Nor less admirable is the marvelous unity that he imparts to the whole scene. Tonality has much to do with it, yet that is but a means. The cause is in himself, in the reverence that he has even for the accessories in his pictures; and the result is a harmony that is at once esthetic and intellectual. Mind, as well as taste, has ordered everything. All the artists of Dutch genre had more or less the faculty of heightening the value of beauty in the accessories they used; but none, not even Vermeer, to so extraordinary a pitch of artistic propriety as Terborch.
His discretion in the selection is so choice, and his feeling for arrangement at once so big and simple and so concentrated, that the presence of his own high-bred feeling pervades almost every interior he has painted and makes its privacy a thing of exquisite aloofness and, if I may say so, of consecrated self-possession.
Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket in The Concert of the Berlin Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red, black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention, distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony, Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, a plein-airist, while Terborch, true to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the invention and realization of his tonal scheme that he is the superior of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a superior quality of mind.
JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER OF DELFT
Johannes or Jan Vermeer, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters. Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken, until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under the nom de plume of “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures, set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown
GIRL AT THE WINDOW JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK