. Cezanne's insistence that the artist should
resist the literary became programmatic for avant-garde artists
concerned primarily with questions of form; and it was little
wonder, given this view, that Vermeer was felt to be free of
anecdotal, narrative elements. Andre Malraux in particular
emphasised that Vermeer's work completely lacked the "myth of
narrative action" and "for the first time in the history of art
(...) the subject of the painting had become an object of vision."
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Vermeer
The Lacemaker (detail)
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The aesthetics of art as a mirror of culture
Those who have rediscovered Vermeer since the late 19th century have recognised
that he was quietly innovative in his compositional technique. His predilection
for balance; his method of simplifying complex structures to a few components (a
method in which geometry played a key role); his treatment of light, which
achieved effects of an almost plein-airist nature, rendering shadows no longer
in greys but in a shimmer of colour; and his very paintwork, so distinctively
different from the fine, porcelain-smooth application then usual in
the Netherlands - all of these characteristics were the hallmarks of
a style unusual even in Vermeer's own day.
If we describe his work only in these terms, though, we risk missing
how very concrete Vermeer's representational art is. His subjects
are by no means of secondary importance. On closer inspection, we
realise in fact that the formal features of Vermeer's style derive
from his way of placing people, objects and rooms in contexts that
lend social and cultural meaning. It is of the essence that his
strongly individualized figures tend to appear alone or almost
alone, busy at everyday tasks, reading letters or pouring milk.
There is no bustle, tension or agitation of the kind typical of
Dutch narrative genre paintings of the period. The facial
expressions of Vermeer's people are not distorted grimaces dictated
by affect. His figures, mainly women, seem almost free of passion,
not in any sense of being emotionally unresponsive or insensible but
in a sense of masking their feelings rather than thrusting them upon
us.
In his age, Vermeer was almost unrivalled in his ability to address
by visual means the moral agenda drawn up by thinkers such as
Gracian or Montaigne. He too was concerned to define people in their
individuality, to preserve a private domain for the affairs of the
spirit, and to place limits upon communication.31 It might not be
going too far to see the tables that so often appear in the
foregrounds of his interiors, with carpets or curtains draped across
them, as symbolic: though it is only a prop, the table nonetheless
denotes a boundary, and imposes distance between ourselves and the
private realm we are permitted to see.
Rhetoric is of diminished importance in Vermeer, though it does not
altogether disappear. Rather, it is frequently transformed into a
barely perceptible irony, as becomes clear if we consider the
interplay between the central characters and visual quotations, so
important for the overall meaning. In many of Vermeer's paintings
there are pictures on the walls, pictures clearly related to the
protagonists and intended by the artist as clavis interpretand,
or aids to interpretation. His conception of the visual image was
evidently dialectic: while he may at first glance seem indifferent
to communicating the meaning of a painting, he does in fact supply
discreet aids such as we can only make use of if we have the
necessary learning and can pick up allusions.
Vermeer was frequently inspired by sayings and moral adages, such as
circulated in large quantities in the illustrated emblem books of
the time. In the sixteenth century, when they first appeared,
emblems were originally symbols devised by humanists to suggest
mysterious deeper meanings in things, and were difficult to
interpret; but by the seventeenth century they had undergone lasting
change. In the Netherlands they had become more accessible, and had
taken on an unmistakable function as a source of popular education.
They were meant to establish and consolidate a new moral code, and
to shape and regulate individual conduct within emerging middle
class society.
In the early modern era, the family unit was of central importance.
Much of society's vital work was done in the family. Since the
increasing division of labour was now tending to involve many men in
work outside the home, women, as keepers of the house, found
themselves with greater responsibility to bear and more tasks to
perform. And the powers that were, as well as the authors of popular
didactic tracts, tirelessly reminded them of these.
Most of Vermeer's paintings are about these domestic duties, but
they also show the conflicts called forth in women by the
imperatives of duty and virtue, so much at odds with the libidinous
desires they were no longer permitted to express. We may be tempted
to see Vermeer's method of encoding his meanings, and the
concomitant impression of reserve and discretion his characters
make, in purely aesthetic terms. But in fact they may be a response
to this process of socio-cultural change. Arguably Vermeer's
figures, rejecting the norms and demands of society, have been
forced into isolation, and have withdrawn modestly - into silence.
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Curtains and carpets
Curtains, or carpet-covered tables,
appear as motifs in the foreground of many of Vermeer's paintings.
Quite apart from their symbolic connotations,
Vermecr used them to create a sense of distance
from the events unfolding in the background.
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The Fall of Eve
The letter is the start of a secret love affair.
Apples and peaches remind us of Eve's Fall.
Vermeer
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
(detail)
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