Johannes Vermeer

“ 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. ”

“ I have very little use for; but the man who says of a poor thing, “A fine thing and my own,” him I admire cordially, and could almost embrace.
But about this Vermeer. I cannot get it out of my head, for Vermeer is a painter of whom, as you know, I have made some study, and the thought of any one really sitting down excitedly with this grotesquely misattributed picture in his room, reading the lying label without a qualm, even with pride, scanning the commonplace paint with no twinge of dubiety—it is this thought which beats48 me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The artist is at work on the head of a demure damsel whom he has posed near the window, with the light falling upon her, of course from the left. The little mousy thing has a wreath of leaves in her hair and a large book held to her breast; in her right hand is a long musical instrument. On the wall is the most fascinating of the many maps that the artist painted—with twenty little views of Dutch towns in the border. Vermeer was the first to see the decorative possibilities that lie in16 cartography; and he was also, one conjectures, a geographer by inclination. ”

“ Those I take to be the artist’s four finest pictures. But it is well in his first dozen, and it is vastly better than either of those in the National Gallery.
The new picture represents a woman: one of those placid domestic creatures to whom Vermeer’s brush lent a radiance only a gleam of which many a Madonna of the Southern masters would have envied. How little can they have thought, these Delft housewives and maidens, that they were destined for such an immortality! ”

“ 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 such11 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. ”

“ In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually creates. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nevertheless, to extol it as a masterpiece—it is set forth as such in the catalogue—by Vermeer, is quite unjustifiable when one remembers the picture in Mrs. Joseph’s possession, the two in the Six Collection at Amsterdam, or those in the Rycks Museum, the Louvre, and at Dresden and Berlin. There are weaknesses, as witness the flat painting of the arms, and the diffusion of light is not grasped with his wonted skill. It lacks just that which delights one most in the master’s work. ”

“ The man who confidently had the legend printed on the frame must indeed have been a simpleton beyond appraisement—the very briniest salt of the soil. For consider: the copyists, the forgers, may do credible things with Corot, even with Raphael. Every day they are writing David Cox’s signature on old water-colours; false ascriptions are the life-blood of too many firms. That is true. But Vermeer—there is only one Vermeer! ”

“ The Bellevue is on the bank of the river and close to the Picture Gallery, into which one could therefore drop again and again at off hours. The famous Raphael is of course Dresden’s lodestar, and next come the Correggios, and there is a triptych by Jan Van Eyck and a man in armour by Van Dyck; but it is Vermeer of whom we are talking, and the range of Vermeer cannot be understood at all unless one sees him in the capital of Saxony. For it is here that his “Young Courtesan” (chastely softened by the modest Baedeker into “The Young Connoisseur”) is found. ”

“ Unknown to the outside world, several more Vermeers were “discovered” during the war years. All were of religious subjects. One was bought at a fantastic price by Van Beuningen, the great private collector of Rotterdam; another by the Nazi-controlled Dutch Government for an exorbitant sum; and a third by Hermann Göring. Though the Reichsmarschall did not pay cash for his Vermeer, the price was high; he traded one hundred and thirty-seven pictures from his collection. According to Hofer, his adviser and agent, the paintings he gave in exchange were all of high quality. ”

“ No sooner do we think that we have caught the intention of this pure artist than he changes his formula; and, when we penetrate this, he comes up with a work so directly opposed to the last that we are constrained forthwith to change our second conception for a third. Vermeer of Delft was called the sphinx of our seventeenth-century painting. ”

“ In the foreground is a little arbour with some young people in it holding a musical party. The most prominent figure is a girl crowned with flowers: and this girl is sheer Vermeer in attitude, in charm, and in technique. The work is, I should guess, juvenile and experimental, but it has many attractions and is of the deepest interest as the thirty-ninth opus on the side of certainty.
Vermeer’s practically unquestionable output thus totals thirty-nine pictures. Think of the smallness of the harvest. ”

“ Behind is an old woman curious as to the result, and beside her is another roysterer, whose face might easily be that unseen one of the artist in the Czernin picture, and who is wearing a similar cap and slashed sleeves. The party stands on a balcony, over the railing of which has been flung one of the heavy tapestries on which our painter loved to spend his genius. The picture is remarkable as being a new thing in Vermeer’s career, and indeed a new thing in Dutch art ”

“ I have the highest admiration for the vivacious and veracious work of these two other men—possibly associates of Vermeer. Their surfaces are impeccably rendered. The woman playing a bass viol in the Berlin gallery and a certain interior in the National Gallery display the art of representation raised to the highest pitch; realism can go no further.
The psychology of a painter's household is revealed in the Count Czernin example (l'Atelier du Peintre) . An artist sits with his back to us and on his canvas he broiders the image of his good wife. ”

“ 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 because13 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. ”

“ For the picture is still a study of tone, in which it differs from the Head of a Girl. For the latter is represented in a clearly diffused light, which is brightest around the head, and illumines in a subtle way the tender flesh-tints of the face, the bluish-white linen head-dress, and the bright full blue of a portion of the gown. The face wears a charming expression of concentration. This picture, indeed, very decidedly forecasts Vermeer’s developed individuality, yet Bode places it among his earlier pieces, about 1656. ”

“ The portrait of an old man, by Rembrandt, is beginning to fade, but that of an old woman is a superior Rembrandt. Of Frans Hals there are two fine specimens; one, a portrait of Willem van Heythusen, is a small picture, the figure sitting, the legs crossed (booted and spurred) and the figure leaning lazily back. On his head a black felt hat with a broad upturned brim. The expression of the bearded man is serious. The only Jan Vermeer is one of the best portraits by that singularly gifted painter we recall. It is called The Man with the Hat. ”

“ 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,14 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. ”

“ But this letter says that the 43 Dutch government wants us to come to Holland as their guests as a reward for finding those paintings.”
These two paintings “The Lacemaker” and “The Smiling Girl” were thought to have been by Vermeer. A series of tests, including some of those described in this booklet, showed that the paintings are fairly old. However, some of the materials used are not typical of Vermeer, and the pictures are now thought to have been painted by a follower of the artist. ”

“ 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 Her29 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. ”

“ Then there are three or four portraits, surrounded by atmosphere, and brilliant in lighting. Lastly there are a few canvases very different from any of these others, painted with a broad brush on a larger scale and with great fluency. This seems to be the style towards which Vermeer was changing when he died. Five of this artist’s pictures were shown at the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. The one in the Altman Collection has suffered seriously through cleaning and restoration, and is not so fine as the subject of this gravure. ”

“ We get from such a book as this not only an interpretation of a particular artist’s art, but also of the art of painting in general. Writing about Vermeer in The Outlook some years ago, Mr. E. V. Lucas called him ‘the rarest and most fastidious of masters.’ After reading Mr. Hale’s book one feels anew the justice of that statement."—Outlook.
“The most elaborate stylistic analysis ever applied to any artist."—Nation.
Large 8vo. With reproductions in color, in photogravure and in half-tone of all of Vermeer’s known works, together with examples of the work of some of his contemporaries. ”

“ But now, at a cost of 500,000 florins at twelve to the pound (or at nearly £155 a square inch) it has passed to the Ryks. The price sounds beyond reason; but it is not. Granted that a kind and portly Dutchwoman at work in her kitchen is a subject for a painter, here it is done with such mastery, sympathy, and beauty as not only to hold one spellbound but to be beyond appraisement. No sum is too much for the possession of this unique work—unique not only in Vermeer’s career (so far as we know) , but in all painting. ”

“ 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,30 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. ”