The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [41]
The revolt against Spain began on June 5, 1568, when two Dutch noblemen, the Count of Egmont and the Count of Hoorn, sought to negotiate with King Philip’s representative in the Netherlands. By way of response, the Spanish official arrested the two Dutchmen and had them beheaded before a gaping crowd. Peace would not come for eighty years. The war was “still going on when Vermeer was born,” one historian writes, “as it had been when his father—and probably his grandfather—were born.”
Against this backdrop, Vermeer’s achievement stands out all the brighter. A few years ago, the journalist Lawrence Weschler traveled to The Hague to cover the Yugo slav War Crimes Tribunal. There he fell into conversation with the tribunal’s chief judge, who spent his days listening to detailed accounts of torture. The judge told Weschler the story of a torture victim who had gone mad. Weschler asked the judge how he coped with such testimony. On his lunch hour, the judge replied, he hurried to the Mauritshuis Museum “to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
Weschler, too, had been communing with The Hague’s Vermeers. (The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft, and Diana and Her Companions are at the Mauritshuis.) The judge’s remark, Weschler wrote, opened his eyes to “the true extent of Vermeer’s achievement—something I hadn’t fully grasped before. For, of course, when Vermeer was painting those images which for us have become the very emblem of peacefulness and serenity, all Europe was Bosnia (or had only just recently ceased to be): awash in incredibly vicious wars of religious persecution and proto-nationalist formation, wars of an at-that-time unprecedented violence and cruelty, replete with sieges and famines and massacres and mass rapes, unspeakable tortures and wholesale devastation.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Vermeer chose to spend his days depicting quiet.
20
JOHANNES VERMEER, SUPERSTAR
For two centuries after his death, Vermeer disappeared into obscurity. When he came back, he came roaring back. In 1881, for instance, a little-known Dutch collector named A. A. Des Tombe had picked up a Vermeer picture at an auction for 2.3 florins, roughly $200 in today’s dollars. The painting had suffered from grime and rough handling. It had not been deemed worthy of mention in the auction catalog, and its name, if it had ever had one, had been lost. Today we know it as The Girl with a Pearl Earring.
In 1902, Des Tombe bequeathed it and eleven other pictures to the Mauritshuis Museum. From the start, rapturous crowds gathered to see the gorgeous young woman in yellow and blue glancing over her shoulder. The painting’s current market value would be almost beyond reckoning. Certainly it would go for many tens of millions.*
At around the turn of the twentieth century, two powerful, capricious forces met and magnified each other. Together they propelled Vermeer into the most rarified ranks of celebrity. The first was a shift in taste—inspired in good measure by rapturous travelers’ tales, Americans declared all things Dutch hugely desirable. The frenzy was dubbed “Holland mania.” The idea, explains the art historian Arthur Wheelock, was that Holland and the United States were spiritual kin. The values at the heart of American culture and democracy derived from Holland, not Britain. The Dutch revolt against Spain served as a forerunner to the American revolt against En gland, and Holland’s seventeenth-century Golden Age foretold America’s just-dawning golden future.
The second trend was American, too. At about the time of Holland mania, America’s robber barons decided they were no longer content to collect railroads and shipping