Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

The other Six Vermeer is that Delft façade which artists adore. The charm of it is not to be communicated by words, or at any rate by words of mine. It is as though Peter de Hooch had known sorrow, and, emerging triumphant and serene, had begun to paint again. And yet that is, of course, not all; for De Hooch, with all his radiant tenderness, had not this man’s native aristocracy of mind, nor could any suffering have given it to him. Like the “View of Delft,” like the “Young Courtesan,” this picture stands alone not only in Vermeer’s record, but in the art of all time. Many grow the flower now—there is a modern Dutch painter, Breitner, whose whole career is an attempt to reproduce the spirit of this façade—but the originator still stands alone and apart, as indeed, by God’s sense of justice, originators are usually permitted to. The sale of twenty-one of Vermeer’s pictures at Amsterdam in 1696 included the “Street in Delft” which the Six family own, and also a view of houses, a smaller work, which fetched forty-eight florins. (That is one of the Vermeers which have disappeared, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, sir.)

The Vermeers at the Ryks were, in 1907, two in number (now made three by the “Milkmaid”); and of these one I do not like, however much I am astounded by its dexterity, and one I could never tire of. The picture that I do not like, “The Love Letter,” shows, with the “New Testament Allegory” at the Hague, the painter in his most dashing mood of virtuosity. Neither has charm, but both have a masterful dexterity that not only leaves one bewildered but kills all the other genre painters in the vicinity. Both were painted, I conjecture, to order, to please some foolish purchaser who frequented the studio. But the other Ryks picture—“The Woman Reading a Letter”—here is the essential Vermeer again in all his delicacy and quietude. It was the first of his best pictures that I ever saw, and I fell under his spell instantly. What I have said of the “Milkmaid” applies also to the “Reader”; she becomes after a while a full length. The picture is only twenty inches by sixteen, but the woman also takes her place in the memory as life-size. It is one of the simplest of all the pictures: comparable with the “Pearl Necklace,” but a little simpler still. The woman’s face has been injured, but it does not matter; you don’t notice it after a moment; her intent expression remains; her gentle contours are unharmed. The jacket she wears is the most beautiful blue in Holland; the map is a yellowish brown; the wall is white. The woman, whose condition is obviously interesting, is, I like to think, the Vrouw Vermeer, possibly the mother of the young girls in the pictures at the Hague, Vienna and Brussels.

The Hague is the most comfortable city that I know in which to see pictures. It is so light and open, the Oude Doelen is so pleasant a hotel, and the pictures to see are so few—just a handful of old masterpieces at the Mauritshuis and just a handful of the romantics at the Mesdag Museum. That is all; no formal galleries, no headaches. Above all there are here the two most beautiful Vermeers that are known—the “Young Girl”—and the “View of Delft.” Writing in another place some years ago I ventured to call the Mauritshuis picture of a girl’s head one of the most beautiful things in Holland. I retract that statement now, and instead say quite calmly that it is the most beautiful thing in Holland. And to me it is in many ways not only the most beautiful thing in Holland, but the most satisfying and exquisite product of brush and colour that I have anywhere seen. The painting of the lower lip is as much a miracle to me as the flower of the cow-parsley or the wing of a Small Heath. I said that the “Pearl Necklace” was steeped in white magic. There is magic here too. You are in the presence of the unaccountable. Paint—a recognized medium—has exceeded its power. The line of the right cheek is surely the sweetest line ever traced. I don’t expect you to come a stranger to this face and feel what I feel; but I ask you to look at it quietly and steadily for a little while, in its uncoloured photographic presentment, until it smiles back at you again—as surely it will. Yes, even in the photogravure reproduction that stands as frontispiece to this book lurk the ghosts of these smiles.

Who was this child, one wonders. One of the painter’s, I think. One of the eight, whom it amused him to dress in this Oriental garb that he might play with the cool harmonies of yellow, green and blue, and the youthful Dutch complexion. If this is so, it is one of his latest pictures, for all his many children were under age when he died. It is probable that the child in the Duke of Arenberg’s picture at Brussels, in the same costume, was a sister. There is certainly a family likeness between the two, and if, as one may reasonably suppose, Vermeer’s wife was his model for certain of the other pictures, we may easily believe that both were her daughters, for they have her candid forehead, her placidity.

Think of what has been happening in the world during the years since this sweet face was set upon canvas—the evolutions and tragedies, the lives lived and ended, the whole passionate fretted progress of the nations! “Monna Lisa” has smiled a century and more longer, and she has been looked upon every day for centuries: this child, not a whit less wonderful as a conquest of man over pigment, smiled unseen; for when she was bought at a Hague auction a few years ago by Herr Des Tombes for two florins thirty cents she was covered with grime. Think of it—two florins thirty cents—and if she found her way to Christie’s to-day I don’t suppose that £50,000 would buy her. I know that I personally would willingly live in a garret if she were on its wall. But leaving aside the human interest of the picture, did you ever see, even in a reproduction, such ease as there is in this painting, such concealment of effort? It was no small thing at that day for a Dutchman to lay his colours like this, so broadly and lucidly. It is as though the paints evoked life rather than counterfeited it; as though the child was waiting there behind the canvas to emerge at the touch of the brushwand.

And the “View of Delft”—what is one to say of that? Here again perfection is the only word. And more than perfection, for perfection is cold. This picture is warm. Its serenity is absolute; its charm is complete. You stand before it satisfied—except for that heightened emotion, that choking feeling and smarting eyes, which perfection compels. The picture is still the last word in the painting of a town. Not all the efforts of artists since have improved upon it; not one has done anything so beautiful. It is indeed because he painted these two pictures that I have for Jan Vermeer of Delft such a feeling of gratitude and enthusiasm. Wonderful as are many of his other pictures that I have described, they would not alone have subjected me to so much travelling in continental trains by day and night. But to see this head of a young girl and this view of Delft I would go anywhere.

To the “New Testament Allegory” I have referred above: it does not give me pleasure except in its tapestry curtain. That detail is, I suppose, among the wonders of painting. The other Mauritshuis Vermeer is the “Diana and Her Nymphs”—that gentle Italianate group of fair women, the painting of which Andrea himself might have overlooked. It is at once Vermeer and not Vermeer. It is very rich, very satisfying; but I for one should feel no sense of bereavement if another name were put to it. As a matter of fact Nicholas Maes was long held to have been its author. A fifth Vermeer the Mauritshuis chanced to possess when I was there, for Herr Bredius had recently discovered in a Brussels collection a very curious example from the magic hand—a tiny picture of a girl with a flute, in a Chinese hat (or something very like it), with an elaborate background: not a very attractive work, but Vermeer through and through, and so modern and innovating that were it hung in a Paris or London exhibition to-day it would look out of place only by reason of its power. The picture is seven and a half inches by six and three quarters, and now belongs to Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

After Delft, where we roamed awhile to reconstruct Vermeer’s environment, but where, I regret to say, little is known of him, Brussels. For Vermeer there, one must, as in Vienna, visit the home of a nobleman—the Duke of Arenberg—and here again one falls into the hands of a discreet and hospitable butler. The d’Arenberg mansion is in the Rue de la Régence, just under the crest of the fashionable hill. It is open to the picture lover, like that of Count Czernin, only on certain days. The gallery is small and chiefly Dutch, with a few good pictures in it. The Vermeer is isolated on an easel—the most unmistakable perhaps of all, although so cruelly treated by time, for it is a mass of cracks. Yet through these wounds the beautiful living light of a young girl’s face shines—not the girl we have seen at the Hague, but one very like her—her sister, as I conjecture—dressed in the same Eastern trappings, a girl with a strangely blank forehead and eyes widely divided, akin to the type of Madonna dear to Andrea del Sarto. The same girl I think sat for the “Player of the Clavichord” in our National Gallery, to which we soon come. She is a little sad, and a little strange, this child, and only a master could have created her. At Brussels also is one of Vermeer’s “Geographers,” in the collection of the Vicomte du Bus de Gisegnies; but this I did not then know. And in the Picture Gallery is the conjectural portrait of the young man of which I have written above.

After Brussels, Paris—a good exchange. Paris has one Vermeer in a private collection—Alphonse de Rothschild’s—an astronomer, which I have not seen, and one in the Louvre—the beautiful “Dentellière”—before which I have stood scores of times. This too is very small, only a few inches square, but the serene busy head is painted as largely as if it were in a fresco. The lighting is from the right instead of the left—a very rare experiment with Vermeer.

It is greatly to be regretted that our National Vermeers are not better, because to many readers of this essay they must necessarily be the only pictures from his hand that they can study at all times; and my ecstasies will appear to be foolish. The lady standing at a spinet is a marvel of technique; the paint is applied with all Vermeer’s charm of touch; the room is filled with the light of day; there are marvellous details, such as the brass-headed nails of the chair, and the little spot of colour on the head is fascinating; moreover there is an agreeably ingenious scheme of blue, beginning with the gay sky of the landscape on the wall, passing through the delicate tippet of the lady and ending on a soberer note with the covering of the chair. But it is not a picture of which I am fond; it is a tour de force; and I think I positively hate the ugly Cupid on the wall, which would be a blot on any man’s work, most of all on Vermeer’s. One feels that he must have painted this to please the husband of the sitter, who insisted on his pictures being immortalized. Vermeer, left to himself, would have painted a map. The other—the seated girl at the piano—lacks the painter’s highest radiance. It is the same girl that we saw in the Brussels picture.