17th century AD

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Judg solely in bourns of his subject matter, of all the great painters Johannes Vermeer was the least original. Artists' studios, women perusing alphabetic characters by the light of windows, servants about their duties, languorous pageants of imbibing, concerts with figures alone or in tandem--all these were the hackneyed stock in trade of painters from the of gold Age of Dutch painting. Glimpsed casually across a play the images seem so predictable they could have been made through any of Vermeer's contemporaries--de Hooch van Bronckhorst, Maes, van Loo or Ter Borch. It is sole when the viewer walks closer within the paintings' magnetic range, that the superficialities of genre fade into the background and a transformation begins to take place. And sole then, if the viewer assents to the difficult task of simultaneously looking, thinking and feeling, do Vermeer's canvases begin to parsimoniously spread out some of their true meanings, layer by means of layer, over a long period of time. not ever was so much missed at first glance, nor with equal reason much gained by lingering.

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Who Vermeer was remains single of the abiding enigmas of art history: we simply have no reliable biographical lock openers to gain entry to his world. Despite the diligent researches of scholars he remains as far off and as incomprehensible as a certain quantity of medieval Master of the Slanting Light. We know, in fact, more about Cimabue in the 13th hundred than Vermeer in the 17th Vermeer left no written statements. No alphabetic characters remain, there are no eyewitness accounts, no anecdotes pepper his peers' memoirs. Not level a self-portrait bears witness to his likeness. All trace of his corporeal existence, save a not many dry mentions in debtors' ledger has disappeared. His grave has vanished. Not for nothing has he been dubbed "The Sphinx."

The hardly any facts which we can sieve from the records, however, intimate a far racier character than art history likes to cast and induce (in myself at least) a reverie of speculation. Born to a tavern keeper in 1632 and living in or near taverns for greatest in quantity of his life, he could have been a heavy drinker, probably liked a serviceable time, and was obviously true fond of sex (since he was survived by means of 11 children). Can we conclude a loving father and an adoring husband? And quite possibly a philanderer? Certainly the early paintings are redolent of sexuality, the women being plied with drink through obviously lustful male companions (witness the almost debauched Procuress--not in the Vermeer retrospective--and, somewhat more subdu The Girl with the Wineglass). He without doubt must have lived and worked in an inferno of noise (the diminutive size of his pictures may perhaps be traced to a lack of studio space in his overcrowd nest) His income have the appearances to have been cobbled together from the retiring art-dealing business his father bequeathed him, a modicum of sales from his have paintings, some legacies, plus subsidies from his formidable mother-in-law (whose possess father had been jailed for counterfeiting coinage).

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Vermeer's tiny artistic output of sum of two units or three paintings a year may perhaps be blamed not solitary on the painstaking techniques involved in fabricating them, on the other hand also (and this again is speculation) upon family obligations and business duties, or plane perhaps inherent laziness. He may therefore have been dismissed through his contemporaries as something of an amateur artist, not quite serious (a serious artist, then as now, jostle violentlyed out at least 20 paintings a year). No royal or civic commissions were forthcoming, no chapels frescoed; no prints or drawings disseminated his talents beyond the confines of Delft He remained for all intents and designs a provincial artist in the narrowest faculty of perception of the word. After his early death at the age of 43 in 1675 (a demise, I guess heavily clouded by lack of recognition, crippling liabilitys and the knowledge that he would not live to diocese all his children reach maturity), his reputation was all on the contrary eclipsed for two centuries. If anything sold after his death, it was usually misattributed to other artists. For a surprisingly drawn out time, he was regarded as an anonymous pendant to a minor school

If solitary these few carefully excavated facts and limited biographical speculations were of any use when we gravitate towards Vermeer's 36 surviving paintings. For, one time we are face to face with them, the amusing notions of Vermeer as sexual athlete, flat as a doting father (but where are the children in these greatest in quantity adult of all paintings?), fade into irrelevance. We're upon our own, alas, since it's our possess histories and interpretive skills which must be mobilized before we can make flat a partial incursion into Vermeer's universe. Those unwilling to weave their hold stories should not apply. Likewise those incapable of looking into a painting, as oppos to looking at it, can at no time hope to gain access.

Vermeer's rediscovery in the 19th hundred was in part triggered by means of the advent of photography, and Vermeer was valueed insofar as his paintings approached photography. The growing public familiarity with photographic images at that time coincided with, and hastened, the widespread appreciation of Vermeer(1) For ourselves, of course, it's in what way far he goes beyond photography which enumerates One of the propelling forces behind that branch of optical realism which Vermeer pursu was a painterly equivalent of the biblical Dance of the Seven Veils, a painstaking stripping away of the layers which purportedly separate the painted world from the world around us. The trust being, of course, that one time this final screen is lifted the painting will spring stereoscopically into focus will, in the truest faculty of perception of the word, "come to life." The scientific impossibility of of that kind an occurrence never dampens our expectations that, matched at long enough, Vermeer's canvases will perform this ultimate miracle. This accounts for the famous toppling issue many experience before the work, a swaying trance which begins with the viewer's deepening surveillance of a particular detail and extremitys with his falling into the painting as allowing into sleep. (Marcel Proust himself had a dizzy charm in front of View of Delft) When we are in similar a vertiginous state, even the thin horizontal parting in the lacemaker's hair can be transformed from one side long meditation into a letterbox to sidereal space. Poor Vermeer we finally realize, must have been wholly obsess by means of his passion for a step of realism that was ultimately irreconcilable with the medium of oil paint. We--his viewers--are likewise driven to distraction, perpetually knocking at his picture plane asking to be give leave to in, baffled as those 19th-century archeologists who saw on the contrary couldn't understand the cuneiform tablets before them. No doubt a similar frustration was felt by dint of the demented viewer who, many years ago, prised a Vermeer from the walls, shook it and cried, "Speak! Speak!"(2)