The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [46]
Those prices were near the peak of what any artist in Delft earned. Two hundred guilders was a substantial sum, by the reckoning of Vermeer’s biographer Anthony Bailey about a year’s pay for a Dutch sailor of the day. The problem is that it was also about a year’s pay for Vermeer, because he turned out so few paintings.
One Dutch scholar has made a careful estimate of how productive painters were in Holland’s Golden Age—to earn a living, he calculated, most artists needed to produce one or two paintings a week. Rembrandt did not achieve quite that pace, but he completed about twenty-five paintings a year, year in and year out. The exact tally is in dispute, as scholars debate which paintings are by Rembrandt himself and which by his followers, but the current estimate is on the order of 350. Vermeer painted only one tenth as many, a total of thirty-five or thirty-six paintings over the course of his entire, twenty-year career.* To boost his income, he worked as an art dealer, and that second job may have brought in more money than did his own paintings.
In 1672, France invaded Holland, and Holland fell into an economic depression. Perhaps because times were hard, perhaps for personal reasons, Vermeer could no longer sell his work. For three years, he sold not a single painting. He fell into “decay and Decadence,” his wife later declared, in a formal statement that was a mandatory part of the bankruptcy process. “In a day and a half,” she went on, “he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” Vermeer was forty-three.†
HIS NAME WOULD be lost almost until the age of the Impressionists. “The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.”
The notion that Vermeer fell into total obscurity has grown deeply entrenched. After the 1696 auction, writes John Updike, Vermeer’s paintings “passed from owner to owner in the following centuries for less, ordinarily, than the price of a suit of clothes.” An old suit might have received gentler treatment than an old master, one standard account tells us. “An eighteenth-century owner of a Vermeer would not have thought a great deal more about hiring another painter to change the picture than a house wife would think today about having an easy chair re-upholstered.”
The art historian Albert Blankert was the first to show that these gloomy tales had it only half right. In the 1700s, in particular, Vermeer’s work never fell out of favor, though his name did. Collectors with the star power of the Duke of Brunswick and King George III bought Vermeers, although the paintings were mistakenly attributed to better-known artists. “Historical accuracy was not the strong point of eighteenth-century collectors and connoisseurs,” Blankert notes. “Their taste, however, was superb.”
Part of Vermeer’s problem, in the days before photographs and coffee-table books and great museums, was his tiny output. With so few works, and with those few scattered and out of sight in private collections, the name “Vermeer” conjured up only the vaguest associations. Connoisseurs at the time had few tools but memory. Small wonder that Vermeer’s paintings were assigned to a host of his more famous and more prolific peers, among them Metsu and De Hooch and Rembrandt.
Worse still, a long list of Dutch painters all seemed to be named Vermeer or Van Der Meer or something nearly identical. In Haarlem, two landscape painters were both named Jan Van Der Meer. Which was the father and which the son? What about the Utrecht painter named Johannes Van Der Meer? Was he the same person as the Delft