The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [45]
The artists’ guild that Vermeer belonged to is a shade less elusive—the Guild Hall was not demolished until 1875. The acolyte can study the original—a sharply detailed photograph has come down to us—or visit the rebuilt version, finished only this year. The buildings that Vermeer depicted in The Little Street vanished long ago, but the visitor to Delft can explore Piet Vonk’s bicycle shop, which stands just to the left of the gateway shown in The Little Street. Even Vermeer’s mortal remains have slipped from sight. He was buried in Delft’s Oude Kerk, the Old Church, but the precise location has been forgotten. Someone made a best guess years ago and inscribed the name “Vermeer” on a stone. There tourists pay homage, though just what the stone conceals no one quite knows.
By coincidence Delft was Van Meegeren’s city as well, in his student days. He attended the highly regarded Delft Institute of Technology, but he quickly found that the rigors of academic life were not for him. Students in Delft lived in rented rooms rather than dormitories. Ordinarily they moved often, but Van Meegeren seems to have found a landlady who let him bring in girlfriends, and he stayed put. For five years he lived within a few hundred yards of Vermeer’s old neighborhood, above a store that today sells stuffed animals.
VERMEER WAS BORN in 1632, a generation after Rembrandt and two generations after Frans Hals. His father was an innkeeper who dabbled in art, though art in seventeenth-century Holland did not carry the cachet it has today. Rubens and Van Dyck and Velasquez might have won honors and riches elsewhere in Europe, the great Dutch historian J. H. Huizinga wrote, but in Holland, Vermeer and his peers were “generally ignored or completely forgotten.” painters were tradesmen who worked with their hands. Poets, who worked with words rather than pestles and powders, were the figures held in esteem.
The biographical scraps we do have serve mainly to deepen the Vermeer mystery. Certainly they do not seem to portend a career as art’s preeminent connoisseur of calm and quiet. Vermeer’s grandfather, for example, was a watchmaker who strayed into coin forging. He managed to stay just ahead of trouble, but two of his accomplices were convicted and beheaded.
A bit more is known about Vermeer’s own life, at least in outline. He married at age twenty-one and lived and worked in the house of his mother-in law, who had originally opposed the match. He and his wife raised fifteen children (four died as infants). It is hard to picture his house hold as a refuge from the world’s hurly-burly.
Eight months after his marriage, Vermeer registered with the Guild of St. Luke, a kind of trade union of sculptors, painters, weavers, and even booksellers. At age twenty-one, he officially became a “master painter.” (In Vermeer’s time the number of master painters in Delft ranged between thirty and fifty.)
For aspiring painters of the day, guild membership was mandatory. Vermeer had served a six-year apprenticeship—this, too, was mandatory, and it is only in this indirect way that we can be certain he had formal artistic training. Vermeer’s signature is number seventy-eight in the guild’s registry book; Carel Fabritius was number seventy-five, Pieter de Hooch, number eighty. The initiation fee was six guilders, roughly a week’s pay for a manual laborer. Vermeer scraped together one guilder and a few cents. Two and a half years would pass before he paid off the remaining four-odd guilders.
In the Decades to come, Vermeer would rise to a position as a member of the guild’s board. More important, he painted A View of Delft, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid, and some thirty more. The work met a respectful welcome, but no one was bowled over. Certainly no one spoke of Vermeer as a genius. But his work commanded