Catharina e Johannes: Did Vermeer Ever Paint his Wife Catharina?

Catharina Bolnes and Johannes Vermeer

Even though we know nothing of Catharina's character, we do some facts about her childhood, her family life and her marriage with Vermeer which have been gathered from documents drawn up by contemporary notaries. Catharina was the daughter of Maria Thins, who came from a well-to-do patrician family in Gouda, a Catholic stronghold, and Reynier Bolnes, a prosperous but irascible brickmaker. "Catharina's childhood memories were full of violence, fits of temper and tears. Her father, after 13 years of marriage, had become an ogre. Maria's relatives and neighbors were to testify that they saw him insulting his wife, kicking her, pulling her naked from her bed by her hair when she was sick, attacking her with a stick when she was pregnant, and chasing her out of the house. She was forced to eat her meals by herself. On one occasion, Catharina, aged nine, ran to her neighbors in fright, yelling that her father was about to kill her sister Cornelia. Maria received the support of her sister and brother, who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier’s brother while Reynier was bolstered by his son Willem."⁴

Years later, after the unhappy couple had been legally separated,  Catharina and her mother  moved into the quite Catholic enclave, called the “Papists Corner,” in Delft  perhaps, in the hopes of finding solace from their  traumatic life in Gouda.  Willem, Catharina’s brother, who had sided with his father, later moved in with them when Vermeer was living—and probably painting—there as well. Willem’s behavior was no less reprehensible than his father’s.  He called his mother an “old Papist sow” and a “she devil” and forced, as his father had done before, to have her meals taken up to her. Willem also attacked his sister threatening on a number of occasions to beat her with a stick with a metal point, although she was in the last stages of pregnancy. Maria was eventually able to commit her son Willem to a private house of correction although he continued to intimidate his mother by threatening to marry a servant of dubious reputation who was employed in the house of correction.

Catharina’s only surviving words are those of a plea to her creditors after the premature death of her husband describing her disastrous financial state: "…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."

Catharina's Legacy

The best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (and eponymous film drawn from the novel) portrayed Catharina in an unpleasant light. She is characterized as a jealous, selfish, vain  and superficial: a completely spoiled young woman. Worse, perhaps, she is sadly incapable of understanding her husband's art, and  in a fit of envy she attempts to destroy one of his finest paintings. Notwithstanding the novelist made no claim to historical accuracy, Arthur Wheelock, curator of Northern Baroque Painting of the National Gallery, organizer of the historic 1995/1996 Vermeer exhibition and author of important publications on the Delft master, declared in an interview that  "the film was quite beautiful, but I had a hard time with the characterization of Mrs. Vermeer. She was portrayed as a very unpleasant individual. And there's nothing at all remotely to suggest that in what we know about her. She was a model for a lot of his work. I don't think the picture is fair to her memory."⁵

Writer and London Times columnist Simon Jenkins also took up Catharina’s defense in an article strongly critical of David Joss Buckley’s stage play based on  Chevalier’s novel  entitled "Vermeer was no sex-mad garret artist. The scribblers have got the wrong girl" (to read Jenkin's article, click here). Jenkins believes that  the novel’s story is “wholly at odds with all that scholars have gleaned of Vermeer’s home life..." and that "there is not a shred of evidence that Johannes and Catharina were unhappily married."

He writes:

Vermeer's marriage to Catharina in 1653 was manifestly one of love, a Protestant to a Catholic and against both families' wishes. He had to leave his neighbourhood and was erased from the civic records, moving into the house of his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, in what was known as Delft's "Papists' Corner". There he ran an art dealership and acted as family rentier.

There is every sign that the family was happy. Catharina was to be pregnant throughout their 22-year marriage, with 11 of their 15 children surviving. Vermeer named them after his mother-in-law, Maria, and her favourite saints (including Ignatius and Franciscus). She made him her heir in preference to her own son. When he died bankrupt at the age of 43, Maria referred to him as "the sainted Vermeer". Catharina pleaded with the executors to let her keep three of her favourite paintings, one almost certainly of her and the others, I believe, of their girls. None of this suggests a frigid, jilted canvas-slasher.

Archival research has uncovered enough about Vermeer's household to indicate a close-knit home, full of children and music. Vermeer, though trained and in the artists' guild, earned little from painting and stopped altogether during the crash of 1672 to concentrate on making money.

In reference to the novel’s plot,  Jenkins writes that he is “unnerved by fiction's relentless abuse of history, as if  ‘real’ invention is no longer up to the job of packing a literary punch,” and that there “ must be a difference between intelligent deduction and pure make-believe.”

In a previous article⁶ which appeared in The Times ("Johannes Vermeer, you’ve been framed"), Jenkins had expressed the same deep dissatisfaction with both the portrayal of Vermeer and his wife and the idea that Griet, the author's fictitious young maid, had posed for Vermeer's masterwork Girl with a Pearl Earring. Moreover, he lamented that the negative images of Catharina and Johannes Vermeer "are doomed to be forever fixed in the public imagination as the 'true' Vermeer."

the signatures of Johannes Vermeer and
his wife Catharina Bolnes which appear
on a notorial document

In effect, even though there is no historical evidence that speaks directly of the nature of Vermeer’s relationship with his wife, surviving archival documents would seem to suggest that Johannes and Catharina had been a reasonably good, if not finely matched couple. They had many children, a rare occurrence in 17th-century Netherlands where most couples had only two or three children. While the burden of so many children may have certainly made itself felt, their choice to have an unusually large family must have been taken mutually since other couples who desired so evidently managed to keep their families within limits. Simon Schama⁷ has shown family planning was avidly practiced by the 17th-century Dutch, Catholics included.

When questioning himself on the singularity of Vermeer's marriage to Catharina, John Michael Montias, in his seminal study of Vermeer's extended family Vermeer and His Milieu, suggests that it was love which attracted the two and goes on to note that ' Romantic love ' was not unknown in mid-seventeenth century Holland. Indeed, it was thought to be a source of artistic aspiration."

If  the public were to come to believe that Catharina was an antagonist to her husband's life and work, a deep injustice will have been dealt to both of their memories and in a sense, she has been unfortunately condemned to die not once, but twice.

Conclusion

Catharina's presence in Vermeer's compositions is largely hinged on the presumed but  unproven pregnancy of some of his sitters and the subjective interpretation of these women's expressions. Even in the best of circumstances, the task of identifying anonymous sitters in an artist's work is compounded by the cultural distance of 300 years which separates us from them. For further information on Vermeer's marriage to Catharina Bolnes, click here.