Vermeer And De Hooch At The National Gallery - Vermeer and the Delft School

Contemporary Review, August, 2001 by Donald Bruce

AFTER the outburst of trumpets at the Royal Academy's Genius of Rome we are invited to hear the dextrous, muted clavier-pieces of Vermeer and the Delft School at the National Gallery. The School of Delft, if it existed at all, was sustained mostly by visiting artists; but there are plenty of works by the longstanding residents, Vermeer and de Hooch. The exhibition is well put together. One cannot say the same of the heavyweight catalogue, expensive ([pound]36) for what it contains, half of which is prolegomena (including an inordinate tally of 169 pages by a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where the exhibition originated) and appendices. The catalogue is thin only in pertinent or even exact details of the pictures on display.

Literally in a backwater not far from The Hague, Delft reposes among the clefts made through the sleepy Dutch fields by the delta of the Rhine. The rivers and their tributaries, though diverted by the provident burghers into canals for transport and moats for defence, were later to impoverish many inhabitants of Delfland, including Vermeer. During the French war with Holland, Louis XIV overwhelmed the Lower Rhineland with a force so large that the Dutch Commander, Jan de Witt, could think of no better response than to open the dykes and flood the area, a decision with grim consequences for his country and himself. The devastated land included farms leased to tenants by Vermeer's mother-in-law. Some of these, as part of his wife's dowry, had staved off the unworldly painter's many debts. After Vermeer's death in 1675 his mother-inlaw, herself hard-pressed for money, took his picture, The Painter's Studio, from his penniless wife in part-settlement of the money the couple had borrowed from her.

The figures in Johannes Vermeer's paintings are infused with even less movement, or incipient movement, than those of Gerrit Dou, yet in spite of the static composure of his work, Vermeer was impelled through his brief twenty years of activity by a restless, enquiring spirit. He began with murky narratives in a Dutch Caravaggist style, gaudy but drab, such as Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (Edinburgh National Gallery) and The Procuress (Dresden Gemiildegalerie). He continued with isolated figures and Hooch-like tableaux vivants in a usually tiled interior; varied with brothel-pictures in the discreet manner of Gabriel Metsu and the elder Frans van Mieris. Finally he painted allegories of art and religion partly derived from Cesare Ripa's rule-book of iconography, which had recently been translated into Dutch. What this list excludes may well be considered his masterpieces, although they are not shown in the London exhibition. They are not interiors but townscapes: the two prospects of Delft.

The shabby redbrick facades of Het Straatje, or the little street, drowse like its denizens in the midsummer heat. The unblemished concord of steady light and liquescent shadow in A View of Delft, with its frugally magnificent infilade of clouds, towers, light-speckled and lichen-speckled bridges and barge-moorings, contributed its harmonies to the orchestration of Proust's great novel. There are five significant references to Vermeer in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Swann, in part Proust's alter ego, is writing a monograph on Vermeer. Bergotte, in part another alter ego, rises from his sickbed to see the View at an exhibition in Paris, and collapses just as he recognises, and remembers from a previous visit to The Hague, the dormered yellow strip of roof to the left of the encrusted masonry of the watergate (so repeating Proust's own experience). Nearly halfway through the last volume, which recounts the rediscovery of the past, Proust, conflating time and space, compares Vermeer's vision to a different p lanet whose rays still reach us centuries after the planet's extinction: 'for a writer's style, and also a painter's, are manifestations not of technique but of vision'. Though not as important as 'the little tune' or 'the little train', 'the little patch of yellow' is part of the recurring theme of memory in Proust's labyrinthine symphony. We shall return later to the affinities of memory and perspective.

It is wretched that in so short a life Vermeer (1632-1675) matured slowly as a painter, and fair to pass lightly over the one biblical and one mythological picture he was misled into labouring upon. They are belated juvenilia which ran contrary to this talent. It may be worth noting that among the slackly delineated limbs of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (Edinburgh National Gallery), the demarcating highlights of Mary's knuckles anticipate the stippled dots of white, akin to the spotted plumage of a starling, which he was later to use to such brilliant effect in, among others, the picture of The Darymaid. The comical prudishness of The Bath of Diana (Hague Mauritshuis), in which the amply clad goddess among her stem-faced nymphs merely has her feet scrubbed with a pumice-stone, suggests the formality and reticence of his future brothel-scenes. Clearly since Diana ran about so much, she might well have calloused feet, but this is not what such Dutch Italianisers as Wtewael and Bloemaert (not to speak of Titian) would have depicted. Vermeer generally knew his limitations, especially that he was no anatomist.