by the records to have existed, are as yet unidentified; but it is assumed that the total output of his twenty years of activity did not much exceed the number already discovered. It falls far short of the productivity of most of the Dutch painters—a fact which has been explained by the scrupulous care with which Vermeer painted, and the degree of perfection to which he wrought each canvas.
The appreciation of Vermeer’s art has increased rapidly during the last twenty-five years, until to-day he is generally ranked as the finest of the artists of genre, and, as a painter, without rival in the Dutch School, while some are disposed to consider him the most accomplished painter in the history of art. These extreme admirers are, as a rule, painters, who find in Vermeer’s technique and point of view precisely what they value most highly in painting. For this artist is a modern among moderns. He is not so in the sense that Rembrandt’s influence is now being felt. The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. To produce a harmony he did not introduce an arbitrary tonality, but, following nature’s plan, drew all the local colors into a balanced relation by the unifying effects of diffused light. In this respect Vermeer was unique in the Dutch School, and it is because the artist of to-day, if he is alive to the modern spirit, works with the same motive and in the same way, that he prizes Vermeer so highly. If, as one enthusiast remarked to me, “the whole art of painting consists in the right relation of values, and there can be no doubt that it does, then Vermeer is the greatest painter that ever lived.”
The value of the criticism, of course, depends upon the acceptance of the major premise, respecting which this individual had no doubt. On the other hand, one may beg to doubt it, without depreciating Vermeer. For it comes dangerously near the position that the whole art of painting consists in its technique; it is an echo, in fact, of that old shibboleth of our youth, “art for art’s sake.” It lays undue stress on the purely sensuous appeal of painting, upon the “mint and cummin,” and neglects the “weightier matter” of possible appeal to the higher faculties of the imagination. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the method which Vermeer brought to such perfection, and which because of its perfection is so justly admired, is essentially one for small canvases. And it was not until Vermeer settled down to these that he developed his characteristic style.
The earliest of his dated pictures is The Proposal, in the Dresden Gallery, which belongs to the year 1656. The figures are of life size, and the treatment is proportionately broad, almost “rough” as Bode says, who adds: “It does not yet show us Vermeer in his developed individuality.” Yet some elements of the latter are already established: the superb plasticity in the modeling of the forms and the frank enjoyment in local colors, the lemon yellow of the girl’s jacket forming a splendid spot
HEAD OF A GIRL JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
HAGUE GALLERY
against the equally brilliant scarlet of the young man’s coat. Again, a minor point, an Oriental rug of crimson and yellow and blue design appears here as in later pictures, such as the Girl with Water-Jug of the Metropolitan Museum. But the Dresden masterpiece of the artist’s youth—he was only twenty-four—differs from his later work not only in the size of the figures and breadth of brushwork, but also in the treatment of the chiaroscuro. The scene is not illumined with diffused light, but with a stroke of light which gives brilliance to the two principal figures and leaves the subordinate ones in shadow. It is an arrangement, suggestive of the example of Rembrandt, and hints at the fact that the picture was produced while Vermeer was still close to the influence of his teacher, Carel Fabritius.