Vermeer: The Man and the Painter

Of the few surviving archival documents that regard Vermeer's civic and professional life, only one refers directly to what might be considered Vermeer the man. Vermeer's wife, Catharina Bolnes, after the premature death of her husband, describes her disastrous financial state as follows: "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." It would seem that Vermeer was at least a caring father whose difficulty in providing for the welfare of his family had become so painful that it caused him to fall into a state of deep depression from which he would never recover.

Everything else which concerns Vermeer's character is purely hypothetical. Even a presumed self-portrait (right) in the background of The Procuress cannot be supported by any objective evidence. If we wish to in some way to imagine Vermeer the man, we must rely uniquely on the interpretation his 36(?) paintings which is, at best, an extremely subjective method open to inevitable personal and cultural prejudice. At times, a painter's work reflects fairly accurately his character as in the cases of Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalì, and another times, there seems to be no relation whatsoever. The capability of an artist to reach into the depths of his being seems in many cases to exist independently from his particular outward character traits.

The Painter Vermeer through the Eyes of Art History

While Vermeer's personality illudes us, a look at his professional attitude may yield a bit more satisfaction.

The portrait that historians have painted of Vermeer has varied according to the interpretation of the scant, known facts of his life see through the lens of each time and place. A century ago, historians like Bredius and Hofstede de Groot tended to cast Vermeer in a tragic light: they believed he lived in poverty and died in distress, ignored by his contemporaries. Another period historian perceived him as an artist  totally lacking in ambition. A third, more recent tradition, exemplified by P. T. A. Swillens and John Michael Montias, sees Vermeer as a man dedicated to his art but somewhat a recluse and out of touch with the major cultural events of the United Provinces.

In order to define Vermeer's art and comprehend it within the context of Dutch painting, every known fact of his life, no matter how insignificant, has been passed through a fine comb. Recent scholarship tends to focus on the relations that the painter entertained with members of the Dutch cultural elite (Constantijn Huygens to name the most illustrious) even though some of these relationships are probable but unproven. The artist's "elitist" subjects and the refined facture of his canvases, together with his ambitious artistic agenda and even the upward direction of his marriage, have convinced art historians that Vermeer was a sort of good courtier who conversed and commerced his work at the highest social level.

For example, one of the richest citizens of Delft, Pieter van Ruijven, had collected almost half of the Vermeer's output, an extraordinary painter/client relationship in any age. We know that the artist received visits from well-heeled gentlemen: the French connoisseur Balthasar de Monconys and Pieter Teding van Berckhout, a patrician of the The Hague with strong family connections to the influential Huygens. During his life, one of Vermeer's compositions found its way into the hands of Diego Duarte, an immensely rich Antwerp jeweler, again, a friend of Huygens. Duarte's inventory reports a "young lady playing the clavecin, with accessories"  (perhaps the Lady Seated at a Virginal) . To give some sort of idea of the stature of Duarte's collection, it is enough to know that he possessed more than two hundred paintings by masters such as Holbein, Raphael, Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck. Duarte was an accomplished musician and composer as well.

Notwithstanding Vermeer had gained access to the circles of elite collectors, he died in poverty. In part, his demise was his own doing. Having sold the good part of his slim production (truly slim by any standard) to one single collector in his native Delft, his fame was destined to remain substantially within the city walls of Delft. In a sense, a single work of art, no matter what its artistic worth may be, has short legs. In those times, there existed no commercial art galleries and no museums where the public lined up to see paintings and specialized art publications were unheard of. If an artist wished to diffuse his images, the most efficient channel was through engraving and etching techniques. Vermeer did neither.

Few privileged people, indeed, had access to either Vermeer's studio or the house of his patron Van Ruijven. Vermeer's artistic production was simply too limited to spread a clear picture of his genius and create demand. Oppositely, the great Rembrandt, who had achieved fame even in Italy, the cradle of classical painting, had flooded the market with countless engravings, etchings, drawings and paintings. Even the output of his talented apprentices enhanced Rembrandt's "visibility."

The other cause of Vermeer's premature downfall was beyond his control. In his last years, the French army had repeatedly invaded the United Provinces bringing the Dutch economy to its knees. The art market, which is historically is the first to  take the brunt of bad news, had all but collapsed.

Another recent view have also been put forth. Robert D. Huerta underlines the conceptual and methodological links between the Delft painter Vermeer and his near neighbor and exact contemporary, the microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Huerta's study considers the close connections between painting and science during the seventeenth century. He argues that Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura parallels Van Leeuwenhoek’s pursuit of the "optical way," and embodies a profound philosophical connection between these investigators. Thus, Vermeer’s informed observations enabled him to confront the same issues as other natural philosophers regarding the interpretation of unfamiliar images presented by instrumental systems (viz, the telescope, microscope, camera obscura).

Psychology

Much modern art-writing has been influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by the assumption that the painter's work is intimately related to his inner self. This widespread, but unproven, hypothesis seems so obvious today that it is taken for granted that it was so in past times as well. Vermeer has been particularly subject to this kind of analysis, perhaps due to the presumed difficulty of grasping the artist's original intentions.

Lawrence Gowing and Edward Snow, who have both extensively analyzed Vermeer's painting from a predominately intuitive point of view, have offered some of the deepest insights into the fundamental nature of Vermeer's artistry. It may not be coincidental that both authors reach similar conclusions regarding Vermeer's creative thought process and hence, indirectly, Vermeer's own peculiar psychology. Gowing states: "The detachment to which he clings as if in self-preservation, the tiny body of his work and the closed hermetic perfection of the system it presents are so many signs that the painter is facing an issue of some personal difficulty" and: "His style developed under an unremitting internal pressure."

Snow's discussions of Vermeer's paintings are conducted in a language of patient observation, and they involve the reader in an experience of deepening relation and ongoing visual discovery. He, too, adverts strong contradictory emotional undercurrents which, especially in his earlier paintings, which he identifies as "negative male conscious" and "sexual inhibition." Thus, the beauty, stability and order so characteristic of Vermeer's artistry may have been compensatory to some grave personal conflict. Even though such an interpretation may satisfy modern sensibilities, it must necessarily be taken as purely hypothetical.

Whatever kind of man Vermeer might have been, it seems befitting to his indecipherable nature that even his tomb marker, now in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, is no longer in the position where he is buried. His tomb, not original, testifies only the barest facts: his name, date of birth and date of death. What remains of the artist is a handful of small unobtrusive  paintings which are, in contrast to what we know of Vermeer the man, more than enough.

Artistic Originality

Vermeer’s choice of subject matter was of capital importance to his concept of painting. No matter how masterfully his works are painted from a technical point of view, it would be entirely incorrect to assume that he painted for the sake of painting. His range of subjects, although not large, provided a reservoir of images that permitted him to reach deep and experiment universal emotions. His paintings are arresting for their lack of clear-cut narrative, for their externalization of seemingly inconsequential moments.

In our age, which retains originality to be the prime value of the artistic endeavor, it may come as a surprise to discover that Vermeer was perhaps one of the least original masters of the glorious Golden Age of Dutch painting. While Rembrandt inspired numerous talented disciples - some masters in their own right - and his paintings are confused with period copies and works of imitators, Vermeer was neither an inventor nor precursor of any technique or style, much less a founder of a school or art movement. The number of paintings by Dutch painters which display unequivocal signs of Vermeer’s influence can be counted on the fingers of a hand. None of his children carried on with his profession and it is even doubtful that he had a single apprentice although he was well known within the environs of Delft during his lifetime. His name virtually vanished within a few years of his death.

If we press the issue of originality further, from a technical point of view, Vermeer painted little that was not within reach of his school, although the means of that school were indeed extraordinary. Even his celebrated use of the camera obscura, a precursor of the modern photographic camera, is not entirely unique. The camera obscura was well known in contemporary scientific and artistic communities. It had been recommended to artists and at least one Dutch painter employed it for the purpose of painting prior to Vermeer.

All summed up, Vermeer was a professional late-comer of sorts and certainly his paintings reveal no revolutionary or provocative content. He embraced the basic theoretical tenets of European art and fully adhered to common technical procedures of his school even though he worked outside the conventional history painting idiom. Moreover, Vermeer identified himself with his native culture. His canvases are a direct confirmation of the moral and social values held by the majority of his fellow Dutchmen. His political allegiance is amply demonstrated by the numerous maps of the Dutch Republic which populate his works, in particular, by the exquisite treatment reserved for the map of the Nether­lands which proudly hangs as the backdrop in The Art of Painting. In the early Officer and Laughing Girl, the carefully integrated relationship between the figures and the map in this sunlit interior expresses not only an unmistakable pride in the homeland but also the communion between the people who live there and enjoy the fruits of peace. Moreover, he portrayed the highest cultural and scientific achievements of his countrymen without a trace of irony.

In particular, Vermeer identified with his native Delft. Anyone who has had the chance to directly view the View of Delft or The Little Street cannot deny the empathetic treatment of these subjects. In Vermeer’s time, Delft was conservative, patriotic and provincial. It was considered the cleanest of all Dutch cities, and the Dutch were considered the cleanest of all European populations. No doubt, Vermeer was the cleanest painter in Delft. While al­most every other painter had left Delft by the late 1660s for the prosperous Amsterdam, Vermeer remained loyally bound to his beloved birthplace until the day of his premature death.

While from a thematic and technical point of view Vermeer’s art might be considered fundamentally conservative, his genius is not subject to dispute and his name now stands above the most highly regarded Dutch genre painters and, indeed, it towers over artists such as Dou and Van Mieris who were considered by their contemporaries as giants able to rival the Italian Renaissance masters.

Indeed, it is odd that Vermeer’s quiet, measured art reached a highpoint of popularity in the twentieth century when year after relentless year contemporary artists did all that was within their powers to shatter established norms. Obviously, Vermeer’s fame hardly rests on modern standards of originality, to say nothing of novelty-at-any-cost. We might say Vermeer’s greatness lies more in the extraordinary depth of his vision rather than in his artistic inventiveness.

Vermeer rarely roamed far from the restricted territory staked out by his fellow painters, but his breed is unique. For he is among those few great artists able to perceive unseen expressive potential in the minor works of his contemporaries. He was alone in his capability for sounding the unexplored depths of daily life which passed, and still pass, largely unobserved by painters, connoisseurs and common folk alike.