A Girl Reading a Letter by
an Open Window

critical excerpt

c.1657
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c.1657
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

literature

exhibitions

It has been estimated that there were about 650 to 750 painters working in the Netherlands in 1650s or about one for each 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants, in Delft one out of every 500. By comparison, the number of painters in Renaissance Italy was about one every 330 in a population of some 9 million. Most Dutch painters came from middle-class families since painting generally did not offer sufficient status to attract the wealthy and the poor could rarely afford the training. As their status and social ambition rose, some Dutch artists assumed the manners, and dress, of their wealthy clients. Vermeer himself appears to have made serious efforts to cast himself as a gentleman/artist.

When Vermeer turned his attention to the domestic interior, he entered into a highly competitive niche market already dominated by a few exceptional painters such as Gerard ter Borch, Frans van Mieris and Gerrit Dou. These artists specialized in themes of upper-class domestic interiors, now grouped with a host of other subjects under the term genre. Their work often display an astonishing level of microscopic detail and required enormous number of work hours making them affordable for a select few. Dou is reported to have sold some works for more than 1,000 guilders or roughly the equivalent of the venerated great Italian Masters. A modest Dutch house could be had for less.

Before the 1650s, few rooms in the typical middle-class Dutch house had specialized functions. Beds, for example, were placed in halls, kitchens, or wherever they could fit. But when rooms did assume a particular use, it was often reflected in the paintings chosen to decorate them—domestic scenes or religious images were selected more often for private areas of the house while landscapes or city views were shown in public areas.

Dutch homes were generally more cluttered than and not as well-lit as the pristine environments of Vermeer's compositions. The image of the famous 17th-century doll house created by Petronella Dunois very likely affords a more accurate idea of the furniture arrangement and density of a true Dutch well-to-do home.

Although exceptionally few Dutch rooms have survived, the doll's houses made in Amsterdam in the second half of the 17th century are regarded as an inexhaustible source of information about the furnishing of grand merchant's houses in the heyday of the Dutch Republic. One such house was made by Petronella Oortsman (1656-1718) who as a wealthy widow married the silk merchant Johannes Brandt in 1686. She started assembling her doll's house shortly after marriage.

The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam estimates that Petronella Oortman spent twenty to thirty thousand guilders on her model house, the price of a real house along one of Amsterdam's most sought-after canal locations at that time. It took nearly 20 years to build.

Merry Company at a Table
Hendrick van der Burch
55 x 69 cm
Private collection

Historians of economics have estimated that out of five million works of art that were executed in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, interiors views and still-lives comprised at least 10% of the total output, or about five hundred thousand works. And since these works are so expertly painted, the viewer tends to believe that the artist was looking at the exact scene he recorded. However, the most outstanding aspect of these images, namely, their apparent capacity to offer unmediated access to the past, is paradoxically the most deceptive. Art historians have come to believe that we are dealing with a case of modified reality (see left) rather than a literal transcription of Dutch homes. The sitters in their environments which we see were meticulously arranged combining both real and fictive elements.

While the window casements and walls in Vermeer's rooms appear to be factual, the marble floors were fictive. While more humble objects such as the porcelain wine jugs, tables, pictures, mirrors and maps were probably Vermeer's own, the luxurious handing tapestries, keyboard instruments and chandelier were brought in for the occasion. Vermeer had full access to these luxury items through his rich Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven or similar channels.

In a certain sense Vermeer's painted environments are analogous to the photo reproductions of today's interiors design magazines advertising luxury homes which are assembled only to be photographed and afterwards disassembled. They both portray an ideal interior - brighter, cleaner, neater and more richly decorated. Moreover, these pictures were expensive commodities in themselves which would have bolstered cultural pretensions of their owners.

The signature of Catharina Bolnes on a legal document

Many critics believe that this handsome young woman is Vermeer's wife, Catharina Bolnes. As is the case for the vast number of common 17th-century men and women, the voice of Catharina Bolnes has been lost. Not a single letter, diary entry or note by her hand has survived the passing of three centuries. Only once are we able to pick up her faint voice through a document dated 24th and 30th April, 1676. Catharina, in a desperate attempt to flea the grip of her creditors after the death of her husband, spoke of her Johannes so: "as a result and owing to the great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half had gone from being healthy to being dead." After Johannes' death Catharina was alone with her mother, saddled with ten minors and full of debt.

Catharina would have remained silent had it not been for the notoriety of her husband for whom historians have combed every shred of documentary evidence that could have possible regarded the artist, his colleagues and his family. What we know largely emerges from legal testimonies elegantly transcribed on vellum ledger books by Dutch notaries, probably the most meticulous note-takers of all times. The evidence which regards Catharina tells us that we are in front of an exceptional woman, at least in relation to the 750,000 women of the time who lived in the Netherlands.

Portrait of Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719)
author of De groote
schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders
en schilderessen (The Great Theatre
of Dutch Painters), in an engraving by his
son Jacob.

The popular myth about Vermeer's fame goes that he was recovered from total obscurity by the French critic Thoré-Bürger in the mid-1800s. Like many myths, this one contains some but not all the truth. Although Vermeer was not well known in his time outside his native town Delft, his works were never completely forgotten.

After the artist's early death, some of his paintings continued to be a considerable value to several generations of collectors with money and taste in Amsterdam and a few of them continued to evoke admiration and high prices whenever they came onto the market. But for unclear reasons, he was excluded from Arnold Houbraken's Groote Schouburgh, the foundational 18th-century Dutch book on artists. Thus, for almost 150 years after his death Vermeer's fame hardly spread out of the Netherlands.

It is a curious fact that the Vermeer canvases which left the Netherlands were attributed to familiar Dutch artists known to outsiders. In 1742, for example, his Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window came to Dresden as a Rembrandt.

Interior with a Dordrecht Family (detail)
Nicolaes Maes
1656
112.4 x 121.0 cm
The Norton Simon Foundation

The type of Chinese porcelain that appears in this work was imported in huge quantities for European consumption by the East Indies Company, or VOC as it was called by the Dutch. Vermeer and his fellow citizens must have been particularly familiar with similar objects because Delft was one of six towns in Holland that had a chamber of the VOC. As the world's first multi-national company, the VOC had commercial interests all over the globe and accessed the world's oceans through Delfshaven, Delft's 17th-century harbor town. With a little imagination, one can picture merchant ships busily unloading their precious cargoes on the quay of Vermeer's View of Delft connected to Delfshaven by the canal which exits the right-hand part of the composition.

To give an idea of the colossal proportions of the porcelain trade, in 1608, one of the first years of organized trade, the VOC had ordered 50,000 butter dishes, 10,000 plates, 2,000 fruit dishes, and 1,000 each of salt cellar, mustard pots and various wide bowels an dishes plus an unspecified number of jugs and cups. In a few years, they could be found in many Dutch households. In 1640, the ship Nassau carried to Amsterdam an astronomical number of 126,391 pieces. The trade continued until the mid-17th century when civil wars caused by the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 disrupted suppliers and the European traders turned to Japan.

Fine porcelain would have normally been displayed on the household's best cabinets or on specially made racks. Nonetheless, these rare objects had no cultural value for the Dutch outside the fact that they were exotic, precious and expensive regardless of their style or even their quality. Thus for Vermeer, their origins had no symbolic meanings for his paintings and they must be taken literally as rare objects, beautiful in themselves.

Chinese potters had produced porcelain for export markets all over the world. Ironically, what the Dutch considered the epitome of style was second rate porcelain for the Chinese. The special models made for exportation rarely attracted Chinese taste. Many of these "unpalatable" hybrids appear commonly in Dutch still life painting. Instead, products destined for Chinese domestic consumption were made according to higher standards of taste and facture. Period documents reveal that finest exemplars were not allowed out of the country on penalty of corporal punishiment.

The Dutch had no regard of porcelain's original use and as years passed, it eventually found its way onto the dinner table because it was incredibly easy to clean and did not pass on food's e flavor to the next meal.

Even though the Dutch were poor judges of Chinese standards they knew that they surpassed anything produced in Europe.

Woman with a Basket of Fruit
Christiaen van Couwenbergh
1642
107.5 x 93 cm
Gemäldesammlung der Universität, Göttingen

There exists a long tradition of paintings of woman with luscious fruit. Symbolically, fruit could alternately allude to the figure of Venus (the goddess of love) in the Judgment of Paris or the Biblical apple (the symbol of sin) of Adam and Eve. The appearance of fruit far exceeds any other kinds of food in European easel painting although very rarely do we see the fruit actually being eaten. It may be that its popularity as a motif in painting is owed to its visual appeal, brilliant colors, shapes and variety of peculiar textures. For any painter, fruit was a stimulating challenge. Moreover, fruit generally has positive associations owing to its sweetness. From the 16th century on, artists created numerous portraits of beautiful women accessorized with fruit or holding bowls or attractive baskets of it. Bowls and baskets of fruit were commonly features in busts of "temptress" types of women in works by Dutch painters such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Christiaan van Couwenbergh.

In the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Vermeer displays an imported Chinese Wan-Li bowel with peaches, plums and perhaps a large apple. One peach has been halved with its rounded pit exposed to the viewer. The exhibit of ripe fruit accents the fullness of the girl herself, perhaps, ripe for love. A Dutch poet once recommended to "send apples, send pears or other fruit" to win over the heart of one's lover drawing inspiration from Ovid's Ars Amatoria.

Four years after Vermeer became an accepted master of the St Luke Guild in Delft he painted the present work and established his definitive artistic course. No evidence explains what might have induced him to reject his initial teachings – 0f an unknown master - and foray into the mode of genre painting. But so divergent was his new approach that had they not been signed, it is doubtful that scholars would have ever attributed the early Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Diana and her Companions and even the Procuress to Vermeer.

In the 17th-century Netherlands, independence from one's master was not unusual. Some painters were satisfied to preserve the artistic tradition of their masters while many broke away to explore new themes and styles of paintings. Some painters worked successfully in different styles. Samuel Van Hoogstraten, an important painter and art theoretician of the time, painted simultaneously in the "antique" mode, producing large-scale history paintings of Biblical and Classical themes, small trompe-l'œil paintings and a few genre scenes of contemporary life clearly anchored in the "modern" mode. Interior painters occasionally tried their hand at still life and some portrait painters, who worked in one of the most highly specialized fields, dabbled in the distant landscape genre. In the Netherlands, the amazing variety of available themes and techniques had been stimulated by an open and variegated art market and the absence of official academies.

The only requirements for changing modes of painting was the knack for understanding what might appeal to a given clientele and sufficient talent.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Suite française no. 1, Sarabande [1.79 MB]
Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Leonhardt-Gustav.htm