Vermeer the Forger- Part 3

Vermeer's Visitors

There are two brief diary accounts of contemporaries meeting Vermeer: Pieter Teding van Berkhout and Balthasar de Monconys. The former mentions seeing several Vermeer paintings of which their chief virtue was their "most extraordinary and curious perspectives". Van Berkhout made two trips to see Vermeer originals; the first appears to have been to Pieter Van Ruijven's digs to survey his collection*. There is no mention of a purchase, which is troubling because van Berkhout was a prominent collector. Odder still is the second diary entry, written a little more than a month after the first visit, which reads almost as if van Berkhout doesn't recall meeting Vermeer that first time. It's possible that Vermeer was not in attendance if van Berkhout did meet with van Ruijven the first time around.

De Monconys is more detailed- he relates how he was brought to Vermeer's door and was told by the painter that he did not have any work at home but that there was a painting at the local baker's shop. The party arrived at Hendrick van Buyten's bakery and De Monconys was not impressed, writing that the asking price for the painting which contained only a single figure was not worth one tenth of what the baker claimed he paid for it. Curiously, the figure van Buyten quotes is 600 guilders, exactly what Vermeer's credit debt at the bakery was at his death.

There is a school of thought that the price quote was an attempt to con a foreigner into believing Vermeer sold at top dollar and that his work would soon be as notable in finer circles as Dou and Metsu, among others working steadily for the nobles.

It's not impossible that an attempt to get Vermeer in the black and his credit back on track with the locals required a joint effort to promote the fiction that Vermeer was selling top shelf stuff. Rich people usually pay others to tell them what's good for their reputation and here a man of means was thought to be vulnerable to a ruse without his house scholars to steer him away from a bum steer. As it happened, De Monconys knew what he liked and the under populated canvas was not worth the investment in Vermeer's career. The Frenchman returned to court and Vermeer missed a chance to have his name go abroad.

*I’m convinced that Van Ruijven owned Vermeer’s entire output, even that which was yet to be painted. Vermeer worked for, was essentially indentured as an artist to, Van Ruijven; and that is why Van Ruijven’s son in law’s estate had over twenty Vermeer originals put up for auction in 1696.

Yes Means No

What's revelatory in these two encounters is the reaction, somewhat subtle, to the viewing of Vermeer's work. Van Berkhout describes Vermeer as an excellent painter which on the surface sounds like an endorsement. However, there are more enthusiastic honorifics available, such as Master, which Vermeer was actually entitled to refer to himself as within the ranks of the St. Luke's artisan guild, but which van Burkhout deliberately avoids. He also refers to Vermeer as celebrated, which in this context smells awfully sarcastic, as if hinting at the backwater nature of this hamlet with pretensions to political significance being so short on breeding that the perspective tricks of a Vermeer drew applause.

 At the same time, a more neutral interpretation would have it that van Burkhout described the "celebrated" with a certain amount of mystification but reserving personal judgment as trends sometimes have to catch up with an artist doing something as odd as what he witnessed in Vermeer's work.

My feeling is that van Burkhout is not only recording his adventures for posterity but also as show notes for the salons where he will regale his peers with a description of his encounters. To label Vermeer as an "excellent" painter to his genteel listeners is a form of courtly politesse, a code in societal vernacular that the guy is not quite there yet without having to employ a pejorative, per se.

As a contemporary example of what I mean, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is generally dismissed as a failure, from over commercialization to poor living facilities, not to mention attempted mass murder by bombing. At the closing ceremonies, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the IOC, said "Well done, Atlanta," and labeled the games, "most exceptional", a valedictory universally translated as "Atlanta, you screwed the pooch!" given that Sammaranch labeled all other Olympics he was in charge of as "the best Olympics ever."

Studied Carelessness

For a van Berkhout, raised in the most genteel environment the upper crust could provide, the idea of denigrating the obvious was not an option; one would simply elide mediocrity. However, when criticizing someone was deemed necessary, the "yes means no" form of diplomatic rhetoric practiced at the highest levels of society could slay with bloodless efficiency. And a proper gentleman should, under no circumstances, ever be seen exerting effort in doing anything, least of all dispatching an unworthy. The term for this is "sprezzatura", in effect "studied carelessness".

The bottom line is this man was a noted collector, and in a position to assess the best collection of Vermeer's available and he walked away without a purchase. Not much of an endorsement.

De Monconys, who was in town on something of an intelligence mission for the Jesuits, was more plain spoken, his point specific in a reactionary way, his entry like a muttered aside that he'd shrugged off the hype and was noting the visit more for comprehensiveness than to leave a lasting testament of the failed artist.

Misreading the Room

And so stands the only eyewitness accounts of the existence of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. Neither witness responds to the work with cash offerings, and both likely for the same reason- the paintings are undernourished in the aesthetics of the day- just too austere for the times- nothing that would enhance the decor of each man's collection of curios.

And on that subject, much more can be contextualized regarding the lack of enthusiasm for Vermeer's compositional restraint. Most interiors of the wealthy were stuffed with possessions, a sign of opulence that cued the visitor that they were in the presence of real affluence. To celebrate the tasteful discretion seen in the tableaus that Vermeer was offering was a concession to the possibility that there was beauty in restraint. Given the aesthetic excesses of nobles and above, Vermeer smacked of deprivation; and given the few expensive items appearing within many of the paintings, each affair seemed staged, as if the viola da gambas, Turkish rugs, ornate frames and apparent original oils on the walls were rented, that the models were indeed models and not native to the interiors, that the artifice was not only implausible but down right depressing. However, if what the viewer was looking at was an accurate reflection, what family would possess such luxurious items and in such short supply? A family in collapse and methodically selling or having their effects repossessed- who of influence and means would want such a scene staring their guests in the face? The whole thing is a buzz kill. I mean, it's one thing to have a show of middle class existence as long as the chins on the women are multiplied, the babies well fed and the assorted flora and fauna succulent and gleaming. But Woman in Blue Reading a Letter has all the celebratory feel of an unwed mother in a prison convent reading a summons that her unborn child will become a ward of the state and the fallen woman will be lucky to get the position of scullery maid.

Vermeer the Forger- Part Two

Pieter van Ruijven (PvR) (1624-1674) loaned Vermeer two hundred guilders on or about 1657. There is no certainty as to why but I will construct an unverifiable narrative that breaks no laws of the physical universe nor confounds human nature within the context of the threadbare facts known of these two men's lives. PvR had money; not massive amounts, but investment money. He played angles, something of a gambler, but a reasonably legit business man for the most part. One of his financial concerns was art dealership. The laws of the land forbade PvR from actually dealing in art. The kind of man he sought out to front for him was financially brittle, with many mouths to feed and open to turning what skills and access he had to broader opportunities. This of course was Vermeer, guild member and legal art dealer. So too, he could handle a brush. The pairing allowed for PvR to gain access to paintings and for Vermeer to exercise his photographically accurate rendering skills.

The copyist, that being the copier of original art, was a legal and potentially lucrative position within the guild framework of the art market. Vermeer had to have made the bulk of his professional income from copying proven sellers. There is no other use for a craftsman of his particular skill set given that Vermeer's originals just did not sell in his lifetime. Vermeer was underwritten to make copies selected by PvR and obtained by Vermeer. Where and how PvR moved these copies I can't say, but Northern Italy, specifically Venice, would be a good guess. 

A New Gizmo

Take a good look at The Glass of Wine. The couple seem to be no more engaged in reverie than a patient drinking a formula prescribed by her attending physician. The composition is geometrically engineered like a perfectly tuned instrument.

It is genius in design, yet as soulless as a museum diorama. How could a man with an eye for design as great as any forget to breathe life into the models depicting an event usually fraught with danger and desire? In my opinion it's because he is still learning how to utilize the new contraption PvR has loaned money to Vermeer to obtain. That contraption is a camera obscura, the very latest in technological marvels that replaces and upgrades Vermeer's concave mirror. The camera obscura allows Vermeer to replicate the entire room rather than the half length, floor-less interiors the concave mirror could accurately report. And even more important, the camera obscura's depth of focus is many times greater than the mirror.

The Glass of Wine is Vermeer getting close, but having struggled to pose his models as carefully as the furniture, they stand and sit with the rigidity of dress dummies.

Now take a gander at The Girl With the Wine Glass. The problem is solved to the point of overstatement. The fawning "gentleman" has clearly charmed this woman into a stupor. His wingman in the corner has played his part and is drifting off to a blackout. The wholesome young lady is likely to lose her maidenhead and looks at the viewer  without comprehension. Her virtue is toast.
I would venture to say this is some kind of object lesson for young women, specifically Vermeer's growing brood of daughters, to stay away from the taverns- including the one across the square that Vermeer's family has been running for a number of years.

Another element unverifiable even though it is right there for all to see is Vermeer using the same male model to play both roles. And an almost perverse touch is the portrait on the wall that suggests the same class and rank as the devious enabler. Here we have a man of means represented by his ability to afford and justify a formal portrait not restricting his reprobate behavior to the bordello; a further caution that the appearance of culture does not preclude an underbelly of vice. It appears as a triple portrait, another trick allowed by the mirror projection systems then in vogue. I would not go so far as to say that is PvR doing the posing but my profile of the investor wouldn't contradict the possibility. I have no other candidates who would be so enthusiastic to participate in Vermeer's development.

Shifting Focus

From here on its important to note the sea change in Vermeer's subject matter. His first attempts depicted life as a pub owner might see his charges as they bob and weave through another night of escape from reality. The Procuress, the Sleeping Girl, the two men standing over young women, determining their fate by getting them drunk gives way to family friendly tableaux featuring young women engaging in more virtuous pursuits, notably as music students. This has to be a reflection of the maturing father of a growing family overwhelming the odds by producing one daughter after another and having the understandable worries attending this development affect his creative life.

The two models from The Girl With the Wine Glass return quickly in Girl Interrupted at Her Music (Lesson?) This time the attentive student is startled by the intrusion; not because of embarrassment but from mild irritation at having her concentration broken. The rogue of the earlier work is now the benevolent pedagog, almost angelic in his beneficence. The threat of degradation from the grip of demon alcohol has been completely washed away.
To compensate, Vermeer has darkened the scene and let the chiaroscuro hold the tension. The muted Cupid in the painting on the wall will return in bright light in Lady Standing at a Virginal a few years later, but here I believe the specter is not insidious but allegorical, a hint of secular spirituality standing in for creative inspiration, nothing more.

Parallel Universe

Down the road in Leiden, a contemporary named Gabriel Metsu was working the same market as Vermeer. Here is Metsu's take on the same situation in the music room.

A young woman takes notes from the master on tempo. The viewer is not part of the narrative as in the Vermeer, the lighting is standard ambience-TV lighting as it might once have been described. The basic tricks of the trade are all in evidence, from the accurate perspective to obsessive detail in the clothing. There are even paintings, as in many Vermeers, on the walls advertising the artist's copyist skills. It's serviceable in its own way and Metsu moved product. He was employed by the prosperous to paint family portraits.

The question then is why, if we can agree on the superiority of the Vermeer, it was Metsu who sold? This is the fundamental question for me: Was Vermeer considered aesthetically undernourished in his day? My answer is yes.

The abhorrence of empty space is termed "horror vacui". It is a common syndrome for the impulsive, the impatient, the thrill seeker, the addict, the undereducated/over employed who had the discretionary income to blow on wall art. Metsu gives the buyer more than the scene needs- he treats everything with equal weight and therefore nothing has any particular value. The interaction between the two players is as dynamic as the action between the water jug and the drapery. The stasis has encased this meaningless moment in forgotten lives like flies in amber. But it has stuff in it. Look at the dress. Look at the gold frame. Look at the hair. Parts.

Today we recognize Vermeer’s restraint as a virtue. But old paintings go up in value just by surviving. The wealthy pay dearly to possess them. They give grants to historians to explain in writing why this painting or that is worth millions in investment. The scholar and his prejudices takes over from the long dead consumer and his impulses in order to assign new value. Vermeer appeals to the modern aesthete. Metsu appealed to the consumer of his day. Vermeer’s objectives were not self sacrificing- he had hungry children; four of fifteen didn’t make it out of infancy. The idiotic caricature of this man brooding alone in his second story st udio, wrestling with aesthetic problems as he laboriously crafts one or two pictures a year is ludicrous. Vermeer was experimenting with technique and composition to make his own paintings sell better. But he was clearly a copyist and PvR basically bought the camera obscura for Vermeer to reproduce other people’s work. Vermeer’s attempts at getting his own name established was a side show. His struggle to that end, trying to make a name for himself and selling at Metsu prices, never materialized.

The Source

Gerrit Dou, Metsu's Leiden Master, can be targeted as one of the sources of Vermeer's plight. Largely dismissed today, Dou was the man to beat at the time, at least for the fijnschilder (fine painters) school of which Vermeer is the now often misidentified preeminent example. What Dou was selling was melodrama- always a populist sentiment.

Here in The Dropsical Woman, Dou lays it on thick, with women in peril and a male savior eyeing the mix of his lifesaving potion as the divine light from the left lends science a hand. The detail is obsessive, the light overly dramatic, the Holy Bible open to the appropriate passage should darkness fall- the same basic design as a Vermeer and yet as far removed from his temperament as can be. Tastes change- some cash in and others win over history.

Vermeer the Forger- Part One

This has bothered me for a long time and so I am finally going to try and put this somewhere other than my head. Guided by a generally agreed upon chronology, I will use the paintings as a stepping stone to get a handle on how Johannes Vermeer of Delft, Holland (1632-1675) managed to feed ten surviving children, a wife and a mother-in-law on thirty some odd paintings, almost none of which sold while he was alive.

A few basic facts: Vermeer's mother in law, Maria Thins, an assumed source for most of the household revenue, was not as wealthy as most claim. She owned rented farmland that did yield some steady income. She was Catholic and so restrained to a degree inside Protestant Holland. The fact that several debts were outstanding at Vermeer's death strongly suggests that the family at best had decent credit. The fact remains that Vermeer was in need of work and that he possessed one marketable skill- the ability to accurately render objects and persons, as well as preexisting paintings by others, with remarkable accuracy.

Developing a Technique 

The Girl With a Flute is a first try. What Vermeer is doing here is courting this woman, Catherine Bolnes. He is attempting to flatter her as a model while at the same time buying an out by claiming this new projection technique he is using is an inexact science. This woman will turn up several times in Vermeer's work as the portrait ploy will pay off in marriage.

The picture is not a success by Vermeer's standards and he tries again, this time utilizing the soft focus effects of the system in Girl Wearing a Red Hat by having Catherine look back over her shoulder. This is an interesting pose that will return in the fabled Girl With a Pearl Earring. Aesthetically speaking, The Red Hat is an improvement and we can't really know what the standards of the time were regarding female vanity- but, as I mentioned, she did marry him and whelp 15 kids.

Two questions: What technique was he using to get these proto-photographic effects and what was this woman doing posing for this guy?

I suspect he was using a concave mirror and was executing the picture at his father's inn, known as Mechelen. The concave mirror technique requires a darkened space, like a draped dark room large enough to fit an easel and a painter, a small cut out to let light in and a model outside whose image is bounced off the mirror, upside down onto a blank canvas inside the darkened space. A precise sketch of the model can be made in any medium including paint if one possesses a quick and steady hand.

Catherine Bolnes was there because she had taken up residence as a guard against her abusive father. She was about twenty one at the time the two portraits were made. Vermeer worked at his father's inn while apprenticing at the Guild of St. Luke's, the regulatory body for training and controlling the local artisan markets. I would add that the protection for this young woman was priced to sustain Vermeer's apprenticeship, which was not cheap.

The house Bolnes was fleeing from was catty-corner to Vermeer's Mechelen Inn, across Market Square at the center of downtown Delft, thirty three miles south west of Amsterdam. The inn catered to officers and other government wonks so could be described as a respectable joint. The male patrons aspired to higher standing and likely saved their reprobate behavior for the bordellos. The inn was approved as a safe haven for an unmarried woman of age.

The concave mirror system had been around for more than two hundred years as a form of image projection and could by then be employed in any number of ways without great space or elaborate set up. The only drawback was that it's depth of field was very narrow and would lend itself to no more use than for modest still life or intimate portraits as we see in the two panels featuring young Catherine. Other, more versatile techniques utilizing more sophisticated lenses had by Vermeer's time largely displaced the concave mirror, though if on a budget as Vermeer almost certainly was, it was still serviceable as a practice tool.

Both panels are in dispute so you can take what I propose with a grain of salt; I will state up front that the novel/film Girl With a Pearl Earring is as best I can put it an entertaining implausibility. I will also pile almost all Vermeer scholarship and romance together and set it alight. Vermeer is the greatest beneficiary of revisionism in all of cultural archeology. His modest output has been infused with more magical thinking and his circumstances have been more fictionalized than any of the pre- Christian Roman emperors.

The Canon
I won't run through every attribution but I want to select a few key paintings to illustrate the progress of Vermeer's technique and suggest why he failed in his own time.

The Procuress is of interest because here is the same problem with depth of field; all of the action is on a single plane. Even more interesting is Vermeer's desperate attempt to compensate by filling the lower fifty percent of the picture with elaborate drapery. This is the equivalent of extending a half hour of television programming into sixty minutes with extra commercials.

I should also state categorically that the two supposed early works, Diana and Her Companions, along with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, are not on my list of Vermeer originals. The circumstances that approved them are largely why I'm bellowing about this guy and his work. A bloviator named Abraham Bredius put the two pictures in the canon and the people who had owned them saw great advantage in keeping them "authentic" as the Vermeer cult was peaking in the early twentieth century.

 

Another item still evidencing the depth of field problem is A Girl Asleep. This is essentially a collage. In the foreground is a white jug, as flat as a magazine advertisement cut and pasted to the canvas. The short span of the fruit bowl remains in the narrow range of focus as does the ruffles of cloth. The elaborate table cloth that seems to be rising up as if infused with life by a conjurer to smother the poor girl as her dreams begin to turn to dark appears to have been draped like a teepee over, what, a brass fireplace stand?

The girl herself is tightly posed, her arms kept close by her sides. The background looks abandoned to geometric patterns that probably hid a figure or, more likely, another room too far beyond the reach of the modest focal length of Vermeer's mirror.

The breakthrough comes with The Soldier and Laughing Girl. Here Vermeer recognizes how to enhance the illusion of depth with still relatively primitive techniques. The foreground soldier, dimmed by the backlight of the window, sits immobile, pausing to find the right adjective to garnish the amusing anecdote he is reciting. The staging will allow the sitter to sustain the pose long enough for Vermeer to adjust the focus of the mirror by moving forward and back as needed. The advantage of the composition is that the figure's right arm which carries the weight of the illusion is rather indistinct as it is lost in the shadows.

The chair he sits on can pose all day and so any adjustment in focus could be done at leisure, even done over if unsuitable in a final rendering.

The amused maid sits in sufficient light to allow complete focus on the half turn to the left and the apparent foreshortening of her right arm, though we can't really see it as it is blocked by her goblet.
The map on the back wall is flat. That leaves the lattice work of the window panes and frames to finish off the illusion. Focus from front left to right rear would not be as vital in situ and Vermeer, who was professionally trained after all, would certainly be able to render the crisp edges effectively without needing the mirror to hold his hand all the way to completion. The fabled diffused light makes itself felt in full force, but that is the one element that requires no artificial means of focus......