The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [44]
We have no idea what Vermeer looked like, not even a hint from some traveler’s journal about whether he was tall or short, a dandy with a taste for silk or a frump in a paint-spattered smock. He was a well-regarded artist in Holland in his own day, but if anyone ever painted his portrait, it vanished long ago. Nor did he fill that blank himself. We have seventy-odd Rembrandt self-portraits (and some forty self-portraits by Van Gogh), but not one by Vermeer.* “Rembrandt, the painter of mystery, is no mystery to us,” remarked the painter Philip Hale a century ago, whereas “Vermeer—the painter of daylight—is engulfed in darkness.”
We know Vermeer had a teacher, though we do not know who it was, and we do not know the names of his students, if there were any. (Historians can name fifty of Rembrandt’s pupils.) We do not know the identity of any of the models in any of Vermeer’s paintings, and can only guess if one of those silent, contemplative women might have been the painter’s wife or daughter or even a local girl who had been hired as a maid.
In only one document, and that one to do with a legal dispute, can we hear Vermeer’s voice. At least in this single example, the great painter struck an impatient and far-from-serene note. He and several other artists had been called on to evaluate a collection of paintings supposedly by Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael. Were they authentic? “Not only are the paintings not outstanding Italian paintings,” Vermeer declared, “but, on the contrary, [they are] great pieces of rubbish and bad paintings.”
What did Vermeer think of his own achievement? What goals was he striving to reach? We have not a single drawing or sketch or abandoned painting to give us a hint, and not a letter or a diary entry about his work. (Vermeer’s dismissal of Italian “rubbish” is his only surviving comment on art, his own or anyone else’s.) Would Vermeer have welcomed the words of the near-contemporary who, in 1699, hailed him as “full of warmth”? Or would he have preferred John Updike’s awed praise of his “almost inhuman coolness”?
For better or worse, we have no choice but to confine our search for answers to the paintings themselves. Even here matters are not so simple, and not merely because we have only a tiny number of paintings by Vermeer to look at. The first step for an art historian studying Vermeer’s career is to arrange the paintings in sequence, but, as noted earlier, only three paintings have dates: The Procuress, 1656; The Astronomer, 1668; and The Geographer, 1669. Thus every attempt at a chronology becomes an exercise in educated guesswork. Historians whose aim is to see how Vermeer changed and developed over the years find themselves caught. First they arrange Vermeer’s paintings in an order that strikes them as fitting; then they use the arrangement they themselves have devised to draw conclusions about Vermeer. It is learned work but it bears a distressing resemblance to a dog chasing its tail.
VERMEER’S HOMETOWN, DELFT, has become a place of pilgrimage for art lovers. They find an unspoiled and lovely city, but they do not uncover many traces of Vermeer. At best the devotées can embark on a kind of shadow tour. They cannot explore the house where Vermeer grew up, which was torn down in the 1800s. As a distant second best, they can consult a detailed map of Delft from 1675, drawn by one Dirck van Belyswijck, which shows the house from above. Decades ago an eminent scholar believed he had located the house where Vermeer lived and worked, at 25 Oude Langendijk. That house still stands, but the most thorough Vermeer archivist of all, the late