Last week on NPR I heard some art historian discussing Vermeer (I think in conjunction with an exhibit at the New York Met). The person being interviewed discussed at length the mystery surrounding Vermeer’s life and his personal appearance. So my curiosity was piqued.
Encyclopedia Britannica says:
One art historian presented him as a laboratory researcher. His paintings would be consistent with the idea that he was confined to the rooms he was depicting (the two known landscapes by him were both painted from a window). There is no known pictorial representation of him (though he does appear, from the back, in one of his works.)
What’s the straight dope? Hasn’t any 17th century gossip-monger written something about him? Had no papparazzo lept out from behind a bush and captured the reclusive painter in a quick charcoal sketch?
This page claims that the leftmost fellow in The Procuress. (It looks to me like she’s about to give it out rather than procure anything.)
However, there is no explanation why that fellow is “thought to be” a self-portrait. One explanation could be that Dutch men paid a lot of money to be depicted in portraits, and therefore wouldn’t be enshrouded in shadow. Rembrandt caught a lot of crap for the way he depicted some of his benefactors in The Nightwatch. But he also got away with it, as I recall. Another reason might be that the figure is looking at the viewer and toasting (no doubt to the very near future) which seems vaguely unusual and personal.
I don’t think there’s anything unusual about not knowing much about a 17th-century Dutch artist. For example, we know very litte about Seghers, or Fabritius-- I don’t recall any self-portraits left by those guys. I think part of the mystique stems from a comparison with Rembrandt, “the other” Dutch 17th c painter that everyone is familiar with and who left SCADS of self-portraits and documentation (if Vermeer had been in as much legal/ money trouble as Rembrandt was, we’d probably know lots about him).
Also Vermeer has attracted a lot of attention from kooks-- sort of the Leonardo of the 17th c. It’s been claimed that he used camera obscuras (which would have been very new, really-- there’s not much evidence that they were used by artists at this time), a lot has been made of the fact that Van Leeuwenhoek also lived in Delft and that Vermeer was the executor of his estate (which was Vermeer’s job as a city employee, and doesn’t necessitate a friendship), etc. Take anything you hear about the man with a grain of salt, especially if it comes out of the mouth of David Hockney (a modern artist who wrote an article for the New Yorker: Thesis: Vermeer must have used optical devices. Reasoning: Because I, David Hockney, can’t draw that well. Well, now.)
Oh dear, you’ve gotten me started. Let’s not into Hieronymus Bosch.
Oooh, dude (gender nonspecific), I want to hear your rants! Why not blast open a GD thread or something, and let us know where it is?
And you’re absolutely right about the documentation of the time. A non-troublesome person of means might not get mentioned in passing a hundred times in a lifetime–and then you have to hope the documents still survive. This is where hail-Mary historians get to manufacture lots of esteem and lecture cash, because they get to create a story by inference. All such stories are wrong, at least in the minor details, but many are captivating as well.
The main reason we know little about him is that he didn’t try to sell his paintings. He was well off and didn’t need the money.
That all his paintings were done with a camera obscura is obvious, and that is what confined his format to the one window. As this technique was considered cheating, he didn’t want to face critics, and may have considered himself less of an artist as well, being a child of his time, as we all are.
The camera obscura question will eventually belong in GD, I believe. It isn’t obvious that he used one-- he did construct his compositions with one-point perspective (traces of which are told by a pinhole at the “point” where he drew his orthogonals from, etc), which would have been unnecessary had he used a C.O., for example. Of course this can go back and forth endlessly.
The fact is that the camera obscura as it existed at the time was very large and unwieldy, room-sized, or a hut-like contraption built outdoors, and if you have ever used one you will know that tracing from one is very very difficult; just eyeballing it is much more accurate, and you need a LOT of light, like in the outdoors on a sunny day-- even working next to a window doesn’t provide enough. If he did have access to one, which is not completely inconceivable, I would bet my ass that although he may have found the optical phenomena interesting and that it might have shown him how to “look at things,” an actual tracing would have been nearly impossible. Proponents of the C.O. theory aren’t happy with this middle ground, though.
In any case, the use of a C.O. would not have been considered “cheating”-- any devices were considered fair game, and there are a few instances where the use of one is suggested, in particular in works on chorography (sort of cartographic landscape)-- there are few accounts of anyone actually trying to draw from one, though (I can give you info on these instances if you like-- a couple of Germans gave it a shot). In the instances where someone used one they were not reacted to with accusations of cheating, but rather with wonder at the amazing device. The Dutch were big techno-geeks; Samuel van Hoogstraten’s “perspective boxes” were a big hit, and Fabritius was using concave mirrors to work up strange compositions; this sort of thing wasn’t looked down upon. Which makes it all the more strange that if Vermeer or any of the artists working in a similar style used a C.O. that it wasn’t mentioned anywhere.
Finally, even if he did sell paintings, in the north contracts had been traditionally oral, so we would have few records-- payments, perhaps.
My question about Vermeer: with his EXTREMELY small output of paintings (I believe only a dozen or so are known to exist), could he have supported himslf as a painter?
By contrast, Rembrandt was a very successful artist (until he lost popularity near the end of his life), and was able to afford a fine house, and (more importantly) a studio full of apprentices (who painted most of his canvasses).
Take another Dutch artist of the time (like Frans hals)-his output of painting was very large. So, given Vermeer’s paltry output, could he have supported himslf as an artist, or was painting more of a hobby for him?
Well, possibilities: we know that Vermeer was also an art dealer-- he sold other artists’ works as well as his own. He also had arrangement with a few rich investors who would buy a few of his paintings a year, and sold to both Catholic and Reformed patrons-- he wasn’t picky. We have no idea how many paintings he actually executed, opposed to survival rate, so it’s hard to say. But if he had a small workshop, unlike Rembrandt or Rubens, he also had lower overhead-- no journeymen to pay. The paucity of his works also might have driven up his prices-- the free market economy as we know it was well underway in the Netherlands at the time.
Rembrandt was pretty bad with money, so he’s a bad example (although he was innovative in some marketing techniques, especially with the prints, like “highly limited editions” with a number of expensive rare proofs and states for his collector friends-- things that helped keep him out of monetary trouble), while Rubens, who was a mighty clever boy, was fabulously wealthy and stable in comparison to Rembrandt-- you should see his house. Fancy fancy.
Anyway, so it’s possible that Vermeer made a bit of money dealing pictures and investing and working the market well. Lots of artists had other things going on the side-- Jan Steen apparently ran the family brew-pub (poorly, I might add).
Also, I put something backwards up above-- Anton van Leeuwenhoek was the executor of Vermeer’s estate, and not the other way around.
I think that there are 35 paintins attributed to Vermeer. This is apparently a very very low number for a Dutch painter of the period - some painted that many a year. Also, I believe that he died in a lot of debt.
This comes from a review in this past Sunday’s New York Times of a biography of Vermeer, which was apparently difficult to write because so little is known about him.
As far as Vermeer’s money situation, Encyclopedia Britannica says the following:
He was a member of the artists’ guild in Delft and was chairman of it twice. But he made most of his money by his work as an art dealer, not by the sale of his paintings. Sometimes he gave paintings as pawns for his debts. When he died (ruined by political troubles and wars of the times) at the age of 43 his wife Catharina tried to save some of his paintings from bankruptcy proceedings.
However, EB also says that he was well enough known that a frenchman named Balthazar de Monconys travelled to Delft for the express purpose of visiting him in 1663.
