Where the Light Falls, by Clare Bucknell

Discussed in this essay:

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton.
416 pages. $45.

There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French diplomat named Balthasar de Monconys traveled to the Netherlands. More than once, he visited the city of Delft. On his final visit, he noted in his diary, he made Vermeer’s acquaintance. He asked to see some of the artist’s work; Vermeer had none to show, he said, but he directed Monconys to the house of a baker who had bought one of his pictures. Monconys was astounded by the amount the baker had paid—six hundred livres! “I myself would have thought six pistoles [a tenth of that sum] too high a price.”

Those are the details. The question is what they mean. Some scholars claim that this well-traveled Frenchman’s interest in the painter must indicate that Vermeer was known to contemporary connoisseurs. Others argue that Monconys had no idea who Vermeer was and encountered him by chance, while on secret Jesuit business in the neighborhood. Then there is the fact that Vermeer couldn’t—or wouldn’t?—show him any of his paintings. Was he hiding them? Were they all at the house of his principal patron? If so, why not send Monconys there, rather than to a baker who owned a single work? And what about that enormous price of six hundred livres, three times the sum fetched by the most expensive of the artist’s pictures at auction thirty years later? Might the baker have been engaged in a quiet bit of price inflation on his behalf?

“It is a fairly negative fragment—‘no works to be seen’—but that is what we come to expect,” Anthony Bailey noted in his biography twenty-five years ago. It is the story of Vermeer in general, who must be the most famous artist known to us only through crumbs and scraps. Fewer than forty contemporaneous documents referring to Vermeer have been discovered across various archives, which scholars have used to sketch out the thin shape of a life.

This is how it goes. Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632. His family was not wealthy. His father had trained as a textile manufacturer, but by the time Johannes was born, he was an innkeeper with an art-dealing business on the side. His mother, who came from a somewhat shady family (her father had been part of a coin-forging group whose ringleaders were arrested and beheaded), helped run the inn; his sister was twelve years older. In 1653, Vermeer married Catharina Bolnes, the daughter of Reynier Bolnes, a brickmaker, and Maria Thins, a wealthy Catholic heiress who owned a large house in an area of town known as Papists’ Corner. The same year, he enrolled as a master painter in the Delft artists’ guild. The modest number of his pictures that survive—thirty-seven, if you include two contested attributions—suggests that he worked slowly, completing on average two or three per year.

Vermeer and Catharina both came from small families, but they seem to have wanted a very big one; they had fifteen children, eleven of whom survived infancy. By 1660, the family had moved into Maria Thins’s house. Vermeer painted, carried on his father’s art-dealing business, and served in the city’s militia. Toward the end of the decade, his production began to slow and then dried up altogether. In 1675, he died suddenly at the age of forty-three, of unknown causes.

Over the years, biographers and art historians have circled the same questions. Did he serve a formal apprenticeship and if so, with whom? Could it have been with the talented Carel Fabritius in Delft? Or might he have gone to a master in Utrecht, with its strong Caravaggesque tradition? Or directly to the source, Rome? If there was no money to send him anywhere (the inn that his father had purchased in 1641 was mortgaged to the hilt), is it plausible that he taught himself or had casual lessons with a local painter in exchange for beer or board? What were his religious affiliations? Maria Thins likely wasn’t thrilled to have a Protestant for a son-in-law, but we can’t be sure whether he had to convert to Catholicism to be accepted into the family, or how committed he was to his new faith if he did.

Then there is the question of money. Scholars largely agree that one wealthy Delft couple, the brewing heir Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and his wife, Maria de Knuijt, were his primary patrons. An inventory made of their daughter’s possessions in 1683 suggests that they must have owned the great majority of the pictures that Vermeer produced from the late 1650s onward, and that they may have had a long-term arrangement with him, likely beginning with the loan—perhaps an advance—that they gave him in 1657. But no contract has been discovered, so this remains an educated guess. If they did strike a deal, we don’t know how formal or exclusive it was (was Vermeer obliged to offer them right of first refusal?), or how much creative control they had over what he produced.

You can see the effects of this absence of information filter into the ways that scholars discuss the pictures. Some seize on context (what is known or knowable, facts external to Vermeer) as a means of shrinking the blank space surrounding his work. What can we infer about him from the state of the Dutch art market in the 1660s, say, or from the pictorial conventions of rival genre painters? Others prefer formalist, historically unmoored interpretations that often involve a vocabulary of unknowability, or indescribability, even at their most descriptive: Vermeer’s work is ambiguous, self-sufficient, intractable, ineffable. That we have almost no idea of what he thought about the world is read back into his art. Sometimes he is said to be curiously detached from his subject matter: given neither to implying nor possessing an attitude toward it. “Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting,” Lawrence Gowing wrote in a classic study.

It seems as if he was of a god-like detachment . . . more immune from the infection of his time than any painter before or since. Or else he was of a naïvety beyond belief, all eye and nothing else.

It’s possible that we have grown too comfortable with the idea of an unknowable Vermeer. In Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found—recently hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as “the best biography of Vermeer . . . that has ever been published”—the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon tells us that a lot more can be surmised than is usually thought. Vermeer, he believes, was an ideological artist, a committed one; he was “driven by something, by some deep feeling or belief,” the origins of which lay in the recent past. In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Catholic dynasty that ruled the Netherlands, sent in an army to crush a series of Calvinist uprisings. One consequence of the ensuing wars was the emergence of a new, anti-sectarian, pacifist element in Dutch religious life. The Remonstrants, who established their movement in the 1610s, advocated tolerance, freedom of conscience, and an end to Christian conflict, breaking with the hardline beliefs of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church. In 1619, the Calvinists outlawed their practices, driving adherents underground or into exile.

By 1632, the year of Vermeer’s birth, the Remonstrants had been allowed to return to the country. Six years later, an ostensibly secret but broadly tolerated Remonstrant church was established in Delft. Van Ruijven, Vermeer’s likely patron, was a well-known member of the local Remonstrant community; Maria de Knuijt, his wife, belonged to the orthodox Calvinist Church but must have been liberal in her views to marry him. A new archival finding reveals that the house that they owned during the 1660s and early 1670s stood directly in front of the secret church, with the alleyway that served as its access point running alongside their property. Vermeer’s family may have had Remonstrant leanings, too. His father, Graham-Dixon notes, had a connection to a Remonstrant preacher who signed his marriage affidavit in 1615. Any patronage deal that Vermeer later entered into with the van Ruijvens would have constrained his production and the profits he could have made. A shared religious commitment would help explain why he signed up to it.

But what if it was Maria de Knuijt, rather than her husband, who was the prime mover in their arrangement? Much has been made of the unusual bequest of five hundred guilders that the van Ruijvens made to Vermeer in 1665, which was stipulated in her personal will, not in the joint one she signed with her husband. Maria grew up in Delft’s Market Square, a few doors down from the inn that the Vermeer family owned. The two families may have known each other, perhaps been part of the same religious community, long before Maria married van Ruijven and the couple began acquiring art. If it was she who commissioned Vermeer to produce works for her house by the hidden church, might their subjects have been connected to her faith?

In the 1650s, theological discussion groups for women began to appear across the northern Netherlands. Some of these were Collegiant groups, a radical outgrowth of the Remonstrant movement that rejected preacher-led worship and encouraged believers of all denominations to meet in one another’s homes and study the New Testament. There are no records of Collegiant gatherings in Delft, and certainly nothing to suggest that Maria was part of one. But, Graham-Dixon asks, what if she had been? What if she “founded a prayer group of like-minded women” around the time that Vermeer is thought to have started painting for her? Could his pictures have been “tailored” to the purpose, to provide subjects for contemplation for the “pious women” who “gathered in [her] house”? If so, he claims, they would have formed a “cycle” of devotional works of “the same order of achievement as Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, or Michelangelo’s paintings for the Sistine Chapel”: a monumental, single-minded project.

It can be hard to keep track of which parts of this story have a basis in fact. Most do not. It’s worth recalling once more that we can’t be certain that the van Ruijvens, or Maria in particular, had a formal arrangement with Vermeer. There is no hard evidence that Maria was either a Remonstrant or a Collegiant. The same goes for Vermeer. (At its peak, the Collegiant movement is believed to have had only four thousand adherents, so it’s unlikely that either belonged to the sect.) Vermeer’s sole apparent connection to a Collegiant during his lifetime was to the Rotterdam statesman and East India Company director Adrian Paets, a key figure in the Collegiant movement who seems to have owned and perhaps commissioned two of his late pictures. We don’t know that Vermeer wasn’t a practicing Catholic, swayed by his wife or mother-in-law. The van Ruijvens, who owned more than one property, may not have even occupied the house by the Remonstrant church until 1665, almost a decade after Maria’s arrangement with Vermeer is supposed to have begun.

So little can be stated with certainty that Graham-Dixon has to rely on circular arguments. After 1657, he writes, Maria “would commission so many more pictures from Vermeer that it is hard to believe she did not intend them for an audience larger than her own small family.” What to infer from this but that she did intend them for such an audience, her “Collegiant group”? Hypotheses rest on “facts” that shortly before were hypotheses themselves. Since Paets appears to have owned two Vermeers, Graham-Dixon reasons, he must have gone to view the artist’s pictures before buying them, “and the only place where anyone could see Vermeer’s work in any depth was the house next to the Remonstrant church.” From this,

it seems all but certain that Paets was on friendly terms with Maria de Knuijt and Pieter Claesz van Ruijven. . . . He was therefore among the few who knew about Maria’s Collegiant meetings.

Speculation is one thing—all the best work on Vermeer does a bit of it—but speculation dressed up as historical truth is another.

Vermeer began his career as a history painter, producing ambitious mythological and religious compositions. Then, around 1657, he switched to genre painting, the realistic depiction of scenes from contemporary life. There are various reasons why he might have changed tack. Perhaps he was influenced by the arrival in Delft of the genre specialists Pieter de Hooch and Jan Steen earlier in the 1650s; perhaps he felt, as other local artists did, that it was a bad time to be a history painter, given that grand, large-scale works had chiefly been purchased by the court in The Hague and, since the death of Willem II, the prince of Orange, in 1650, there had been no real court to speak of. The Calvinists weren’t exactly keen on iconography, so church patronage was on the wane, too.

What buyers of the period did want was pictures of figures in domestic interiors: recognizable people doing recognizable things, at leisure or at work, surrounded by traces of their lives—babies, animals, furniture, pots and pans, musical instruments, pieces of fabric, jewelry. “Seventeenth-century artists must, indeed, have had an irrepressible need to grasp things,” the cultural historian Johan Huizinga has observed. “Nothing in their environment was too slight to be noticed.” Like his contemporary Gerard ter Borch, the master painter of fabrics so resplendent they seem to crackle, Vermeer was pleased by “slight” things: the way a satin ribbon holds the shape of a previous fold; the cleft in a lower lip; a sleeve puckering under a pinafore. His attention to coiffure, Anthony Bailey points out, was exceptional. He could do it all: hair “pulled straight back from the forehead, held in place with bows, tied in a bun or braided in a chignon,” hair in ringlets, turbans, scarves.

Just because someone is interested in ribbons doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in God. Vermeer’s pictures are often observed to harbor spiritual meanings as well as material ones, flickering back and forth between the two. In Woman with a Balance, the delicate set of scales that the subject suspends between her finger and thumb is symbolic as well as literal: they take the measure of earthly goods and spiritual ones, setting one kind of value in the context of another. But the picture’s theological implications, as the Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke has pointed out, do nothing to stop us noticing that the woman is beautiful, or that, in general, “Vermeer’s women are never faulted for their love of things.” He infused objects with so much light that they appear almost immaterial anyway.

Graham-Dixon doesn’t like this sort of multivalence. In his view, Vermeer was Maria de Knuijt’s devotional artist, the painter she paid because he shared her beliefs; everything he made for her must have been unequivocally pious. “She has renounced her jewellery, taken it off and placed it on the table,” he writes of the Woman with a Balance. (Why might she not be about to put it on?) “All will go to charity.” (It looks rather too nice for that.) “Having resisted temptation, her soul remains spotless. . . . She has put her conscience in the scales.” The woman can be two things at once—pious Dutch housewife and symbol of the contemplative Christian life—but they have to point in the same direction. The purely material is a distraction, a red herring. When, Graham-Dixon argues, we persist in looking at Vermeer’s objects rather than through them or past them, we are being hoodwinked by an old assumption: that Dutch art “reflected the materialistic attitudes of the mercantile society in which it was produced.” Vermeer, he thinks, started out painting religious subjects and effectively “never stopped.” The only thing that changed when he switched to domestic scenes around 1657 was the degree of overtness:

The distinction that needs to be made is that his early works are religious pictures that look like religious pictures, whereas his later works are religious pictures that do not.

It’s a strange, conspiratorial thought, that an artist might want to confuse us this much—might give his works “the appearance of other, more secular types of painting” while all along hiding “deeper meanings within like secrets.” As an interpretation, it strikes at the heart not only of what the pictures are about, but, more radically, “what kind of pictures they are”—what we should expect from them and how we are supposed to value them. Graham-Dixon tells us that Vermeer had little or no interest in “pure genre,” anecdotal representations of work or play or romance. His finest works, the “classic Vermeers,” are those that “superficially resemble” depictions of ordinary human actions and relations (such things being, implicitly, superficial themselves), but are really about something else.

A Maid Asleep, for example: the flushed woman at the table, her head propped on her hand and an almost-empty wine glass in front of her, isn’t drunk, nor has the picture anything to do with a love affair, as is often supposed. “With an open heart the woman has been praying and reflecting, perhaps repenting,” Graham-Dixon writes. “We are to understand that she has been visited”: not, as you might think, by a man, given the carelessly rucked-up tablecloth, the discarded cutlery, the rummer glass dumped on its side, but by God. “Something out of the ordinary, something uncanny, is taking place in the silence of this room. . . . Has the spirit of the Lord dwelt with her and held communion with her?” Or A Lady Writing: she is shown bristling with hair ribbons, meeting your eye with frankness and a touch of coquetry, and attending fashionably to her correspondence. But this is a disguise. She is really a “domesticated version” of St. Jerome or St. Matthew, working away at something devotional, “a sibyl for the Collegiant movement.”

What all this obscures is the element of sexual desire. The “force of erotic circumstance,” in Gowing’s phrase, was a side of genre painting to which Vermeer returned again and again, refining it “into subtler and more elusive forms.” Take The Music Lesson, a study of a young woman playing the virginal, closely watched by a gentleman, which Graham-Dixon reads as a depiction of Collegiants chastely performing and singing psalms. The playing of music in seventeenth-century genre paintings often suggests sensuality and pleasure of an easy, familiar kind. But to my eye, this picture’s major quality is tension. There is tension in the orthogonal lines of the window frames and wall on the left; tension in the sharply accelerated perspective (you have the sensation that the background, where the woman and man stand, is rushing at you very fast); tension in the sharp contours and contrasts of the tiled floor; tension in the battery of objects—table, tapestry, chair, viola da gamba, salver, jug—that obstructs our view of the human interaction; tension in the curl of the man’s fingers around the top of his cane; tension in the back of the woman’s neck and in her shoulders. Their relationship is private—we are privy to the woman’s gaze only indirectly, by means of the angled mirror above her (another source of tension in the picture)—but it also seems inscrutable even to them, or still in the process of being worked out. There is a sense, as there often is in Vermeer, that they are in a before-moment: something is about to happen.

To Graham-Dixon, the measure of a good Vermeer is whether it was painted for the van Ruijvens. The figure in A Lady Writing, he writes, “might easily be mistaken for an ‘urbane elegant modern’ sort of person, someone who loves dressing up and composing flirtatious letters.” (Imagine.) “But Vermeer is not that type of artist, and it is not that type of picture.” The corollary is that paintings that don’t seem to have been purchased by the couple must be empty and flat, without the vein of spirituality that would bring them to life. The Glass of Wine and Young Woman with a Wine Glass are, to Graham-Dixon, “uncharacteristically obvious” works: “They look like genre pictures . . . and so they are.” (This rests on the assumption that Young Woman with a Wine Glass was not part of the van Ruijven collection; other scholars think that it probably was. It’s also not clear why the white porcelain wine jug that appears in many Vermeers is an instrument of seduction here, while in A Maid Asleep and The Music Lesson it must refer to holy communion.) And so it goes on. Woman with a Lute is “awkwardly composed”; The Love Letter is “straightforward”; A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid is a “stale picture”; Young Woman Seated at a Virginal is “a sad thing.” The thinness of aesthetic attention is remarkable.

It seems an odd choice to write a book about a painter whose work you only partially admire. Artists’ oeuvres show what they did produce, not what we would have liked them to, and Vermeer’s, as much as anyone’s, indicates how embedded in the circumstances of his time and place he was, which was a time and place that valued domestic storytelling. Graham-Dixon wants him to have disdained genre work, to have done it on sufferance, or as a pretext that allowed him to paint what really absorbed him. (You can see in this a flash of the early modern idea, older than Vermeer, that anecdotal subjects are second-rate and everyone would be a history painter if they could.) But why should he have been somehow “above” it when his brilliant forebears and contemporaries—Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maes, Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, and Gabriël Metsu, whose motifs and compositions and perspectival arrangements he seems to have admired and learned from—weren’t?

Buyers of his kind of work, those who wanted elegant, leisured scenes from upper-middle-class life, certainly weren’t either. They sought out fine genre paintings because they saw themselves sympathetically reflected in them. The van Ruijvens purchased Vermeer’s earliest genre pieces, then kept on buying them: Why assume that genre was specifically what they didn’t want? Here we might recall (as the book doesn’t) that, in 1669, Pieter van Ruijven spent sixteen thousand guilders on a parcel of land, the domain of Spalant, which came with the title Lord of Spalant. He used it in official documents and passed it down in his will. Remonstrants were as attracted to wealth and status as anyone.

This is not Graham-Dixon’s story. He has clear-cut heroes and villains. In one corner, there are his goodies: Vermeer, the van Ruijvens, Paets, the Remonstrants, the Collegiants—the far-sighted dreamers, he argues, of “a world in which men and women would be treated as equals,” the “chosen few who built the values on which a tolerant and liberal civilization, our own even, might be based.” (You might fairly wonder where he has been living.) Then enter his baddies: the Catholics of Papists’ Corner, Delft’s very own “nest of Jesuits,” with Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins, at its helm. You are never allowed to forget that Maria was extremely rich. Anything she did for Vermeer that could be construed as generous—allowing him and his enormous family to move into her house, hanging portraits of his parents alongside ones of her family, giving him a lavish funeral—becomes evidence of mean-spiritedness or an obsession with appearances. (On the portraits: “Ten members of her dynasty to two of his: a crushing scoreline.”) She is forever putting “the squeeze on [Vermeer’s] allowance,” keeping him on a “tight leash financially.” (Never mind that she kept him going in the first place.) A petition that she filed with Catharina after his death to recoup a debt must indicate deceitfulness, or at least shameless greed. On the subject of his death: Might she, now you think about it, have caused it? “Might she have discovered his double-dealing sometime just before Christmas and given him such a hard time that he had a seizure?” Well, why not.

It’s not that biographers shouldn’t adjudicate. Character has to be strung together from actions; the accent has to fall somewhere. But Vermeer was an artist who painted over the too-obvious markers of story in early drafts of his pictures. In A Maid Asleep, a man in a floppy hat and a dog have vanished from the back room; the Woman with a Pearl Necklace no longer has a map on the wall. His style, as Gowing pointed out, tends to frustrate the novelistic way of reading that we usually apply to genre pieces: look where the light falls; find the sharply delineated detail, the “telling human particular”; figure out what it might signify; flesh out the story from there. In this, his art is rather like his life, which seems underserved by being treated as parable or fairy tale. In his weirdest picture—the late, baroque, campy Allegory of Faith—a bug-eyed female figure is shown clutching her chest, one foot balanced perilously on a globe, while a snake gushing blood from its jaws gyrates in the foreground. She looks “tyrannized by a profusion of emblems,” Graham-Dixon observes. You can imagine Vermeer sympathizing.