17th century AD

Art in America, May, 1996 by Trevor Winkfield

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Judged solely in terms of his subject matter, of all the great painters Johannes Vermeer was the least original. Artists' studios, women perusing letters by the light of windows, servants about their duties, languorous scenes of imbibing, concerts with figures alone or in tandem--all these were the hackneyed stock in trade of painters from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Glimpsed casually across a room, the images seem so predictable they could have been made by any of Vermeer's contemporaries--de Hooch, van Bronckhorst, Maes, van Loo or Ter Borch. It is only when the viewer walks closer, within the paintings' magnetic range, that the superficialities of genre fade into the background and a transformation begins to take place. And only then, if the viewer assents to the difficult task of simultaneously looking, thinking and feeling, do Vermeer's canvases begin to parsimoniously unfold some of their true meanings, layer by layer, over a long period of time. Never was so much missed at first glance, nor so much gained by lingering.

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Who Vermeer was remains one of the abiding enigmas of art history: we simply have no reliable biographical keys to gain entry to his world. Despite the diligent researches of scholars he remains as remote and as incomprehensible as some medieval Master of the Slanting Light. We know, in fact, more about Cimabue in the 13th century than Vermeer in the 17th. Vermeer left no written statements. No letters remain, there are no eyewitness accounts, no anecdotes pepper his peers' memoirs. Not even a self-portrait bears witness to his likeness. All trace of his corporeal existence, save a few dry mentions in debtors' ledgers, has disappeared. His grave has vanished. Not for nothing has he been dubbed "The Sphinx."

The few facts which we can sieve from the records, however, suggest a far racier character than art history likes to project, and induce (in myself at least) a reverie of speculation. Born to a tavern keeper in 1632 and living in or near taverns for most of his life, he could have been a heavy drinker, probably liked a good time, and was obviously very fond of sex (since he was survived by 11 children). Can we deduce a loving father and an adoring husband? And quite possibly a philanderer? Certainly the early paintings are redolent of sexuality, the women being plied with drink by obviously lustful male companions (witness the almost debauched Procuress--not in the Vermeer retrospective--and, somewhat more subdued, The Girl with the Wineglass). He surely must have lived and worked in an inferno of noise (the diminutive size of his pictures may perhaps be traced to a lack of studio space in his overcrowded nest). His income seems to have been cobbled together from the modest art-dealing business his father bequeathed him, a modicum of sales from his own paintings, some legacies, plus subsidies from his formidable mother-in-law (whose own father had been jailed for counterfeiting coinage).

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Vermeer's tiny artistic output of two or three paintings a year may perhaps be blamed not only on the painstaking techniques involved in fabricating them, but also (and this again is speculation) on family obligations and business duties, or even perhaps inherent laziness. He may therefore have been dismissed by his contemporaries as something of an amateur artist, not quite serious (a serious artist, then as now, churned out at least 20 paintings a year). No royal or civic commissions were forthcoming, no chapels frescoed; no prints or drawings disseminated his talents beyond the confines of Delft. He remained for all intents and purposes a provincial artist in the narrowest sense of the word. After his early death at the age of 43 in 1675 (a demise, I conjecture, heavily clouded by lack of recognition, crippling debts and the knowledge that he would not live to see all his children reach maturity), his reputation was all but eclipsed for two centuries. If anything sold after his death, it was usually misattributed to other artists. For a surprisingly long time, he was regarded as an anonymous pendant to a minor school.

If only these few carefully excavated facts and limited biographical speculations were of any use when we gravitate towards Vermeer's 36 surviving paintings. For, once we are face to face with them, the amusing notions of Vermeer as sexual athlete, even as a doting father (but where are the children in these most adult of all paintings?), fade into irrelevance. We're on our own, alas, since it's our own histories and interpretive skills which must be mobilized before we can make even a partial incursion into Vermeer's universe. Those unwilling to weave their own stories should not apply. Likewise those incapable of looking into a painting, as opposed to looking at it, can never hope to gain access.

Vermeer's rediscovery in the 19th century was in part triggered by the advent of photography, and Vermeer was esteemed insofar as his paintings approached photography. The growing public familiarity with photographic images at that time coincided with, and hastened, the widespread appreciation of Vermeer.(1) For ourselves, of course, it's how far he goes beyond photography which counts. One of the propelling forces behind that branch of optical realism which Vermeer pursued was a painterly equivalent of the biblical Dance of the Seven Veils, a painstaking stripping away of the layers which purportedly separate the painted world from the world around us. The hope being, of course, that once this final screen is lifted the painting will spring stereoscopically into focus ... will, in the truest sense of the word, "come to life." The scientific impossibility of such an occurrence never dampens our expectations that, peered at long enough, Vermeer's canvases will perform this ultimate miracle. This accounts for the famous toppling effect many experience before the work, a swaying trance which begins with the viewer's deepening surveillance of a particular detail and ends with his falling into the painting as though into sleep. (Marcel Proust himself had a dizzy spell in front of View of Delft.) When we are in such a vertiginous state, even the thin horizontal parting in the lacemaker's hair can be transformed through long meditation into a letterbox to sidereal space. Poor Vermeer, we finally realize, must have been wholly obsessed by his passion for a degree of realism that was ultimately irreconcilable with the medium of oil paint. We--his viewers--are likewise driven to distraction, perpetually knocking at his picture plane asking to be let in, baffled as those 19th-century archeologists who saw but couldn't understand the cuneiform tablets before them. No doubt a similar frustration was felt by the demented viewer who, many years ago, prised a Vermeer from the walls, shook it and cried, "Speak! Speak!"(2)