Vermeer and the Delft School - Carel Fabritius - Pieter de Hooch
National Gallery
Of course, I booked a ticket
for the opening day of ‘Vermeer and the Delft School’.
It was first shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
includes thirteen superlative examples of the paintings Johannes
Vermeer and seventy works by his contemporaries. As soon
as I read about the exhibition, I queued for ages to get
my first day ticket. You cannot image what a great unexpected
emotion it was for me to be in Room No. 7 of the National
Gallery surrounded by only the best of Vermeer. You look
around and the public that pushes you towards the pictures
immediately resolves your indecision and one has no choice
but to surge forward with the mass of people with whom one
shares this emotional moment. You feel completely full of
happiness, it takes your breath away, you experience complete
fullness. As I don't have a family life, I don't have a social
life; as I don't have a love life, I don't have a sex life.
However, I DO HAVE AN INCREDIBLE CULTURAL LIFE, that gives
me all manner of pleasure and happiness and balances my life
quite well.
The problem with Vermeer is that each painting is perfect
and you could easily spend hours in front of only one work;
every Vermeer has similar moments of magic created by the
way the artist brings the effect of light into his mainly
dark interiors.
This is the unmissable exhibition of the century was first
organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 8 to May
27, 2001, New York), where it was seen by more than half
a million art-lovers, (www.metmuseum.org, E-mail education@metmuseum.org). The exhibition is now on at
the National Gallery in London, June 20 to September 16,
(www.nationalgallery.co.uk Email information@ng-london.org.uk). The last Vermeer
exhibition, held in 1996, offered twenty-three of his pictures
hung together for the first time and attracted record crowds
in The Hague, Netherlands. In the middle of this city, only
20 minutes from Delft, home of the school of art with which
Vermeer is associated, there is one of the most beautiful
gallery-rooms in the world, in the Royal Cabinet of Paintings
Mauritshuis, (Koninliijk Kabinet van Schilderijen ‘Mauritshuis’
(E-mail communicatie@mauritshuis.nl). On one side of the
room is a window that overlooks the heart of the city and
on the other three walls hang three wonderful Vermeers (www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/Vermeer_main.html).
One of these is ‘The Girl With the Pearl in Her Ear’,
who turns and looks mysteriously over her shoulder at the
viewer. Another is ‘View of Delft’ (not in the
National Gallery exhibition), painted in 1661. Here, "his
town comes across as a prototype of Heaven, with its inner-harbour
waters ruffled by the merest cat's paws and the sunlight
diffused by high, unthreatening clouds," according to author
Anthony Bailey. (A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now,
by A. Bailey, published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99).
Marcel Proust declared it "the most beautiful picture in
the world" and he left his death-bed for the last time to
see it one last at the Jeu de Paume in 1921, Paris. The third
painting is of ‘The Goddess Diana with her Maidens’,
less know to the world. Mauritshuis also houses works by
Rembrandt, Holbein and Cranach.
Room No. 2 of the National
Gallery exhibition is dedicated to views of the interiors
of two famous Delft churches, the Out Kerk (Old Church) and
the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), both built in the early 15th
century. These Churches can be seen in most painting of the
city. "The masterly perpectival rendering of the interiors
of Delft's churches The Nieuwe Kerk and Oude Kerke by de
Witte, Hendrick Cornelisz van Vliet and Gerard Houckgeest
are as sober and as measured as the churches themselves.
It is difficult to warm to these paintings. Warmth is not
the point: endurance is, and being put in our place by Dod's
laws and human perspective. The light may be cold here, but
it is the same light that falls through Vermeer's windows."
The New Church is a very important Dutch monument, as it
contains the tomb of the national hero, William the Silent.
When you enter the exhibition in the Room No.1, there is
a map of the Dutch Republic in 1648 as it was at that time.
Vermeer was baptised in the New Church and his parents are
buried there, but Vermeer himself is buried in the Old Church.
This delightful city was visited in the 16th century by plague,
famine, and Protestant riots. In the 17th century the whole
city it was blown up by Protestants. One of the painters
whose work can be seen in the Hague exhibition, Carel Fabritius,
died in the explosion.
The view of the placid waters
in ‘The View of Delft’ is no longer. There are
new buildings all around, and the Koornmarkt and the Capels
bridge live on only in memory; the water-gates were torn
down in 1830 and now there is a busy canal-road. However,
even with the apparent hyperrealism of the painting perhaps
the view was never realistic. In fact, many details appear
strange: Vermeer's gates, in accordance with true perspective,
protrude too far; the mild morning sun seems wrong for the
time of day; the bridge is at a slightly dubious angle; the
canals are too quiet in the early summer daylight on the
main route to the river that was a principal commercial artery
of the greatest trading nation on earth at that time. All
of these elements are very mysterious but, at the same time,
magnificent. I don't think a painting has to show exactly
what is there, rather it is how Vermeer the artist, or indeed
any artist, sees his subject.
The fact remains, however,
that Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ enraptured
the world, and is considered the best example of 17th c.
Dutch. It remains a typically Vermeer-ish enigma. Anyway,
some of Vermeer's town has been preserved, for example, the
ancient houses on the beautiful Koornmarkt have been rebuilt
after the catastrophic floods and the war of 1673. Delft
was the centre of Vermeer's existence; he lived here for
all of his 43 years, proving that it does not take wide horizons
to produce genius. The Town Hall, remodelled in 1618, is
where Vermeer published the banns of his marriage to Catharina,
a Catholic; Vermeer was a Protestant Calvinist. Delft society
disapproved of his marriage to a Catholic so he must have
loved her very much to defy them and, indeed, to portray
her in his paintings. Of thirty-five Vermeers, of which only
three can be reasonably dated, at least a dozen are refined,
obsessive studies of the same pretty blonde, modelled perhaps
on Catharina. In some of these paintings, the blonde appears
pregnant. Vermeer had fifteen children, three of whom died
early. He married at the age of 21 and died at the age of
43. There is some doubt in Delft as to the exact location
of his house because many buildings dating from his time
have been demolished. There is however, a white commemorative
plaque on one of the houses, assumed to be where the couple
probably lived with Catharina's mother, the wealthy Maria
Thins, and where the Master Painter executed most of his
famous works, such as ‘The Milkmaid’, ‘The
Music Lesson’, and ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’.
Room No. 2 of the exhibition
is also dedicated to the Architectural Paintings, mainly
the interiors of the New Church. By 1650 a new generation
of painters turned their attention to the existing buildings
of Delft and adopted a different perspective scheme - oblique
angle or two point perspective so you have this magnificent
exhibition room of the most beautiful interiors of churches
- a perspective to die for. Today Delft is more know for
the fields of tulips and daffodils ringed and threaded by
waterways and bridges. For Samuel Pepys, the English traveller
of 1660, this was "the most sweet town".
In Room No. 5, Carel Fabritius
depicts a view of the city using optical effects and pictorial
illusions and, in the middle of the room, there is a wooden
box where you can see the painting inside the box, a view
that give an effect of illusion. In his book Vermeer's
Camera, Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces,
Professor Philip Steadman of University College London, proves
beyond doubt that Vermeer himself used a camera obscura
to trace the scene he later painted. Steadman spent 30 years
pouring over his canvasses. "The painting ‘The Soldier
and the Laughing Girl’ looks as if it is a snapshot
grabbed by a modern camera and this sort of perspective was
very unusual in Vermeer's time, an effect which becomes even
more intriguing when you consider the precision of the maps
in the background. These, I discovered, were real maps which
were copied with quite astounding accuracy. The Victorians
also noticed that the blurring of some of the objects in
his paintings seemed to mimic the out-of-focus areas of photographs",
says Prof. Steadman.
Even Leonardo da Vinci had
toyed with this contraption, which uses lenses and mirrors
to reflect images on to tracing paper inside darkened booths.
X-rays have shown that, unlike most artists before and since,
Vermeer did not bother with under-drawings or sketched outlines
and appears to have painted straight onto the canvas. ‘The
Music Lesson’ (also know as ‘A Lady at the Verginal
with a Gentleman’), depicts a mirror that reflects
the image of a part of the room where the camera obscura
should be seen. Professor Steadman, who revealed his findings
at the Hay-on-Wye Festival, believes this was deliberate.
He says, "You can see the easel and the canvas, even the
foot of the stool where the artist might have sat, but not
Vermeer himself. In putting the tools of his trade at the
precise point where you would expect to see a camera, I suggest,
Vermeer is laying a deliberate false trail." Prof. Steadman
re-constructed the room to prove his point and found that
a camera positioned where the artist's camera obscura
might have been, produced an almost identical picture. It
was a mirror in the so-called ‘Mother-in-law's Front
Room’ series that provided the professor with the clinching
proof. In ‘Allegory of the Faith’, much of the
left foreground is masked with a curtain. Our knowledge of
this technique does not devalue Vermeer's paintings. As Steadman
argues, "It may seem to be a form of cheating, but what he
did was no short-cut by any means. He would have pricked
the outline of what he was doing out with a pin in a piece
of paper and then covered it with ground charcoal so it left
a stain on the canvas.
The website ‘The camera
obscura from Aristotle to Zahn’ (www.cinemedia.net/SFCV-RMIT
Annex/rnaughton/CAMERA_OBSCURA.html) provides a good
description of this device. It consists of a darkened box
or a room with a small hole on one side. When bright light
passes through the hole, the scene outside the box will be
projected inside it, with or without improving additions
such as mirrors, lenses, or ground-glass screens. The image
produced can then be traced onto paper or canvas by anyone
capable of holding a pencil. ( I wonder if I hold
a pencil, will my future be there?). Years ago, Professor
Steadman persuaded the BBC to re-create and film the room
in Vermeer's ‘The Music Lesson’, with the woman
at the virginal played by a static Carol Vorderman. Steadman
also believes that at least a dozen of Vermeer's beast-know
paintings are set in one and the same room. All is set out
as compellingly as any classic closed-room mystery. He says
that Vermeer's camera obscura (Latin for dark room)
was nothing less than a room within a room, a darkened cubicle
large enough for the artist to sit in, apart from the carefully-staged
scene he was painting. Steadman argues that countless artists,
from Caravaggio to Constable to Canaletto, relied on optical
aids. The dramatic change of style of Vermeer's painting
around 1656 almost certainly resulted from the introduction
of this tool, invented in the 16th century and first used
for solar observation.
The captivating National Gallery
exhibition displays two Vermeer’s owned by the Gallery
itself, ‘The Milkmaid’ and ‘The Art of
Painting’. London is also home to ‘The Guitar
Player’, on display in Hampstead's Kenwood House and
‘The Music Lesson", in the Queen’s Collection
at Windsor Castle. (The Queen lent ‘The Music Lesson’
for the 1996 exhibition in The Hague, but not for this one.)
Five paintings in the exhibition are from the USA. ‘The
Mistress and the Maid’ is on loan from the Frick Collection
(N.Y.), and the others are from the National Gallery (Washington
D.C.), and one each from Boston and Princeton, New Jersey.
In France, the Louvre has two Vermeers, ‘The Astronomer’
and ‘The Lacemaker’. In Holland the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam has, among others, ‘The Little Street’,
another Delft cityscape and ‘The Love Letter’.
In The Hague are perhaps the two most famous Vermeers of
all, the extraordinary ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’
and ‘The View of Delft’ at The Mauritshuis.
It is said that Vermeer's paintings
are so few because he was too busy managing an inn and a
picture-framing business. His subjects were modest, small-scale
domestic scenes, capturing everyday 17th century life such
as ‘The Girl With the Red Hat’, a magical painting,
extraordinarily described as looking like "crushed pearls
melting together". He painted quiet interiors featuring very
often just one woman. In Room No.3 we have the Early Vermeer.
The large and robust figures reflect a type of composition
influenced by the Italian painter Caravaggio who was active
in Utrecht. Vermeer's mother-in-law owned some of his works
and they were favoured by the court in The Hague. Willem
van Vliet and Christian van Couwenbergh also adopted Caravaggio's
style. The painting ‘The Procuress’ focuses on
the everyday life of such a woman. Here his style is more
confident than his earlier paintings and includes what is
possibly the only self-portrait of Vermeer. He is looking
directly at us and raising a glittering wine-glass to the
woman, as he grins. There have been doubts whether ‘The
Procuress’ is in fact by Vermeer, something that has
remained a mystery like his use – or not – of
the camera obscura. Vermeer used friends for models,
such as van Leeuwenhoek as ‘The Astronomer’ and
‘The Geographer’. He also used his family and
servants. Tanneke, for example, was the model for ‘The
Milkmaid’ and ‘The Letter Bearer’. Some
paintings focus on a lone woman, whether preparing to weigh
gold on a scale, pausing by a virginal or simply glancing
at us from under a sensuous red hat. His most potent paintings
of all are the domestic interiors that depict everyday rituals.
In the untypically large and elaborate ‘The Art of
Painting’, a young woman dresses up as the Muse of
History with a laurel wreath and trumpet, and a stylishly
long-haired artist begins to paint her. However, Vermeer
denies access to his face, he has a capacity for placing
this woman by lights that transform her surroundings and
this transforms us also.
"Vermeer is strange", was how
Van Gogh, an admirer, described him. Furthermore, his pictures
are, to use the Dutch word, "schoon": clean and beautiful.
His subjects are family, wife, daughters, servants, reading
or writing letters, playing musical instruments, sitting
in front of a mirror as they don a string of pearls, unaffected
by great events. As Bailey says, "in most of his pictures,
which are interiors, the rooms with withdrawn; sunlight enters
from one side, usually the left, and illuminates the young
woman who seem to be in a reverie."
‘Young Women Seated at
a Virginal’, No. 36 in the London exhibition, is a
picture that came to light only 90 years ago. It is possibly
attributed to Vermeer, but one that has divided scholars
for almost a century. For the first time, this painting is
shown alongside his undisputed masterpieces. Some regard
it as the Master’s work but many reject the attribution.
Vermeer fakes are not unknown; Hans van Meergeren painted
three, one of which was bought as genuine by the Nazi, Hermann
Goering. N.36 belongs to a Belgian art dealer, who hopes
to have the work recognised as genuine. I don't feel it resembles
Vermeer's work, in my humble opinion.
Vermeer's painting has been
a great attraction to thieves. Hitler had ‘The Art
of Painting’ pilfered from Vienna, and in 1971 a waiter
stole ‘The Love Letter’ from the Rijksmuseum.
‘The Guitar Player’ was stolen from London's
Kenwood House in 1974 and ‘The Lady Writing a Letter
with Her Maid’ was stolen twice, in 1974 and 1986,
from a private estate near Dublin. ‘The Concert’
was stolen in 1990 is still missing.
In Room No.1, a selection of
early Delftware is also on display. This blue-and-white tin-glazed
earthenware, based on Chinese porcelain and imported into
the Netherlands around 1600, has been produced in Delft since
the 17th century. This city is also very famous for its industry
of luxury goods such as tapestries and precious metal objects.
Vermeer often features blue Delftware as tiling along the
edge of walls, something that can be seen in ‘The Geographer’
and ‘The Milkmaid’. I love this feature and in
the Gallery shop, they are selling paintings as fridge magnets
and other small Delftware items. I intend to buy the collection!
Also included in this wonderful
show are great painters such as Carel Fabritius, a pupil
of Rembrandt, who stayed in Delft only for a few years. Less
than a dozen works can safely now be attributed to him. His
chiaroscuro makes him a great example of the Delft
School. He died at the age of 32 in a bomb explosion. Exhibited
are two self-portraits, his view of the city and his magnificent
little painting of ‘The Goldfinch’ on a perch.
The exhibition also contains
paintings by Pieter de Hooch. Last year The Dulwich Picture
Gallery devoted a first exhibition to Pieter de Hooch. Vermeer,
as the leading light of the Delft School, led to the discovery
of de Hooch, who painted interiors in a similar style, using
a variety of reflected lights showing mothers gurgling to
their children, soldiers flirting, maids cleaning, children
playing, and so on. You can see how gorgeous the predominantly
orange-coloured brickwork is. De Hooch who was born in Rotterdam
in 1629, to a bricklayer father, died in a mental home. He
was always busy but never rich. ‘Two Soldiers and a
Serving Woman with a Trumpeter’, probably executed
in 1654-55, seems curiously disjointed. His fascination with
lights in ‘The Courtyard’ takes us outside, away
from the usual interiors, where a woman clasps a little girl's
hand near an old monastic plaque referring to the virtues
of "patience and meekness". The plaque is still there.
As a final touch to the exhibition,
a real celebration of Vermeer, one can enter the competion
for a give-away dinner at the National Gallery, a two course
meal at Crivelli's restaurant in the Sainsbury Wing. The
question to be answered is ‘What is the name of the
Peter Greenaway/Louis Andriessen opera based on Vermeer's
life?’ Answers on a postcard, please…..
Vermeer is really a sensation
on both sides of the Atlantic. In London the exhibition is
smaller, but we are all fascinated this painter, whom the
19th c. French critic Theophile Thore, who ‘discovered’
the hitherto unknown Dutchman, called ‘The Sphinx of
Delft’, a Sphinx of pure genius, as the world now knows.
Marguerite Youcenar's novel Two Lives and a Dream’
is based on Vermeer. But before her, Marcel Proust's
character Swan and Bergotte are both besotted with Vermeer.
We never find out in ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’
whether Swann finishes his 'essay' on Vermeer, but we follow
Bergotte in his final illness to the exhibition in Paris
where the ‘View of Delft’ is to be seen and dies
after seeing it - as it were, after a view of perfection.
They say "see Naples and die".
As Proust said, he would like to die under a painting by
Vermeer, so I would, "see Vermeer and die".
Verinha Ottoni.
