Vermeer the Forger- part 6

Vermeer's Forgers

One of the most notorious art forgers in history was the miscreant, Han Van Meegeren (1889-1947). He is sited as much as he is because he had the juevos to engineer a swindle of the degenerate, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's number two. This event made Van Meegeren a popular figure in Holland after the war but it was also the reason he was caught. Had he not pulled a fast one on Iron Hermann, his Vermeer forgeries might still be part of the official canon.

His story is told several times, the best English language versions being "Van Meegeren, Master Forger" by an Irish Lord, Kilbracken, with the aid of Van Meegeren's son; "The Forger's Spell" by Edward Dolnick, and the superior "The Man Who Made Vermeers" by Jonathan Lopez. If you only have time for one, get the Lopez book.

Also of interest is the filmmaker Errol Morris' multi-part essay about these events and books at the New York Times website.

(Christ at Emmaus, Han Van Meegeren's most successful Vermeer forgery)

In a nut shell, Van Meegeren fooled experts and Nazi thieves alike during the crest of the Vermeer cult when the hunger for more work and information about this mysterious, long dead and essentially mute artist was at a frenzy. The paintings look nothing like Vermeers and got as far as they did because of one painting, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. That painting was attributed to Vermeer by the fading eye of the pompous art historian, Abraham Bredius. Following that claim, Van Meegeren sold the theory that Vermeer apprenticed in his youth by copying and spinning on existing religious works he came in contact with as a member of the St. Luke's artisans guild.

One has to accept Christ/Mary/Martha as a Vermeer to buy into Van Meegeren. Fortunately, truth intervened and Van Meegeren has been deposed, the unforeseen result being his case has inspired some very good writing on the value of attribution and the dangers of self-deception.

But the toppling of Van Meegeren has not raided the game, in my humble and fact challenged opinion. Consider the following:

In 2004 a Vermeer came up for auction, the first in over eighty years. "Young Girl Seated at the Virginals" was long thought a forgery and after the Van Meegeren affair, the painting was considered just that. When the owner's estate put it up, Sotheby's commissioned experts to analyze the painting with every technique available. This included X rays, chemical analysis of the pigments and a study of the canvas weave. The conclusions were that the shawl had been applied over an earlier rendering of the sleeve. The pigments included lead tin yellow, which had fallen out of use around 1700; lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli, which had been replaced by synthetic ultramarine blue in the 1820's; and it was agreed that the weave of the canvas was almost exact in its pattern with that of Vermeer's "The Lacemaker". To top it off, the unique dimensions were cited, without title or description, though with authorship as Vermeer, in an 1818 catalogue.

Armed with these conclusions, the painting went on the block and fetched 42 million, US. The buyer was Las Vegas entrepreneur, Steve Wynn- who, by the way, is legally blind. In 2008, he sold it for 30 million to a private collector in New York. Technically, minus Sotheby's cut, Wynn got his money back- save for the four year interest on thirty million dollars and the absent earnings on any investment that he could have made with that pile. A bath any way you look at it-

(Young Woman Seated at the Virginals- Faux Vermeer fetched $42 large in 2004)

There are several problems with this narrative. First off, Sotheby's would be the last place you would find objective analysis of an item they stood to make a huge commission from. If you think the august house is above reproach, review the Alfred Taubman price fixing affair from 2002. Their "experts" we're going to find what they assumed would be found in any of the authentic Vermeers. Their "evidence" would be distilled in a series of press releases, repeated in the echo chamber of the print and online features sections of corporate news sources ad infinitum.

Secondly, since when does the most successful casino owner since Howard Hughes willingly take a loss that large on a private resale of an authenticated Vermeer?

As for pigment, one can find the recipes for lazurite, lead tin yellow and the rest of the Vermeer palette within minutes. Granted, the information we have at our fingertips was hard to come by in days of yore, but mixing paint the old fashioned way and applying it to old canvas stripped of its original image is the foundation of all forged paintings going back before the age of Vermeer. It was the starting point for Van Meegeren's most successful fakes.

The canvas weave argument is new to me- until this painting was analyzed, I had never heard of a canvas fingerprint. I have a hard time believing something as simple and uniform as weaving canvas threads together, a practice that reaches back to antiquity, could be at such variance by all who practice the craft that unique patterns would be left in such variety as to be likened to fingerprints. Even so, let that go, along with the catalogue entry of 1818.

By these criteria, the painting is genuine.

So, again, why would an operator on the order of Steve Wynn dump the thing so unceremoniously?

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the picture just isn't very good. Here, once again, Vermeer, or somebody else, has placed a young woman at the keyboards, had her turn to the viewer while she bangs out Greensleeves or some such with all the enthusiasm of a bored teenager who is listing in her mind a million other places she would rather be. Overwhelming the scene is the reconstituted shawl, prominently rendered in lead tin yellow as if to compensate for the very un-Vermeer like rendering with extra Vermeer- era pigment.

The fingers and knuckles of the left hand look as if they have been pounded flat with a mallet. Not helping is the stark barrenness of the wall, absent a slice of curtain or a discreet corner of a painting frame as seen in the majority of official Vermeers.

The lion head finials on the back of the chair are absent where they are a regular feature in many other works. This is not really a red flag as the chair in "Woman Standing at the Virginals" very definitely a Vermeer, does not have the lion's heads either. Then again, if you were to fake something so close to a genuine Vermeer, this detail would be observed in the execution.

But beyond all of that I ask myself, why would Vermeer paint this picture? Some have argued it’s a preliminary study but there are no Vermeer preliminaries of any of his work- there are no surviving drawings, sketches, half finished works, oil sketches- nothing! In the context of where he was in his development and with this subject matter, it has an exhausted air of redundancy to it.

But to my mind, the most suspect element in this painting is the woman herself.

The face looks like a composite from a how-to-draw faces primer, Academie des Beaux-Arts edition. And that's the real giveaway, in my sotted opinion- that is the face of a French girl, circa 1865. That is the idealized academic blasé gaze of David and Ingres inspired hacks who are pandering to conservative tastes; to those patrons who pine for the return of standards; of the exactitude of neo-classicism, and who demand a thorough purge of the decadent modernity of the romantics, the realists, and the neophytes that would unleash the impressionist contagion a half generation later.

(Two details from Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, c.1850's)

Specifically, look at the hair do, with highlighted ribbon reporting an unknown light source (something Vermeer never would have allowed) That mop is exactly the studied falsehood that replicators would fashion in what they thought was the style of late seventeenth century Delft; a misstep that, yet again, betrays the seepage of the present that is enabled by the vanity of the forgers and their marks. It’s a feature of forgery that is absolutely unavoidable. Removing all trace of your own time is simply not possible with the evocative forgery, which is what this is- it’s not a straight ahead copy of an existing work. It is a heretofore unknown work in the exact same style as the known Vermeers and yet the time and place of its execution is impossible to hide once time moves sufficiently away from the age in which the fake was executed. I believe this was made in France in the mid 1860's in the aftermath of Thore- Burger's popular monograph announcing the resurrection of a great, and to that point, unknown Dutch Master. Thore- Burger, who actually had little good to say of the academic traditions embodied by the likes of Ingres, had inadvertently created a market for Vermeers and enterprising thieves were out to exploit it-

I doubt they could have ever conceived just how much money would change hands over their deception, not that I grieve for a swindled casino magnate.

Enough.

This series is a tight little conspiracy, yes, relieved of the demands of verifiable fact. But as time goes by and I waste more of it pondering Vermeer and his work, my need for some plausible alternative to the ethereal genius theory scholars have settled on (also in absence of fact) demands a more earth bound explication. For me, Vermeer's life is closer to crime fiction than the romantic drama we've been sold since the Belle Époque.

Vermeer the Forger- Part Five

Vermeer's Demise

Two events occurred between 1672 and 1674 that essentially broke Vermeer and hastened a quick and brutal end to his life at the age of forty three. The first disaster was the invasion of Holland by the French who were attempting to wrestle ports in the Netherlands away from Spain, the Catholic super power holding sway over the Protestant region. The immediate fallout was that the Dutch economy collapsed, leaving Delft in particular with holes in its pockets, prompting a mass exodus of tradesmen for Amsterdam, then the richest city in Europe.

Vermeer stayed put, having several children to feed, and he by default became one of the guild leaders as he was one of the few master grade painters left in town. This didn’t do him much good as the market for paintings vanished. It is at this point in time, if the eponymous claim of this series has any validity, that Vermeer may have, with the facilitation and cash flow of Pieter Van Ruijven, executed outright forgeries.

(St. Praxedis by Felice Ficherelli and Vermeer's Catholicized copy- the only Vermeer copy to be positively identified- The addition by Vermeer of the crucifix indicates the commission was from a Roman Catholic patron)

The evolution of forgery in this era begins with coins. The new Dutch economy was a cluster-fuck of unregulated speculation and the bookkeeping was creative, to say the least. Such chaos attracted all kinds of flies from every level of society. As it happened, Vermeer’s grandfather and father were caught counterfeiting coins for a couple of operators working for the Elector of Brandenburg, who had leveraged his ass to buy adjacent lands in Holland to contribute as a bulwark against Spain. The debt ran eventually beyond seven figures, impossible to repay in those days, but along the way, schemes of all stripes were hatched to get cash flowing. Two government wonks, Gerrit De Bury and Hendrick Sticke, lost their heads on the counterfeiting gambit, thanks largely to Vermeer’s grandfather, Balthasar Gerrits, dropping a dime on the two. The Vermeer faction of this conspiracy escaped real trouble; however, name and location changes were to follow. Knowing what was good for him, Vermeer’s father, Rayner Balthens, became Raynier Jansz and made for Delft, even swapping names again, this time to Vos, just for good measure…. Now I’m not going to insist that some sort of determinant gene of criminality passed to Vermeer himself. It’s a mighty convenient story to attach to my speculation, and it is emblematic of the financial times, but I will leave that as an unclaimed turd in the dog park and move on…

The second disaster was the death of Pieter Van Ruijven in 1674, age forty nine. With the French invasion, Vermeer’s mother in law, Maria Thins, had her rental farmland flooded in preparation for the defense of Delft. This cut a huge chunk of change out of the monthly income and in conjunction with the art market collapse, the death of Vermeer’s business partner was the final blow. If Vermeer was in any kind of racket to make unregulated cash, the stress of across the board failure cost him his life-

“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 half had gone from being healthy to being dead.” Catherina Bolnes, Vermeer’s wife, in a sworn testimony to authorities on the investigation of his death.

Some of his children fared alright- One became a lay nun, living to the age of eighty nine. Two boys became surgeons; another one a notary. Others married and had children. None followed their father into the arts.

By 1678 and the treaty of Nijmegen, the Dutch economy started its recovery. Vermeer’s work remained in the hands largely of the Van Ruijven family and was then sold off at auction in 1696 for very modest prices; from that point until the 1860’s and the creation of the Vermeer cult by Theophile Thoré-Bürger, an art critic and political pundit of sorts, Vermeer’s name, given to him by his father, Raynier Balthens/Jansz./Vos, remained almost completely unspoken.

When his reputation was revived nearly two centuries later, the meaning and intent of his work was completely distorted. By the 1920’s, when Marcel Proust had invested The View of Delft with mortal powers, the romance of Vermeer the Martyr had completely consumed the technician and professional copyist and his earthbound problems- and some possibly desperate moves to alleviate those burdens.

Vermeer the Forger- Part 4

Vermeer's Women

Vermeer had fifteen children, eleven who survived infancy. At least seven of these children were female. The adult woman in his paintings is obviously his wife, Catherine. A few items have their maid, Tanneken Everpoel, at her side (or, as in The Milkmaid, going about her duties alone.)

His most famous model, the adolescent girl with the oriental headdress, or, if you prefer, Girl With a Pearl Earring, is either of his oldest daughters, Maria or Elizabeth. I believe she is the same person in Girl Writing a Letter.

To say the girl writing a letter has alopecia is a bit rich but she has a high forehead even in the style of the day. The girl with the pearl earring indicates no particular hairstyle. One can assume she has hair under there. The painting of the letter writer- I see this portrait as an advertisement for a marriage-aged daughter in an overcrowded house as much as a demonstration of skill for potential commissions. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the point of the painting is- I'm certain the man loved his daughters and was happy to bestow a certain immortality by essaying them in paint; that, though, is the kind of romance I bristle at when, on the one hand you have a professionally trained painter trying to make his substantial financial nut through his talent, but at the same time finding time to pose his daughters for posterity. It's not impossible to accept such sentiment, but if Vermeer painted so few pictures and some are for the family album then the argument that he spent most of his energy as a copyist gets stronger.

The Girl Writing a Letter is fascinating just the same. Here a girl of maybe fifteen shows her varied aspects- the maternity coat drops a lead sized hint she's fertile and maternal. The quill pen states firmly that she is literate. The coquettish ribbons position her age and support her assumed virginity. The desk and the welcoming look suggest more book balancing than penning a personal note, indicating a certain efficiency at running a household full of future children. Finally, the painting on the wall includes flowers and musical instruments. Given how much musical performance goes on in Vermeer's pictures, this is another item to list in the girl's favor, that she's also musically literate.

The sitter for the pearl earring- noted in recent years as the Mona Lisa of the north- is doing nothing more than holding a pose so her father can execute a "tronie", a demonstration piece, an exercise definitely made for potential commission requests to asses the skills of the artist; patrons who would want specific family members immortalized in paint.

A great deal of noise has been made about the information gathered from x rays pointed at this painting, the result being that there is nothing but paint on the canvas, no underlying drawing. I believe it- a very fine tipped brush dipped in a neutral shade of something like burnt umber or chrome yellow can, with a quick hand, do the same in paint that a stick of charcoal or pencil lead can do. Glazes of varying density in the same neutral range can fill shaded areas of the face in a matter of minutes. A template of light and shadow would then guide the build up of color that would only require periodic attendance by the  model. The model would likely be repositioned through a grid on a piece of glass set between the model and the projection onto the canvas by the lens of the camera obscura. Even a chin rest could be set to keep the head in place, which obviously the painter would not include in the finished product.

I've tried variations on these techniques and though a neophyte would have some trouble, after a time the hand and eye pursue only the necessary information and the efficiency of a painting like this one becomes possible to imagine without infusing the artist with supernatural skills. This dash off of his daughter was a sterling example of a veteran with finally honed instincts. The vague intent of the sitter is also a by-product of Vermeer pinpointing the essentials and leaving out obsessive detail. Try to imagine a fashion photographer showing his portfolio and presenting highly detailed close ups of rugged or wrinkled family members with admittedly compelling character rather than softly focused, idealized beauty that the magazine actually wants. This tronie was part of Vermeer's sizzle reel.

Woman With a Lute is the same girl as the letter writer. Why she's tagged as a woman is beyond me- she looks about fourteen- the girl with the high forehead again (and the ubiquitous pearl earring.) At this point, that earring is starting to look like nothing more than a device, a prop to give the shadowed side of the face a spot of light. It's a good trick, and frankly no one was assessing Vermeer's technical schemes in whole, save himself. So what if that damn earring suggests there's only one earring in a whole house full of females? A painter can fetishize like no one else when they get to liking a gimmick.
I also wonder about the ermine trimmed yellow jacket that is as popular for Vermeer as his earring. Is this the best piece of glad rag they had? The repetition of elements in the oeuvre suggests there may have been very little to spruce up the pictures and this, too, may account for the lack of interest from the buying public. I have to wonder that if one painting of a woman in yellow and pearl isn't selling, why keep at it?

Of all the ridiculous claims I've made in this series, the following is the most absurd: I stated before that Pieter Claesz Van Ruijven was not Vermeer's patron exactly but his financial backer- there is a difference. Van Ruijven sunk money into Vermeer, and the camera obscura, for the express purpose of copying best sellers for the foreign market. The attempt to get Vermeer a name for himself was secondary to that- at the same time, Van Ruijven had some say over what Vermeer was trying to market. To this end, Van Ruijven, who I truly believe owned Vermeer's output past and future, insisted Vermeer keep painting pictures of these precious young women. I can't say what the age of consent was in Holland at the time but I'm sure it was younger than 16 which is what it is today. For us, Van Ruijven then seems like a lecherous old bastard, which is how he was portrayed in the film, Girl With A Pearl Earring, by Tom Wilkinson (who was much older than Van Ruijven at his death, aged forty nine.) I wouldn't tar and feather Van Ruijven even if he may be playing a subtle game with his employee. Men like female beauty, and real time and place beauty whenever possible. But paintings of unrequited crushes, let's say, can take hold of the male gaze. By the looks of things in Dutch culture of the time, women weren't tasked with showing much in the way of smarmy flesh. What they could do is look placid, gentle, entertaining in a discreet fashion, clearly tied to the domestic side of life, and of course, pretty, in a way that would flatter a man. What a Van Ruijven did with all this delicate implication would be too much information, but all the hyper-feminine gentility in the Van Ruijven collection of Vermeer's, which I insist again, he owned in total (unless Vermeer had a prospect for an actual cash sale), is there, I believe largely at the behest of the man keeping Vermeer afloat. And running deep underneath this claim is something a little more sinister- the idea that Vermeer was trading on his daughter's appeal to provide some balance to an inequitable financial arrangement. Like I said- the most absurd claim, yet...

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......