OLD WOMAN SPINNINGNICOLAES MAESRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
OLD WOMAN SPINNINGNICOLAES MAESRIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
OLD WOMAN SPINNINGNICOLAES MAES
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
and individual language with which Rembrandt renders similar genre pieces.”
The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller canvases, such as the two examples ofAn Old Woman Spinning, in the Rijks Museum, andAn Old Woman Peeling Apples(the spinning-wheel near her), in the Berlin Gallery, andThe CradleandThe Dutch Housewifeof the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures, beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.
In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize his work. But at first, as inThe Dreamer, it is the brightness of hue that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter, blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and charms, but does it hold one’s interest? Scarcely, if you come back to it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in theCard-Playersof the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for example,An Old Woman Spinning(No. 1504). Here the red reappears in the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro. Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a natural and complete equipoise.
During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of high merit; thePortrait of a Man, for example, in the Fine Arts Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme, and moreover,
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATIONGABRIEL METSURIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATIONGABRIEL METSURIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATIONGABRIEL METSU
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
in its grave, tender rendering of old age, preserves the fine sentiment of his best period. But such noble characterization of humanity is rare with him, for, impelled by need and very likely by the taste of his public, he became an imitator of Van Dyck’s elegance. With Maes this elegance became pinchbeck, his fine ladies and gentlemen being very cheap imitations of their models.
Bornin Leyden in 1630, the son of a painter, Gabriel Metsu was one of the precocious talents of the Holland School, for in his sixteenth year he helped to form the Guild of St. Luke in his native city. For the purpose of studying his art, his brief career of thirty-seven years (he died in 1667) may be conveniently divided into two parts, preceding or following the year 1655, in which he moved to Amsterdam and came under the direct influence of Rembrandt. But it would appear from his own early pictures, that even during his life in Leyden he had by some means obtained a knowledge of this master’s work. Metsu’s actual teacher, according to Houbraken, had been Dou, though his own work shows no direct trace of the latter’s influence. On the other hand, that of Hals is apparent. Meanwhile he experimented for himself and produced several pictures which, likeThe Blacksmith, in the Rijks Museum, are founded on the motive of a workshop, lighted fitfully by a forge and scattered with tools. In fact, as Bode says, the work of his early period is distinguished by “restless composition, hurried movement, and careless treatment.”
Moving to Amsterdam, he became one of the group that circled round Rembrandt, and at first was directly influenced by Maes, and perhaps by Rembrandt himself; witness hisOld Woman in Meditationof the Rijks Museum and his fine portrait of an old lady in the Berlin Gallery. Then almost at a jump he reaches an individual style of his own. It grows out of his attitude toward the subjects that—with occasional exceptions of marketing scenes, such as the two pictures respectively of a man and of a woman selling poultry, in the Dresden Gallery, and theVegetable Marketof the Louvre—he now favors. They are intimate presentations of the graciously prosperous life of the middle-class burghers, before extravagance and ostentation had eaten their way into Dutch society. That his art thus settled to a distinct purpose may be partly attributed to the fact that the artist himself settled down to domestic life, marrying Isabella Wolff, April 1, 1663. A picture in the Dresden Gallery, dated two years earlier,Lovers at Breakfast, shows himself and the lady sitting side by side, one of his arms about her shoulders and the other lifted as he holds a tall wine-glass. It is curiously interesting in its resemblance and difference to Rembrandt’s picture of himself and Saskia that hangs in an adjoining gallery of the same museum.
The style which Metsu formed for himself is in accordance with the character and treatment of the subjects to which he now devoted himself. He abandons the Rembrandtesque principle of chiaroscuro, for there is no mystery or depth of sentiment in his point of view. He is frankly and simply interested in the genial externalsof his subject; yet something of the Maes influence still affects his outlook. He sees the comfort and happiness of the home life and reflects it in the composure and refined orderliness that now pervade his compositions. Devoting himself to the simplest and directest way of presenting the subject, he avoids all striving after effect and secures a quietly balanced ensemble, wherein every figure and object is rendered with sureness of drawing, regard for the beauty of local color, and the utmost perfection of truthful realization. The date at which Metsu thus found himself is placed about 1660, and the picture in the Metropolitan Museum,A Music Party, dated 1659, serves to mark the transition. Its composition is still inclined to be “restless”; but the treatment, far from being “careless,” is distinguished by a very sincere feeling for the objective beauty of the salient details, while at least one figure, that of the cavalier on the right, exhibits the concentrated repose of movement which became one of the most delightful elements of Metsu’s art. It is seen developed throughout the whole composition in Mr. J. P. Morgan’sVisit to the Nursery, where, notwithstanding the sprightliness of feeling that animates the figures, each of them has its own plastic individuality of self-contained movement. Every detail has a perfection of finish that is never finical or at the expense of the unity of the whole. The hands and heads have a special distinction of fluent modeling and of exquisite expression. These qualities, combined with richness of local color, characterize the pictures of the sixties, as may be seen in the examples in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the galleries of Dresden,Amsterdam, and The Hague. Toward the end of this ten years of highest production Metsu’s pictures grow stiffer in composition, colder in color, and harder in their surfaces. The beginning of this change is noticeable in the portrait group ofThe Family Geelvink, in the Berlin Gallery, and characterizes also some of his latest genre subjects. Probably the cause was failing health, for toward the end of his life he suffered from the effects of a bungled operation.
Pieter de Hooch, the son of a butcher, was born in Rotterdam in 1630, being therefore the same age as Metsu and two years older than Maes and Vermeer. With these last two he has been ranked by some critics, who consider that the trio represents the high-water mark of Holland genre. With Maes’s claim to this distinction one has ventured to disagree, and may also dispute De Hooch’s for somewhat the same reason. The latter’s best period was confined to ten years, 1655-1665, and outside of that, especially toward the end of his life, he did some quite indifferent work.
Houbraken makes the statement that his teacher was Nicolaes Berchem. It is accepted as a fact, the presumption being that Berchem at the time was living in Amsterdam, in which case De Hooch would have become acquainted with Rembrandt’s style. That it did not affect him, immediately at any rate, is evident from his early work, which represents lively scenes of soldiersand young girls, painted rather in the manner of Dirck Hals or Duyster. It is possible, however, that even thus early the Rembrandt influence may have been operating upon him, as upon so many of the painters in Amsterdam at that time, by drawing his attention to problems of light, which eventually became the characteristic of his art.
From 1653, for two years, he served as “painter and footman” to Justus de la Grange, a rich merchant adventurer, with whom he lived both in Haarlem and The Hague. Then he married a girl from Delft and moved to that city, his name appearing among the members of its guild from 1655 to 1657. It was now that he came in touch with Vermeer, whose example helped to bring out all that was best in him. His pictures now became veritable poems of light, wrought with extraordinary conscientiousness and to a high pitch of refinement. He paints the courtyards of city houses, aglow in bright sunshine, cool rooms opening into warmly lighted ones, the vista often terminating in a street or canal. Always the varieties of light are rendered with delightful naturalness and in a way that gives a special charm to every detail which the light illumines. He is not very skilful in the representation of figures, but a master in the art of placing them. They and every object in the scene not only occupy their respective planes with absolute justness, but the position assigned to them has been selected with an unerring eye for decorative effect. Moreover, no artist has been so successful in rendering what visitors to Holland rarely fail to observe—the propriety and cleanliness of the Dutch home, and the sentiment thatseems to attach to every object in it and around it. Among the loveliest of these interiors is No. 426 in the Munich Pinakothek;The Mother, in the Berlin Gallery;The Interiorof the National Gallery;The PantryandThe Interior, in the Rijks Museum, and anInteriorin the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; while two notable outdoor scenes are the National Gallery’sA Dutch Courtyardand theFamily Groupof the Berlin Gallery. All these and others that might be cited belong to the period between 1655 and 1665. But the enthusiasm which these arouse is sadly dashed by many examples of his later manner, which are disconnected or restless in composition, hot in color rather than luminous, and heavy in the shadows, while others are marred by excessive hardness of surface and triteness of overwrought detail. The latest date that appears on any of his paintings is 1677, wherefore it is surmised that De Hooch’s death occurred about this time.
Ofthe painters bearing the name Van Mieris the most considerable was Frans van Mieris, surnamed the Elder, to distinguish him from his grandson, Frans van Mieris the Younger. Between them came Willem van Mieris, and the merit of the three as artists corresponds with the order of their succession.
The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou, though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass. The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of Hollandgenre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who, however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome.
Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Among the Munich examples isThe Sick Woman; she seems to have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman, while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of cordial to the light and gazing at it—a figure very familiar in Dutch genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superiorespritwith which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears inThe Oyster Breakfast. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the finerside of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in the Munich Gallery,The Girl Before a Mirror, which possesses the quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that of Metsu.
In the Art-History Museum of Vienna isA Lady and Her Doctor, in which he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory isCavalier in a Shop. On the right of the foreground is a mass of sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste of the eighteenth century.
Thedecline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society. For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste that aped
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORDCASPAR NETSCHERDRESDEN GALLERY
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORDCASPAR NETSCHERDRESDEN GALLERY
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORDCASPAR NETSCHER
DRESDEN GALLERY
the standards and manners of the French, whose influence became more and more powerful in Holland as the seventeenth century drew to a close.
Gerard de Lairesse, a painter of Flemish extraction, who settled in Amsterdam in the sixties, helped to establish the vogue of “taste.” He had a considerable following of students anddilettantito whom he expounded his views on art, assailing the vulgarity of such as Hals, and advocating the courtly style by which the theme is “ennobled.” He himself introduced the fashion for historical pictures, vapid and theatrical; and these qualities, interpreted in a minute and precise style, found their way into genre. The Dutch interiors became transformed into palatial chambers, decked with columns, amid which the inmates strut and pose with affectation of superior elegance and refinement. Such are the genre pictures of Caspar Netscher. Now and then, as inA Lady at the Clavichordof the Dresden Gallery, his motive and execution remind us that he had the privilege of being a pupil of Terborch; but these moments are rare. Usually his pictures are but petty and meretricious echoes of the great days of genre. Nor are his portraits less trivial. They are numerously represented in the Rijks Museum and other galleries, suggesting the popularity that he enjoyed and also explaining it; for, with few exceptions, they exhibit the shallowness and display of a society that, like the jackdaw in the fable, has borrowed the plumes and is aping the manners of the peacock. The same is true of the portraits of Godfried Schalcken, who also indulged in genre that supplemented the poverty of the artistic motive by the mild humor of its subjects. To these names of the decadence may be added that of Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland.
Before completing the story of Dutch genre with a separate notice of Terborch, Jan Steen, and Vermeer, allusion must be made to the “society pictures.” Their prototype appears in Flemish painting, in such canvases of fashionable life as we have already noted by Lucas van Valckenborch. The Dutch development of this motive, however, produced smaller canvases, very carefully composed, with superior quality of color and skilful rendering of detail. The leader in this class of picture was Dirck Hals (1591-1656), who was a pupil of his brother Frans; and it is the latter’s corporation pictures that became the model for corresponding groups of “society people,” banqueting, engaged in concerts, or disporting themselves in garden-parties. Dirck’s pictures are bouquets of gay color, animated with lively and characteristic action, and, notwithstanding their slightness of motive and superficiality of technique, form attractive spots in the galleries of Europe. He, like the rest of the society painters, varied these subjects with others of an unfashionable and sometimes coarse description, involving the amusements of the soldiery on furlough or in the intervals of peace. Willem Cornelisz Duyster, who died in 1635, painted creditably both these kinds of picture; and two other names, frequently met with in the galleries and not unacceptably, are Palamedesz (1601-1673) and Pieter Codde (1600-1678).
THE DESPATCHGERARD TERBORCHHAGUE MUSEUM
THE DESPATCHGERARD TERBORCHHAGUE MUSEUM
THE DESPATCHGERARD TERBORCH
HAGUE MUSEUM
TERBORCH is the aristocrat among Dutch painters, Rembrandt excepted. But Rembrandt’s is an aristocracy of genius, while Terborch’s is an aristocracy of talent and temperament. He owed something of this to his father, who, besides being a painter, held an official post in his native town, Zwolle, where Gerard was born in 1617. The father had enlarged the horizon of his life, by travel and the study of foreign languages, and the son followed his example. He was already a good draftsman, when he moved to Haarlem to study with the landscape-painter, Pieter Molyn. After three years spent in Haarlem, during which he experienced the influence of Frans Hals, he spent some time in England and later in Italy. Then followed some five years in Amsterdam, where he profited by the example of Rembrandt. In 1646 he went to Münster, in Westphalia, being present there during the negotiations of the peace, mingling with the delegates and painting portraits, which he afterward embodied in the famous group-picture,The Peace of Münster, now in the National Gallery, to which it was presented by the late Sir Richard Wallace. On the completion of this picture in 1648 he visited Spain and made the acquaintance of Velasquez and his work. Returning to Holland, he spent four years in Zwolle, and then, in 1654, the year in which he married Gertrude Matthyssen, settled in Deventer. Here he continued to reside until his death in 1681.
All these details of his career are pertinent, for they point not only to the various influences, successively of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, under which he came, but also to the scarcely less important fact that he had mixed with a variety of men of parts and consequence and become acquainted with various kinds of civilizations. His experiences enabled him to form a very distinguished technique of his own, and at the same time cultivated in him an extraordinarily refined taste and a very high regard for the dignity of human nature. In technique, taste, and point of view he became essentially a true aristocrat.
His portraits eminently epitomize these qualities. Usually very small in size, they suggest Velasquez in miniature; exhibiting the same discretion in avoiding unnecessary accessories, the same eloquent use of blacks and grays, occasionally relieved with old rose or blue, and, despite their minuteness, a corresponding breadth and distinction of fluency and simplicity. All these traits of technique are the expression of his attitude toward his subject, which is essentially one of respect for its humanity. This attitude is a rarer one in portrait-painting than might be expected. Certainly in the Dutch School one is not impressed with its prevalence. There is characterization, good, bad, and indifferent, and the suggestion of the subject’s position in his or her social
OFFICER WRITING A LETTERGERARD TERBORCHDRESDEN GALLERY
OFFICER WRITING A LETTERGERARD TERBORCHDRESDEN GALLERY
OFFICER WRITING A LETTERGERARD TERBORCH
DRESDEN GALLERY
environment, but of the reverence for humanity as such, very little. Indeed, outside of the portraits by Rembrandt, Terborch, and occasionally Maes, I question if you will often find it.
A similar reverence for humanity and its environment—the product, I take it, of the artist’s high-bred respect for himself and his art—distinguishes also Terborch’s genre pictures. He began by painting guardroom scenes and continued to be fond of subjects in which officers and soldiers figured. Sometimes the circumstances are equivocal, but their salience is not enforced; indeed, as Bode points out, the models for the ladies appear to have been his sisters, while his brothers posed for the military. The scene and the occasion are but an excuse for a picture. In fact, the subject counts with him for very little; it is the pretext that it offers for pictorial representation in which he is interested first and last. And to this he brings an extraordinary degree of refined sensibility and of virile and at the same time exquisite realization.
The virility appears in the drawing and construction of his figures, to which Fromentin has paid so high a tribute in his analysis ofThe Gallant Soldier, in the Louvre. And, as the French critic points out, in discussing the representation of the man’s shoulder and arm, it is a virility tempered with extreme sensibility. It has nothing of the improvisation of Hals in the following of surfaces, but rather Velasquez’s mastery of plane-construction; only here, in the case of this small figure, it is not with the open palm but with most sensitive touch of finger-tips that we imagine ourselves discovering thereality of the form. Or, again, examine the wonderful example of drawing inThe Concertof the Berlin Gallery, where the foreground is occupied by a seated figure of a lady, whose back is toward us, as she plays the violoncello. Even more remarkable than the fine structural reality of the figure is its play of expression, as it bends over the instrument and seems to be vibrating to the touch of the strings. Again, what extraordinary realization of action, at once broadly and subtly characterized, appears in the two figures ofOfficer Writing a Letter, in the Dresden Gallery; or, in the same museum, in the figures of the mistress and her maid inLady Washing Her Hands; or in the action of the hands followed so absolutely by the gesture of the head in theOld Woman Peeling Applesof the Art-History Museum, Vienna! These are but examples, taken more or less at random, of Terborch’s gift of drawing, which in its mingling of virility and exquisite sensibility is unsurpassed in Holland painting.
Nor less admirable is the marvelous unity that he imparts to the whole scene. Tonality has much to do with it, yet that is but a means. The cause is in himself, in the reverence that he has even for the accessories in his pictures; and the result is a harmony that is at once esthetic and intellectual. Mind, as well as taste, has ordered everything. All the artists of Dutch genre had more or less the faculty of heightening the value of beauty in the accessories they used; but none, not even Vermeer, to so extraordinary a pitch of artistic propriety as Terborch.
His discretion in the selection is so choice, and his feeling for arrangement at once so big and simple and so concentrated, that the presence of his own high-bred feeling pervades almost every interior he has painted and makes its privacy a thing of exquisite aloofness and, if I may say so, of consecrated self-possession.
Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket inThe Concertof the Berlin Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red, black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention, distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony, Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, aplein-airist, while Terborch, true to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the invention and realization of histonal scheme that he is the superior of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a superior quality of mind.
JohannesorJan Vermeer, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters. Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken, until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under thenom de plumeof “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures, set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown
GIRL AT THE WINDOWJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERMETROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK
GIRL AT THE WINDOWJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERMETROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK
GIRL AT THE WINDOWJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK
by the records to have existed, are as yet unidentified; but it is assumed that the total output of his twenty years of activity did not much exceed the number already discovered. It falls far short of the productivity of most of the Dutch painters—a fact which has been explained by the scrupulous care with which Vermeer painted, and the degree of perfection to which he wrought each canvas.
The appreciation of Vermeer’s art has increased rapidly during the last twenty-five years, until to-day he is generally ranked as the finest of the artists of genre, and, as a painter, without rival in the Dutch School, while some are disposed to consider him the most accomplished painter in the history of art. These extreme admirers are, as a rule, painters, who find in Vermeer’s technique and point of view precisely what they value most highly in painting. For this artist is a modern among moderns. He is not so in the sense that Rembrandt’s influence is now being felt. The latter is indirect in its suggestion of a conception of beauty other than the classical, and in its equally indirect suggestion of the expressional value of light and of the symbolic use of form and color. Rembrandt’s appeal is rather to the mind; Vermeer’s to the eye. He saw the world as the modern painter sees it, enveloped in natural light, and rendered it, as the modern painter tries to render it, by a close discrimination of delicately different values. To produce a harmony he did not introduce an arbitrary tonality, but, following nature’s plan, drew all the local colors into a balanced relation by the unifying effects of diffused light. In this respect Vermeer was unique in the Dutch School, and it is because the artist of to-day, if he is alive to the modernspirit, works with the same motive and in the same way, that he prizes Vermeer so highly. If, as one enthusiast remarked to me, “the whole art of painting consists in the right relation of values, and there can be no doubt that it does, then Vermeer is the greatest painter that ever lived.”
The value of the criticism, of course, depends upon the acceptance of the major premise, respecting which this individual had no doubt. On the other hand, one may beg to doubt it, without depreciating Vermeer. For it comes dangerously near the position that the whole art of painting consists in its technique; it is an echo, in fact, of that old shibboleth of our youth, “art for art’s sake.” It lays undue stress on the purely sensuous appeal of painting, upon the “mint and cummin,” and neglects the “weightier matter” of possible appeal to the higher faculties of the imagination. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the method which Vermeer brought to such perfection, and which because of its perfection is so justly admired, is essentially one for small canvases. And it was not until Vermeer settled down to these that he developed his characteristic style.
The earliest of his dated pictures isThe Proposal, in the Dresden Gallery, which belongs to the year 1656. The figures are of life size, and the treatment is proportionately broad, almost “rough” as Bode says, who adds: “It does not yet show us Vermeer in his developed individuality.” Yet some elements of the latter are already established: the superb plasticity in the modeling of the forms and the frank enjoyment in local colors, the lemon yellow of the girl’s jacket forming a splendid spot
HEAD OF A GIRLJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERHAGUE GALLERY
HEAD OF A GIRLJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERHAGUE GALLERY
HEAD OF A GIRLJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
HAGUE GALLERY
against the equally brilliant scarlet of the young man’s coat. Again, a minor point, an Oriental rug of crimson and yellow and blue design appears here as in later pictures, such as theGirl with Water-Jugof the Metropolitan Museum. But the Dresden masterpiece of the artist’s youth—he was only twenty-four—differs from his later work not only in the size of the figures and breadth of brushwork, but also in the treatment of the chiaroscuro. The scene is not illumined with diffused light, but with a stroke of light which gives brilliance to the two principal figures and leaves the subordinate ones in shadow. It is an arrangement, suggestive of the example of Rembrandt, and hints at the fact that the picture was produced while Vermeer was still close to the influence of his teacher, Carel Fabritius.
Another early example, betraying the same influence, isDiana at Her Toiletof the Hague Gallery, which in the 1905 edition of the Catalogue is still assigned to Vermeer of Utrecht, though later criticism accepts it as by the artist of Delft. Closely following in subject aDiana and Her Nymphs, painted by Jacob van Loo in 1648, which is now in the Berlin Gallery, this picture is in the freer, looser method ofThe Proposal, and even repeats the same colors of red and yellow, though subtilized here to a delicate rose and a kind of snuff color. The light is still partially distributed so as to dapple the figures, and these are painted with a flickering brushstroke that helps to increase the fluttering effect of the light.
Two other examples have been acquired in recent years by the Hague Gallery: an allegorical picture,The New Testament, andHead of a Girl. In both are introduced the cool blue and white that characterize many of Vermeer’s later pictures. The subject of the former, which is owned by Dr. Bredius of The Hague, is curiously affected, representing a lady in blue and white silk costume, resting her foot on a globe, as she sits beside a table on which are a crucifix, chalice, and book. On the wall behind her hangs a large picture of Christ upon the cross, attended by Mary and John; and on the left of it is a superb tapestry of orange, blue, and mellow green, while a crystal ball is suspended from the ceiling. In contrast with the glowing warmth of the curtain and the shadowed warmth of the picture on the wall, the lady’s figure presents a cool, white-lighted spot. The plastic feeling is strongly pronounced, the brushwork wonderfully limpid and firm, and the tonality extraordinarily fine. For the picture is still a study of tone, in which it differs from theHead of a Girl. For the latter is represented in a clearly diffused light, which is brightest around the head, and illumines in a subtle way the tender flesh-tints of the face, the bluish-white linen head-dress, and the bright full blue of a portion of the gown. The face wears a charming expression of concentration. This picture, indeed, very decidedly forecasts Vermeer’s developed individuality, yet Bode places it among his earlier pieces, about 1656. To this period also probably belongs the beautifulSleeping Girl, recently acquired from the Rudolph Kann Collection by Mr. B. Altman.
To a somewhat later date following close on 1656 Bode assigns theView of Delft, one of the greatest treasures of the Hague Gallery. There is a record of its sale in 1696, together with two other landscapes, one ofwhich has disappeared, while the other is in the Six Collection in Amsterdam. The Hague picture is an unusual example of the artist, not only because it is a landscape, but also because of the warm light that pervades it. From a triangle of rosy yellowish foreground one looks across the quiet sheet of grayish-blue water to the line of houses of reddish-drab and brown bricks, and red and blue and yellow roofs, above which shows a high expanse of sky. The coloring, which again, it is to be observed, includes red and yellow, is brilliantly variegated, yet held in control by the stretches of sky and water. The ensemble is superbly artistic, while as a presentation of a late afternoon scene it could not be surpassed in naturalness. The picture, in fact, stands out among all the landscapes of the seventeenth century as being extraordinarily modern in feeling and manner, and its influence has been very great in the modern development of landscape-painting in Holland.
Another picture of the period immediately following 1656 isThe Cook, in the Rijks Museum. She is standing in front of a whitish wall, lighted from a window on the left, pouring milk into a red earthenware pitcher that stands upon the table. The latter hides the lower part of her figure, which is clad in a lemon-colored body, reddish-brown skirt, and deep-blue apron, while a white cap covers her head. Here in these details—cap against light wall, prominent note of blue, the three-quarter length of figure, the cool lighting from a window on the left, lastly, the plasticity of the form—we find the ingredients of Vermeer’s later manner; but as yet the brushwork has not the limpid exquisiteness, compressedyet fluent, of his full development. On the contrary, it is broad, inclined to roughness, loose and free, magnificent in the gusto with which it has been applied, and vigorously stimulating in its appeal to sense imagination.
Also in the Rijks Museum is a picture which recalls the fact that De Hooch was a member of the Guild of St. Luke in Delft from 1655 to 1657, and that, while he benefited most by contact with Vermeer, the latter was also somewhat influenced by him. For in this picture,The Letter, Vermeer seems to have experimented, not over-successfully, with De Hooch’s device of showing one room beyond another. For an anteroom opens into two others, side by side, in one of which on the black and white marble floor a lady is seated in an amber dress trimmed with ermine. She pauses in her playing of a lute to take a letter from a servant. The picture is exceedingly choice in color and technique, but the composition is a little awkward in its division into two parts—a device, by the way, that recalls De Hooch’sThe Visit, owned by Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer, the composition of which is open to a similar criticism.
Again, in the Rijks Museum isYoung Woman Reading a Letter. Here in the delicate modeling of the face one observes the exquisite gray tones that distinguish so many of the examples of Vermeer’s fully developed style. Also notable is the arrangement of the composition, the girl facing left, her feet hidden by a chair and table, the latter forming a dark spot so as to increase the luminosity on the figure and the wall. It is repeated very closely inThe Lady with a Pearl Necklaceof the Berlin Gallery, where chair and table occupy the same
THE COOKJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERSIX COLLECTION NOW IN RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THE COOKJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEERSIX COLLECTION NOW IN RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
THE COOKJOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
SIX COLLECTION NOW IN RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
position, and the girl stands between them with her hands similarly raised, only as she holds the necklace she looks up, instead of down to the table as in the other picture. She wears a canary-colored jacket edged with ermine, that appears again in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington’sLady with Lute. In the Berlin picture it sounds a note of liveliness that is exquisitely sustained in the silvery resonance of the lighted room; the effect of which is induced by the tones of olive in her skirt and the table-cloth, by a deep almost colorless blue drapery over the latter, and a shaft of dull yellow, formed by the velour of the window-curtain. The ensemble, in fact, is one of piquant decision and indescribable delicacy, illustrating Vermeer’s faculty of sight imagination, so that he not only renders what he sees, but actually creates.
Between Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan’sLady WritingandThe Lace-Makerof the Louvre there is a remarkable companionship of arrangement and feeling. In each case the figure is seated, bending over a table; the jacket is canary-colored, and blue is introduced in the table-cloth of the former picture and in a cushion in the other, while in both the sensitive expression of the head and hands is echoed in the delicate precision of the objects on the table. In both cases the luminosity of the scene is enhanced by a shadowed mass on the left of the foreground. Mr. Morgan’s picture in loveliness of color, exquisiteness of handling, and inexpressibly subtle feeling rivals its sister piece of the Louvre.
It is in this element of feeling alone that these two pictures possibly excel theGirl with Water-Jugof the Metropolitan Museum. For the latter’s beauty of color, with its deep bell-like note of blue and the resonance ofblue, more or less faintly hovering over the cap and kerchief and permeating the atmosphere, is unsurpassable. Perfect also is the handling of this picture, both as to its suggestion of the plastic reality of everything represented and its consummate delicacy of manipulation; while in one particular it surpasses both the others and is in Vermeer’s finest possible manner. This is the extraordinary propriety with which each detail of the composition is introduced. Everything has been selected and placed with the choicest discretion; nothing is confused or unexplained, everything is a triumph of incomparable simplicity and exquisite adjustment. Only, I repeat, in feeling; in the expression of the head, arms, and hands is there lacking something of the exquisitefinesseof the above two pictures and of certain other examples.
Occasionally, as inThe Coquetteof the Brunswick Gallery,A Lady at a Spinet, in the National Gallery, andThe Music Lesson, owned by Mr. Henry C. Frick, the figures display a consciousness of themselves or of the onlooker; their personality looks out from its own surroundings. On the other hand, it is rather a characteristic of Vermeer as of Terborch, that the people in his pictures seem immersed in themselves. The scene is wrapped in privacy, undisturbed by the suggestion of an outsider. But the most signal instance of a scene, actually arranged, and posed as if to be viewed by others, is the example ofThe Artist in His Studio, in the Czernin Gallery, Vienna. In color and mingled breadth and delicacy of treatment it is superb; but in place of the artist’s usual sincerity of feeling, it is possible to detect a suspicion of affectation.