Life Made Light

One of my favorite artists, as I have mentioned before, is Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch artist best-known for his work "Girl with a Pearl Earring."

In an uncanny anticipation of his subsequent reception history, Johannes Vermeer made one of his first appearances in the printed record in the guise of a phoenix, the mythical bird that regenerates itself from its own ashes. The context was a poem by the printer Arnold Bon, published in 1667 to commemorate the premature death of the painter Carel Fabritius in the explosion of Delft’s gunpowder arsenal 13 years earlier, and Bon concluded his lament by reassuring his fellow citizens that a worthy successor had nonetheless miraculously emerged to take Fabritius’s place. Despite this evidence of the esteem in which Vermeer was held at the time, his name largely vanished from accounts of Dutch painting in the centuries that followed, only to reappear - phoenix-like -when the French journalist and art critic Théophile Thoré devoted a three-part article to this “unknown of genius,” as he had earlier dubbed him, in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1866.

Vermeer’s virtual disappearance from the record is usually explained by the small size of his corpus - modern scholars estimate that the entire oeuvre consisted of some 45 to 50 works, as compared to more than 350 currently attributed to his great compatriot Rembrandt - and by the fact that a significant number of his paintings were swallowed up in a single private collection during his lifetime. If the art historian Ben Broos is right to speculate that the influential chronicler of Dutch painting Arnold Houbraken managed to skip the crucial lines about the newly risen phoenix because they appear on a separate page from the rest of the poem, then an accident of printing may also have helped consign the artist to oblivion. (Houbraken’s The Great Theater of Dutch Painters first appeared in 1718, and the commentators who followed mostly took their cues from him.)

The result was that when an occasional Vermeer did circulate, it was often attributed to someone else, and even admirers of his paintings did not know whose art had actually captivated them. "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window" (circa 1657–1658) - recently restored by the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and the centerpiece of its Vermeer exhibition less than two years ago - was purchased in 1742 for the elector of Saxony as a Rembrandt; two decades later "Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman", better known as "The Music Lesson" (circa 1662–1664), entered the Royal Collection at Windsor as a Frans van Mieris. When The Art of Painting (circa 1666–1668) changed hands at the beginning of the 19th century, it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch - an error that persisted until Vermeer’s signature was deciphered and De Hooch’s identified as a forgery in the 1860s.

Thoré called his discovery “Van der Meer de Delft” in order to distinguish him from the bewildering array of other Van der Meers and Vermeers who wielded a brush in the 17th century Netherlands, but such discriminations have long outlived their usefulness. Though much still remains unknown about the artist and the man alike, there is no question about the spell he continues to exert on his viewers. One of the most intimate and quiet of painters, and one who often chose to work on an unusually small scale, Vermeer has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser.

Managing those crowds can not have been easy. Any museum that hopes to stage a Vermeer exhibition also has to contend with viewers’ tendency to linger longer before his paintings than they do before the work of his contemporaries.

The painting that launched his revival is "View of Delft" (circa 1660–1661). It was the first of Vermeer’s paintings to enter a public museum under the artist’s name and the first with which Thoré, writing more than four decades later, chose to introduce him to contemporary viewers.

By calling "View of Delft" “very singular,” Thoré presumably meant to distinguish it from other landscapes with which he was familiar, but the painting has proved virtually unique in Vermeer’s corpus as well. Persuaded that its creator must have specialized in the genre - about a third of the 70 odd works Thoré tentatively attributed to him were landscapes or cityscapes - the artist’s 19th-century champion ended up constructing a Vermeer very different in this respect from our own. Only the painting known as "The Little Street" (circa 1658–1659), continues to represent this version of the artist. (A third such painting, known to modern scholars from a 17th-century sales catalog, has never been located.) Despite the fact that Vermeer’s wife gave birth to 15 sons and daughters, 11 of whom are known to have survived his death, these cityscapes are also his only pictures to feature children: a tiny figure carried by a woman in "View of Delft" and the two youngsters playing in the foreground of "The Little Street". The modern Vermeer is primarily an artist of the interior, and his celebrated silence partly depends on keeping those children, imaginatively speaking, outside the walls.

The hint of clouded sky and a red building just barely visible through the casement in "Officer and Laughing Girl" (circa 1657–1658) represents the single such outward view in all the artist’s oeuvre. That determination to close off his space to everything but light is among the characteristics that most distinguish Vermeer from a contemporary like De Hooch, with whom he otherwise shared so many motifs. There are no figures in the doorways of Vermeer’s interiors or glimpses of a cheerful courtyard, only an illuminated enclosure that often seems to double as a metaphor for the inwardness of the solitary woman - or occasional man - who inhabits it.

Commentators on the paintings frequently remark their tendency to leave things out: not just the things we cannot see through the window, but the elements Vermeer originally painted and then removed from the picture and the narrative cues he deliberately suppressed, sometimes by painting them over, too. (A man could once be seen in the inner room of "A Maid Asleep" (circa 1656–1657), for instance.) More of what lay beyond Vermeer’s windows made it into his pictures than a casual viewer might think.

Sometimes this takes the form of calling attention to individual figures, like the “fashionable intruders” - by definition male- said to bring the outside world into the intimate inner world of the elegant young women in three early paintings of courting couples: "The Glass of Wine," "Girl Interrupted at Her Music", and "Girl with a Wine Glass" (all circa 1659–1661). At other times we are urged to notice particular objects that serve as physical representations of the wider world - the map and globe in "The Geographer" (1669), for example - or the pieces of paper that implicitly travel back and forth between sender and receiver in the six paintings of women reading or writing letters, piercing the confines of domesticity like so many windows and doors.

Less satisfying, I think, is a repeated attempt to divide Vermeer’s figures between “introverts” and “extroverts,” as if the border between inside and out could be mapped directly onto their psychology. At its most literal, the distinction is clear enough and loosely corresponds to the well-known divide between absorption and theatricality while many of Vermeer’s figures are apparently absorbed by something within the picture itself and take no notice of our presence - think of "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter" (circa 1662–1664), for instance, or "The Lacemaker" (circa 1666–1668) - others face the viewer, as if inviting us to meet their gaze. Probably Vermeer’s most famous “extrovert” in this sense is "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (circa 1664–1667), but the category includes his other small head studies, or tronies, like "Girl with a Red Hat" (also circa 1664–1667), as well as individual figures in a range of works both early and late, from the smiling young man to the left of "The Procuress" (1656), who has sometimes been identified as the artist himself, to the two women at the virginals, one seated and one standing, who look out at us from a pair of late paintings.

Yet physical orientation is no guarantee of psychological effect, and with a few arguable exceptions, like the awkwardly laughing young woman in "Girl with a Wine Glass," “extrovert” feels like the wrong term for Vermeer’s figures, even when they literally turn outward. Nor does the distinction really address the way they respond to one another within the pictures. On which side of the divide, for example, should we place the young woman of "Officer and Laughing Girl", as she turns her luminous face not toward the painting’s beholder but toward her enigmatic visitor? Like the gentleman who attends to the woman’s performance in "The Music Lesson" - or, for that matter, the artist who faces away from us and looks toward his model in "The Art of Painting" - she is as much removed from the viewer by a state of absorption as any of the single figures engaged in their solitary tasks.

Even when Vermeer’s figures do turn our way, the fact that they typically look at us over their shoulders rather than confront us directly means that there remains something oblique and withheld in the very gesture with which they meet our gaze.

What does resolve the dialectic between inner and outer in Vermeer is light. Both the physics of light and its psychological resonance are also crucial to the artist. A 1678 treatise by Vermeer’s contemporary Samuel van Hoogstraten observed that the brightest surface of any interior is always darker than the shadows outside, and advised his fellow artists to save their most brilliant white for any glimpse of sky or clouds they wished to include in the picture. By choosing to foreclose such possibilities, however, Vermeer freed himself to use that white within the room instead, typically employing it for a window jamb or wall: a maneuver whose paradoxical result is to make viewers’ imagination of what they cannot see shine still more brilliantly than what they can. Though we have no way of knowing if Vermeer made such decisions consciously - unlike Van Hoogstraten, he never attempted to theorize his practice - the paintings themselves provide abundant testimony to their creator’s understanding of how vision operates.

Scholars have long speculated that Vermeer must have had access to a camera obscura, since certain features of his work - especially the areas of blurred focus and the dots of bright paint he often scatters on the canvas - resemble the effects it generates. Consisting in its simplest form of a pinhole in a wall through which sunlight projects an image onto an opposing surface in a dark room (the literal meaning of “camera obscura”), the device has been known since antiquity, and versions of it can be readily documented from Vermeer’s time.

No definitive evidence has emerged to link Vermeer to such an instrument. An inventory of his possessions compiled after his death lists other artist’s paraphernalia, like easels and palettes, but says nothing about a camera. Nor have attempts to associate his apparent knowledge of its effects with the optical experiments of another Delft citizen, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, proved especially fruitful, despite the tantalizing fact that the microscopist later served as executor of Vermeer’s estate.

The inhabitants of the Jesuit residence just down the street from the house where the adult artist lived with his Catholic wife, Catharina Bolnes, and mother-in-law in the neighborhood of 17th-century Delft known as the Papists’ Corner may have been a principal source of the painter’s optical knowledge. Equally important, they also provided the chief inspiration for his treatment of light as a spiritual phenomenon.

The Jesuits have sometimes been identified as possible commissioners of the late painting known as "Allegory of the Catholic Faith" (circa 1670–1674), a technically sophisticated exercise in Baroque religiosity that many of the artist’s modern admirers have nonetheless found difficult to love. More recently, scholars have speculated that the Jesuits next door may also have commissioned the early "Saint Praxedis" (1655), a copy apparently signed by Vermeer after an Italian original by Felice Ficherelli. Not every authority has accepted the attribution, but if the painting is indeed Vermeer’s, its depiction of the saint serenely wringing the blood of martyrs from a sponge would represent perhaps his earliest attempt at an image of female absorption - a macabre forerunner of works like "The Milkmaid" or "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" (both circa 1662–1664). Only when his brush drew a fluid squiggle of red paint beneath the dead snake in "Allegory of the Catholic Faith," however, would he again mark a canvas with the sign of blood.

The local Jesuits probably did serve as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowledge of the camera obscura. Whether we must therefore conclude that they also shaped his view of the world is another matter, however, especially when we can begin to share in that view by looking at all the paintings they did not commission.