7. The Magic Vermeer
I
Who owns the thirty-fifth canvas by Jan Vermeer of Delft? And are there more than thirty-five works by this master of cool, clear daylight? I have seen nearly all the pictures attributed to the too little known Dutchman, and as far as was in my power I have read all the critical writings by such experts as Havard, Obreen, Bredius, Hofstede de Groot (Jan Vermeer van Delft en Carel Fabritius, 1907), Doctor Bode, Wauters, Arsène Alexandre, G. Geoffroy, Bürger, Taine, John Smith, Gustave Vanzype, and several others.
Doctor A. Bredius has printed an article entitled: A Pseudo-Vermeer in the Berlin gallery, which I have not been able to procure, but then the same worthy authority has contested the authenticity of the portrait of a young man in the Brussels Museum. It is not signed, this beautiful head, and at one time it was in the English collections of Humphry Ward and Peter Norton, and later in the Collection Otlet at Brussels. Smith catalogued it as a Rembrandt; indeed, it had the false signature of the great master. Much later it was accredited to Jan Victoors, a Rembrandt pupil, and to Nicolas Maes, and under this name was sold in Paris in 1900. A. J. Wauters finally declared it a Vermeer, though neither Bredius nor Hofstede de Groot are of his opinion. And now we hear the question: Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer, Vermeer of the magical blue and yellow?
First let us ask: Who was Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer? "What songs did the sirens sing?" puzzled good old Sir Thomas Browne, and we know far more about William Shakespeare or Sappho or Memling than we do of the enigmatic man from Delft who died a double death in 1675; not only the death of the body, but the death of the spirit, of his immortal art. For several centuries he was not accorded the paternity of his own pictures. To Terburg, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolas Maes, Metsu they were credited. Even the glorious Letter Reader of the Dresden gallery has been attributed to De Hooch, and by no less an authority than Charles Blanc. Fromentin, of all men, does not mention his name in his always admirable book on the art of the Low Countries; no doubt one cause for his neglect.
This is precisely what we know of Jan Vermeer of Delft, in which city--oddly enough--there is not a single canvas of his. In 1632 he was born there. In 1653 he married Catherine Bolnes; he was just twenty-one years old. His admission to the corporation of painters as a master occurred the same year, as the books attest. In 1662 he was elected dean of the corporation, and again in 1670. In 1675 he died, in his forty-third year, and at the apogee of his powers.
When he became a member of the corporation of painters at Delft he could not pay in full the initiation fee, six florins, and he gave on account one florin ten cents--the entry in the books attests this astounding fact. He was poor, but he had youth and genius, and he loved.
He had also eight or ten children and lived happily--as do most people without a history--on the Oude Langendyck, where he became at least a local celebrity, according to a mention of him in the Journal des Voyages, by Balthazar de Moncouys (published 1665). Moncouys also recorded another interesting fact. "At Delft I saw the painter Vermeer," he writes, "but none of his works were at his atelier; at a baker's I saw a figure--for which was paid six hundred livres." At a bakeshop! Vermeer, then, literally painted for his bread.
In 1696, twenty years after his death, certain of his works (forty in the catalogue) brought only 100 florins, pictures that to-day are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in 1719 the superb Milk Girl, now in the Rijks Museum, formerly from the Six Collection, was sold for 126 florins (it brought $100,000 when Mr. Six sold it to the museum), while at the same sale the mediocre Gerard Dou fetched 6,000 florins for a canvas. Even nowadays the public has not been converted to the idea of the greatness of Vermeer. Go any time of the day into the Mauritshuis at The Hague and you will always discover a crowd before that clumsy, stupid bull with the wooden legs, by no means Paul Potter's masterpiece, while the gem of The Hague gallery, the View of Delft, with its rich pâte, its flowing rhythms, its clear daylight, seldom draws a large audience. And I do not doubt that only the propinquity of Rembrandt's Young Saskia to Vermeer's Merry Company (otherwise known as The Courtesan) in the Dresden gallery attracts an otherwise indifferent public.
In 1696 there were 21 pictures of Vermeer sold at public auction in Amsterdam. Of these 21 the experts claim to have discovered 16. But the bother of the question is that 100 other pictures were also sold at the same time; furthermore, the sale is said to have taken place after the death of a venerable mediocrity, also named Vermeer, but hailing from Haarlem. (He died in 1691.) This confusion of names may have had something to do with the obscuring of the great Vermeer. But he had no vogue in 1696, as the prices at the sale prove only too well.
Vanzype gives the list, and its importance in any research of the Vermeer pictures is paramount. Here are the 21 canvases that are extant, and the prices paid: No. 1--A young woman weighing gold, 155 florins; 2--A milk girl, 175 florins; 3--The portrait of the painter in his studio, 45 florins; 4--A young woman playing the guitar, 70 florins; 5--A gentleman in his chamber, 95 florins; 6--A young lady playing the clavecin, with a gentleman who listens, 30 florins; 7--A young woman taking a letter from her servant, 70 florins; 8--A servant who has drunk too much asleep at a table, 62 florins; 9--A merry company, 73 florins; 10--A young lady and a gentleman making music, 81 florins; 11--A soldier with a laughing girl, 44 florins; 12--A young lacemaker, 28 florins; 13--View of Delft, 200 florins; 14--A house at Delft, 72 florins; 15--A view of some houses, 48 florins; 16--A young woman writing, 63 florins; 17--A young woman, 30 florins; 18--Young woman at a clavecin, 42 florins; 19--A portrait in antique costume, 36 florins; 20 and 21--Two pendants, 34 florins.
The subsequent history of these pictures, while too copious for transcription here, may be skeletonised. This may answer the question posed at the beginning of this little story. Gustave Vanzype asks: What has become of the young woman weighing gold, which reappeared at a sale in the year 1701, which Bürger thought he had found in the canvas, The Weigher of Gold. And the Intoxicated Servant? The latter is in the Altman collection; the former at Philadelphia, in Mr. Widener's gallery. But let us see how the wise doctors of paint dispute among themselves. How many Vermeers are there in existence, that is, known to the world, for there may be others, for all we know, hidden in the cabinets of collectors or sporting other names? Bürger, who called Vermeer the Sphinx among artists, has generously attributed to him 76 pictures. This was in 1866, and since then a more savant authority has reduced the number to 40. Havard admits 56. The Vermeer of Haarlem was to blame for this swollen catalogue. Bredius and De Groot have attenuated the list. The Morgan Vermeer in the Metropolitan Museum, a Vermeer of first-class quality, is not in some of the catalogues, nor is the Woman Weighing Pearls, now in the possession of P. A. B. Widener, of Philadelphia, to be found accredited to Vermeer in Smith's Catalogue Raisonné. But not much weight can be attached to the opinions of the earlier critics of Vermeer. For them he was either practically unknown or else an imitator of Terburg, De Hooch, or Mieris, he whose work is never tight, hard, or slippery.
The following list of thirty-four admittedly genuine Vermeers may clear up the mystery of the 1696 sale at Amsterdam. Remember that the authenticity of these works is no longer contested.
In Holland at The Hague there are four Vermeers: The Toilette of Diana, the Head of a Young Girl, An Allegory of the New Testament, and the View of Delft. At the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam, there are four: The Milk Girl, The Reader, The Letter, and A Street in Delft. (This latter is the House in Delft, which sold for seventy-two florins in 1696.) In Great Britain in the Coats collection at Castle Skalmorlie (Scotland) there is Christ at the House of Martha and Mary. In the National Gallery, a young woman standing in front of her clavecin. In the Beit collection, London, a young woman at her clavecin. Collection Salting, London, The Pianist. Windsor Castle, The Music Lesson. Beit collection, A Young Woman Writing. In the Joseph collection, A Soldier and a Laughing Girl. And the Sleeping Servant, formerly of the Kann collection, Paris, then in London, and later sold to Mr. Altman. In Germany we find the following: At the Berlin Museum, The Pearl Collar. The Drop of Wine, in the same museum, Berlin. The Coquette, Brunswick Museum. The Lady and Her Servant, in the private collection of James Simon, Berlin. The Merry Company and The Reader in the Dresden gallery. The Geographer at the Window, in the Städel Institute, Frankfort. In France, The Astronomer of the A. de Rothschild collection at Paris, and the little Lacemaker, in the Louvre Gallery. In Belgium, there was at Brussels the portrait of a girl, which was formerly in the Arenberg gallery. When I tried to see it I was told that it had been sold to some one in Germany. Its type, judging from the head of a girl at The Hague, is not unlike The Geographer, in the collection of Viscount Du Bus de Gisegnies, Brussels. A Young Girl, collection of Jonkheer de Grez, Brussels. This last was discovered by Doctor Bredius in 1906, and is at the present writing in New York at the gallery of Mr. Knoedler.
In Austria-Hungary there are two noble Vermeers; one in the private gallery of Count Czernin, the portrait of the painter, the other in the Museum of Budapest, the portrait of a woman, the latter as solidly modelled as any Hals I ever viewed. The Czernin Vermeer is the only one in Vienna (the other Vermeer in this gallery is by Renèsse). It is a masterpiece. In it he grazes perfection.
The United States is, considering the brevity of the list, well off in Vermeers. There is at Philadelphia the Mandoliniste of John G. Johnson (without doubt, as M. Vanzype points out, the Young Woman Playing the Guitar of the 1696 sale). At Boston Mrs. John Gardner owns The Concert. At the Metropolitan Museum there is the Woman with the Jug (Marquand); and the Morgan Letter Writer; H. C. Frick boasts The Singing Lesson (probably known at the 1696 sale as A Gentleman and Young Lady Making Music).
So the importance of the 1696 catalogue is indisputable. And now, after wading through this dry forest of figures and dates and haphazard or dogmatic attributions, we are at the fatal number, thirty-four--only thirty-four authentic Vermeers in existence. Some one must be mistaken. Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer? I again ask.
II
The works attributed only to our master in the list compiled by M. Vanzype are but six: Portrait of a Man, at the Brussels Museum; View of Delft, in the collection of Michel Van Gelder, at Uccle, Brussels; The Lesson, at the National Gallery, London; the Sleeping Servant, Widener collection, Philadelphia--another version, according to Bürger-Thoré; Portrait of a Young Man, in the same collection; two interiors, collection Werner Dahl at Düsseldorf and collection Matavansky at Vienna, respectively. There is also to be accounted a small landscape in the Dresden gallery, a Distant View of Haarlem (probably by Vermeer of Haarlem), the Morgan and the Widener Vermeers. To deny the authenticity of either of these compositions would be to fly into the face of Vermeer himself. I have enjoyed the privilege and pleasure of viewing the Widener Vermeers, and I believe that the Sleeping Servant--she may not be intoxicated, a jug on the table being the only evidence; certainly her features are placid enough; besides, Vermeer did not indulge in paintings of low life as did Teniers, Ostrade, or Jan Steen--is about the same period as The Merry Company, in the Dresden gallery, that is, if paint, texture, and arrangement of still-life be any criterion. As for the Woman Weighing Gold, it is superb Vermeer.
There is little danger nowadays of any other painter being saddled with the name of Vermeer. It is usually the other way around, as we have seen. As was the case with Diaz and Monticelli, so has it been with Vermeer and De Hooch, Vermeer and Terburg (or Ter Borch). 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. Again the miracle is repeated, "Let there be light!" Here is not only the subtle equilibrium between man and the things that surround him, but the things themselves--flesh-tints, drapery, garbs, polished floor, chairs, table, and wall tapestry--are saturated with light; absorbed by the inert matter which nevertheless vibrates and, like the flesh-tones, remains puissant and individual.
Humanity is the central and sounding note of his art. He is neither a pantheist in his worship of sunshine, nor is he a mystic in his pursuit of shadows. He is always virile, always tender, never trivial, nor coarse--an aristocrat of art.
In the Dresden Merry Company, and a large canvas it is--he comes to grips with Rembrandt in the matter of the distribution of lights and shades. The cavalier at the left of the picture--facing it--with the cynical smile, is marvellously depicted. There is a certain shadow on his wide-margined collar which also touches the lower part of his face--but now we are nearing the region of transcendental virtuosity. I always convince myself when in the presence of the other Dresden Vermeer, and the greater of the two, that this young Dutch lady reading a letter at an open window is my favourite.
And now it's high time to answer my question: Who owns the thirty-fifth Vermeer? We stopped, you may recall, at the thirty-fourth, The Singing Lesson, belonging to Mr. Frick. That would give the thirty-fifth to the Portrait of a Man in the Brussels Museum. But that is a contested canvas, while the Lesson in the National Gallery (not the young woman at her clavecin, a genuine Vermeer) is also doubtful, say the experts.
Setting aside the two interiors and the second View of Delft as not being in the field of the authentic, there remain the Morgan and the Widener Vermeers. Which of the pair is the thirty-fifth Vermeer? They are both masterpieces, though the Morgan is blacker and has been overcleaned.
Since writing the above I had on my return to America the pleasure of reading Philip L. Hale's wholly admirable study of Vermeer, and many dark places were made clear; especially concerning the place in the catalogue of 1696 of the Widener picture, Lady Weighing Gold, often called Lady Weighing Pearls, because there are pearls on the table about to be weighed. Mr. Hale, who, as a painter, knows whereof he speaks, styles Vermeer as "the greatest painter who ever lived," and meets all the very natural objections to such a bold statement. Certainly with Velasquez and Da Vinci, Vermeer (the three V's) is the one of the supreme magicians of paint in the history of art. Who doubts this should visit Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and Amsterdam, and for ever after hold his peace.