Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

Can you conceive of a more delightful existence than that of Herr Bredius—to be when at home the conservator of such masterpieces as hang in the Mauritshuis on the banks of the Vyver, in the beautiful and bland Dutch capital (some of which are his own property, and only lent to the gallery), and when in mind to travel, to leave the Hague with a roving commission to hunt and acquire new treasures? I can’t. And that is why, when I am asked who I would choose to be were I not myself, I do not say the King, or Mr. Pierpont Morgan, but Herr Bredius of the Mauritshuis.

And yet if I had Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s wealth, I would.... But let us consider first the life and works of Jan Vermeer of Delft.

Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer, was born in Delft and baptized there on 31 October, 1632. His father was Reymer Janszoon Vermeer, and his mother Dingnums Balthasars. In 1653 he married, also in Delft, Catherina Bolnes or Bolenes. How many children they had I do not know, but eight survived him. It is generally believed that Karel Fabritius, himself a pupil of Rembrandt and a painter of extraordinary distinction, was Vermeer’s instructor; but the period of tuition must have been very short, for Fabritius became a member of the Delft Guild in 1652, before which he might not teach, and he was dead in 1654, killed by a powder explosion. A poem on the death of this great painter by a Delft writer has a stanza to the effect that from the ashes of that Phœnix rises Vermeer. There is very little of the work of Fabritius to be seen; but his exquisite “Siskin,” a small picture of the little musical shy bird, painted with the breadth that is commonly kept for auguster subjects, hangs next Vermeer’s “Head of a Young Girl” (my frontispiece) at the Hague, and would alone prove Fabritius to have possessed not only strength but sweetness.

Dr. Hofstede de Groot, the author of a magnificent monograph on Vermeer and Fabritius, published in 1907 and 1908, conjectures Vermeer to have had an Italian master as well as a Dutch, and it is easy to believe. I had, indeed, with none of Dr. de Groot’s knowledge, come to a similar conclusion; and in the huddle of pictures in one of the rooms of the Academy at Vienna I even found a copy of an Italian picture—a Correggio, I think—which Vermeer’s hand might easily have made, so luminous and liquid is it. That he visited Italy is more than unlikely—practically impossible; but to gain that something Italianate which his works occasionally discover there was no necessity for him to have done so, for Italian painters settled in Holland in some numbers. The “Diana and her Nymphs” at the Hague, and the “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary” (which I have seen only in reproduction) in Scotland, have each Italian characteristics; but I must add that in Vermeer’s authorship of these pictures Dr. de Groot does not absolutely believe.

The facts about Vermeer are singularly few, considering the high opinion in which he was held by contemporaries. Almost the only intimate thing told of him is the story of his unpaid bread bill, as recounted by De Monconys, the French traveller. De Monconys visited him in 1663 and wanted to buy a picture, but none could be found in the artist’s house. Vermeer’s baker consented, however, to sell one which was hanging on his wall and for which he had allowed 300 florins. After Vermeer’s death, it is told, the baker’s debt of 3176 florins was liquidated by two pictures. Since Vermeer’s wife is known to have had rich relations and to have come into money from time to time, we may guess this gigantic account to have been the result rather of bad management than of poverty; for of all the painters of the world none less suggests necessity than Jan Vermeer of Delft: on the contrary, his work carries with it the idea of aristocracy and prosperity, certainly a fastidiousness rarely associated with the father of a large family’s struggle for existence in the seventeenth century. Moreover, we are told that his prices, even when he was alive, were higher than those of any painter save Gerard Dou, and such a guild as that of Delft would not be likely to elect a starving man as its chief four several times.

No, if Vermeer owed money to his baker it was because he was easy-going, placid, above such trifles, as other artists have been before and since: indeed, occasionally still are, I am told. You can see that Vermeer was placid: the fact shines in every picture. He was placid, and he liked others to be placid too. His wife was placid, his daughters (if, as I conjecture, certain of his models were his daughters) were placid, his sitters were placid. His one undisputed landscape shows that he wanted nature to be placid; his one street scene has the dove brooding upon it.

Yet when we put in one balance the debt for bread and in the other the very slender output of this famous artist, to whom a collector could come even from distant France with a heavy purse, we are face to face with a difficulty; because even placid men when they become chiefs of guilds do not much care for continual reminders that they owe money, and in such a small town as Delft Vermeer and his baker would have had some difficulty in not often meeting. Moreover what of the butcher? And the vintner? The inference therefore—especially when it is remembered that the baker occasionally agreed to be paid in kind and hang we know not which of the masterpieces on his wall—the inference therefore is that Vermeer painted, was forced by necessity to paint, many pictures in excess of the very small number at the present moment identifiable. Of this, more later; but I want to bring out the point here, since it is of the highest importance and might indeed completely alter the life of Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

We may believe Vermeer to have been a home-keeping man from several circumstances. One is that he was not only born in Delft (in 1632), but he married in Delft (in 1653) and died in Delft (in 1675); another that the years in which he was a chief of the Delft Guild, and therefore a resident there, were 1662, 1663, 1670 and 1671; another that his only famous landscape and his only known street scene are both Delft subjects; and another that of his thirty odd known figure pictures, thirty-one are lighted from the left precisely in the same way, which leads one to suppose that most of them were painted in the same studio.

When I add that Vermeer died in December, 1675, at the early age of 43, and that his executor was Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope (and probably his model for several pictures), I have said all that is known for certain of his career.

To me it is not to Andrea del Sarto that the title of the “Perfect Painter” belongs, but to Jan Vermeer of Delft. Andrea with all his weakness was in a way greater than that: he had, one can see, finer thoughts, sweeter imaginings, a richer nature than a perfect painter needs; the phrase perfect painter limits him to the use of his brush, and one thinks of him (and not wholly because Browning was a man of genius) always as a human being too. But of Vermeer we know nothing save that he was a materialistic Dutchman who applied paint to canvas with a dexterity and charm that have never been equalled: in short, with perfection. His pictures tell us that he was not imaginative and not unhappy; they do not suggest any particular richness of personality; there is nothing in them or in his life to inspire a poet as Andrea and Lippo Lippi inspired Browning and Romney Tennyson. Vermeer was not like that. But when it comes to perfection in the use of paint, when it comes to the perfect painter—why, here he is. His contemporary Rembrandt of the Rhine is a giant beside him; but ruggedness was part of his strength. His contemporary, Frans Hals of Haarlem, could dip his brush in red and transform the pigment into pulsating blood with one flirt of his wrist, and yet think of his splendid carelessnesses elsewhere. His contemporary, Jan Steen of Leyden, had a way of kindling with a touch an eye so that it danced with vivacity and dances still, after all these years; but what a sloven he could be in his backgrounds! His contemporary Peter de Hooch could flood canvas with the light of the sun, but how weakly drawn are some of his figures! And so one might go on with the other great painters—the Italians and the Spanish and the English and the French; naming one after another, all with more to them as personalities than Vermeer, all doing work of greater import; and all, even Michael Angelo and Leonardo, even Correggio, even Raphael, even Andrea, even Chardin, falling beneath Vermeer in the mere technical mastery of the brush and the palette—no one having with such accuracy and happiness adjusted the means to the desired end. He aimed low, but at his best—in, say, six pictures—he stands as near perfection as is possible.