ADVOCATES AND CHAMPIONSCan One Person Make a Difference?VERMEER!191 YearsSleeping beauties are often awakened by individuals who advocate and champion the work or ideas. Some advocates are professionals who clearly stand to benefit from resurrecting forgotten work in their field. But just because they stand to gain something for themselves doesn’t mean they don’t perform an amazing service.
You’ve probably seen a photo of this painting,
Girl with a Pearl Earring. Maybe you’ve seen the real painting. There are posters of it, postcards of it, advertisements that play on it, a novel by Tracy Chevalier with the same title as the painting and a movie adaptation in which Scarlett Johansson plays the girl. The girl in the painting looks like a real person who could be around today; she lives in upstate New York, she has a very popular restaurant. The painter has captured both her and her relationship with us, the viewer: She is looking right at us.
The painting is by Johannes Vermeer, who had some success in his lifetime, but died in 1675 penniless. A little while after that his work fell into obscurity for almost two centuries. This guy! Now he’s one of the most celebrated painters who ever lived. In November 1995, in Washington, DC, people lined up for twelve hours in the cold to view an exhibition of his work. A 2023 show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam sold out its entire run. It’s hard to believe that someone now so revered could have been forgotten.
When Vermeer was alive and working in the mid- 1600s, he was doing pretty well. He was a successful painter around his home city of Delft, well respected by his peers, twice voted to head the local painters guild. His technical knowledge was respected too— he was called as an expert witness when some Italian paintings were thought to be forgeries. He didn’t paint a vast number of paintings: Scholars disagree over the
exact number of works that we can attribute to him with certainty, but most counts range from thirty-four to thirty-seven. Still, his work reportedly sold pretty well during his lifetime, and he even had a local patron who bought twenty- one of his paintings, roughly half of everything he ever painted. (For many years, it was thought that this patron was one Pieter van Ruijven, a local bigwig, but more recently, historians discovered that it was actually van Ruijven’s wife, Maria Simonsdr de Knuijt, who took an interest in Vermeer’s work.) Unlike van Gogh, who sold only one painting (as far as we know) in his lifetime, Vermeer did pretty well for much of his life. I will say, I’m a little mystified how anyone who painted mostly small paintings could make a living having painted only a few dozen of them in total. How is that possible? Rembrandt, in contrast, made 137 that we know of— and many of those were quite large.
There’s evidence that the local business community liked him too. In 1667, a poem was published to commemorate the untimely death of a favorite local painter, Carel Fabritius (who studied under Rembrandt and probably influenced Vermeer). The poem concluded by thanking God that a painter had been discovered who could take Fabritius’s place: Vermeer.
But about twenty years after his death in 1675, this beauty was already going to sleep. Right after Vermeer died, a local baker was given paintings from his family to pay off their bread debt—the baker did say he’d give them back if the six-guilder debt were paid, but that wasn’t very likely: The family was broke. At an auction in 1696, his
View of Delft went for up to two hundred guilders—though even that is considered low. one paintings were sold at this Amsterdam auction. His decline in popularity continued. In 1881, at another auction, the famous
Pearl Earring painting went for two guilders. If you had a time machine, you could have gone back and gotten one of the most famous paintings in the world for almost nothing.
Politics and MisinformationThere doesn’t seem to be a single factor that caused Vermeer to be more or less forgotten but a number of them that all occurred together. The evil fairy in this case was a perfect storm of economics, politics, and plain bad luck. A series of wars in Europe that broke out in the second half of the seventeenth century disrupted the trade and thus the buying power of the successful Dutch merchants.
There was misinformation as well. In this period, art dealers and contemporary historians created a lot of confusion regarding the authenticity of the work of Dutch artists. Arnold Houbraken wrote a guide to Dutch painters that was published from 1718 to 1721, just forty- odd years after Vermeer’s death, called
The Great Theater of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses, in which he omitted Vermeer entirely. Misattributions proliferated— journalist Cynthia Saltzman writes in her book
Old Masters, New World that Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was at one point attributed to Rembrandt. Vermeer’s
The Music Lesson was attributed to Frans van Mieris, and his
The Art of Painting was credited to Pieter de Hooch. Vermeer was by now less well known than these other (many unknown to me) painters in Houbraken’s book, so theirs were therefore considered more valuable—clearly a motivation for the misattribution . . . and there was no one around to dispute it.
Vermeer didn’t help in this matter either— he often didn’t sign his work, and even when he did sign a painting, he didn’t maintain a consistent signature, bad branding on his part, and something guaranteed to create later confusion. And, as often happens even today, once some misattribution or misinformation is published, the printed word is presumed to be true, so little by little Vermeer begins to recede into a chaos of error and mistaken information.
It seems to me that an obvious problem for Vermeer’s legacy was the fact that he didn’t produce that many paintings in his lifetime. You’d think scarcity would therefore increase their value, but it didn’t seem to work that way— in his case it only made them more obscure. There has to be demand for the economic scarcity formula to work, and it seems that now there wasn’t much of that. There were a very few signs of life: It’s reported that the French collector and dealer Jean- Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, who specialized in the work of Northern artists, published a survey in 1792 of important Northern painters in which he included a reproduction of a Vermeer painting,
The Astronomer. This was followed by an engraving Le Brun made of the painting
Mistress and Maid, which he sold around 1810.
Nowadays we are flooded with images— in print, online, on the street, and on our phones. Access to images, landscapes, and portraits—like the paintings of Vermeer’s day— are now a dime a dozen. But how different it must have been then. If you were nostalgic or moved by a painting, it would have to be located in a public space, or you’d have to physically possess that painting to be able to experience it. Same with portraits— no doubt some were paid for by the sitters themselves, but for later collectors I suspect portraits of folks who would be strangers to them would have mainly symbolic and emotional value— they captured a sense of life, a fleeting moment in time. There was no photography to do that. Imagery then was intimately connected with physical things— paintings (and prints). Engraved copies of well- regarded paintings were not uncommon and were a means of sharing and disseminating a popular image in a very rough sense. But even these were somewhat rarefied—it wasn’t a mass medium.
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