Johannes Vermeer: biography Of This Delft Painter
When Johannes Vermeer died in December 1675, his wife Catharina was left in a very precarious financial situation. In a desperate plea for help that the widow sent to the authorities in the Netherlands, she claimed that she, In recent times, Vermeer had not sold any of his paintings which, together with the very high expenses accumulated by his family (made up of numerous children), led to a sudden attack (apoplexy? heart attack?) that took him to the grave in just two days.
It is known that Catharina Bolnes had to sell two of her husband’s paintings to the baker who supplied them with bread, Hendrick van Buyten, to settle two bills that remained unpaid. Actually, the widow of Johannes Vermeer had to make great efforts to catch up with the debts that the family had accumulated, which leads us to the next question: how can it be that one of the most famous painters in the history of art would he end up almost plunged into poverty?
Brief biography of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most admired painters
Salvador Dalí himself claimed that Vermeer was the best painter in history. With his particular style, the Catalan artist asked the Louvre to allow him to “spend a night” with the famous Lacemaker of Vermeer, who inspired his critical-paranoid study Sunflowerin which the young woman’s face appears surrounded by rhinoceros horns.
But the obsession with the Delft painter has also been experienced by other artists. The recovery of his work at the beginning of the 19th century was especially promoted by Theóphile Thoré-Bürger (1807-69), who contemplated the View of Delft in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague and was greatly impressed by its realism, which he compared with contemporary painters such as Gustave Courbet. And of course, the luminous brushstroke of the Delft artist fascinated the impressionists Auguste Renoir commented in wonder that The Lacemaker It was one of the two most outstanding paintings in the Louvre museum. The other was the Boarding to the island of Cytheraby Watteau.
Currently, just over thirty works are attributed to the Delft artist, some of them of dubious attribution. Clearly, his pictorial production was really scarce, partly due to the time he dedicated to painting each work. His main patron, who commissioned most of his paintings, was the wealthy Pieter van Ruijven, who acquired twenty of his paintings (including some of his best compositions), and assured him a certain economic stability that, as we have seen, It did not last over time.
The “Sphinx of Delft”
Thoré-Bürger nicknamed him, not without some reason, the Delft Sphinx, in allusion to the mystery that surrounds the painter’s life. Indeed, Until relatively recently, there was hardly any information about his career However, recent studies have managed to find some documents that demonstrate, among other things, that Johannes Vermeer was a renowned painter in the artistic circle of his hometown, since the Delft Painters’ Guild elected him its president on a couple of occasions. .
Johannes Vermeer was born, lived and died in Delft. He is not known to have stayed outside his hometown, with the exception of a brief trip to Amsterdam. In Delft he learned the art of painting; As they say, looking at the paintings that his father, Renyier Jansz, he had hanging them, with the aim of selling them, on the walls of the inn he ran. It could not be otherwise; Great artists have always been inspired by previous authors to develop their work.
In those years, Delft was a predominantly Protestant city, so the temples lacked the images that were common in Catholic churches. This considerably reduced the possibilities of artists, who had to work for another type of patron: the rich bourgeoisie of the prosperous United Provinces. These seven provinces had been politically grouped in 1579, with the Union of Utrecht, and from then on a new artistic panorama had begun to be drawn in the territory, in which cities such as Harlem or Amsterdam stood out.
Delft had enough artists at the time to speak of a Delft School, whose representatives, however, were not united by any other ties than the locality where they worked. This school includes, of course, Vermeer, its greatest representative.
Exchange of faith for love
Johannes took the light and tonality of his works from Delft. Although, for the most part, his paintings represent interiors (only two exteriors remain, the View of Delft and the alley of the same city), The light filtering through the windows perfectly captures the atmosphere of the painter’s hometown
In Vermeer’s work the same scenario is repeated: the studio where the painter worked, located on the upper floor of the house where he and his family lived. In 1653, at the age of twenty-one, the painter had married Catharina Bolnes and had finally entered the city’s guild of painters. The house to which he moved and where he founded his new family (made up of no less than 15 children, four of whom died as children) belonged to Catharina’s mother, María Thins, to whose abundant estate Vermeer owed the live from his art.
María Thins had finally managed to separate from her husband (who abused her and her two daughters) and settled in Delft. At first, the woman did not welcome the marriage of her daughter to Vermeer, since, in addition to both belonging to very different social spheres, there was the thorny problem of religion. And it is that the Thins family was Catholic, while Johannes Vermeer belonged to the city’s Calvinist majority
It is not clear whether Vermeer converted to Catholicism upon marriage or whether, on the contrary, he remained faithful to his Protestant faith. However, the relationship with her mother-in-law improved considerably after the wedding, which, together with the fact that two of her children (Ignatius and Franciscus) had names attached to the Jesuits, makes specialists think that the conversion probably did. was carried out. In any case, Vermeer lived until his death in his mother-in-law’s house, located in the Papist Quarter of Delft, where the Catholic minority lived.
The protagonists of the scenes that invariably take place in the studio of María Thins’ house are mostly women. Vermeer is the “painter of women” par excellence ; and not because she captures the best attributes of the female anatomy on her canvases, but because she captures them in everyday scenes, as if they were suddenly surprised by an unexpected spy.
Some of his best-known paintings bear witness to this intimate atmosphere; one of his most famous is Girl reading a letter in front of the open windowexecuted in 1657 and which is considered one of the most beautiful of the painter.
On the canvas, a young woman, whose features have been related to those of the painter’s wife, is absorbed in reading a letter. Several studies have led to the conclusion that Vermeer corrected the painting on numerous occasions, since the girl’s posture and headdress do not match the reflection in the window.
Since, in 1979, it was discovered through an x-ray that under the painting on the wall there was a painting of Cupid, it was believed that the Delft painter had also changed his mind regarding the decoration of the room. It was not until much later that it was certified that the layer of paint that covered Cupid corresponded to a period in which the painter had already died, which meant that, during Vermeer’s lifetime, Cupid was on the wall, which related the letter to a love theme. Currently, and after its restoration, the painting is exhibited with its original idea.
This would not be the only time that Catharina appeared in Johannes’ compositions; most likely the girl in blue (visibly pregnant) who also reads a letter in the box Blue letter reader (1663-64), as well as the woman dressed in yellow who contemplates her maid in Lady writing a letter and maid (1666-67), among many others.
As the scenes take place in the painter’s studio, we find repeated objects in many of his canvases: the chair with the arms ending in lion’s claws, the checkered pattern of the floor tiles, the arrangement of the windows, the map that often hangs on the back wall, the musical instruments… On the other hand, the women who appear In his compositions they usually wear the same accessories: the yellow ermine cape, the earrings and the pearl necklace… Vermeer was perfectly capable of composing several and diverse stories in the same setting.
The “Gioconda of the North”
Vermeer’s most famous painting may be The girl of the pearl, executed in 1665, in what would be the last period of his artistic production. The popularity of the canvas is due in particular to the film of the same name, released in 2004 and based on the book by the writer Tracy Chevalier. In the novel, the author presents the sitter as Griet, the fictitious servant of Vermeer’s house, who furtively poses for the painter wearing Catharina’s pearl earrings.
The reality is that we do not know the identity of the woman portrayed. Vermeer did not leave a record of who his models were, and even in the paintings in which it is believed that Catharina is the one represented we can only make conjectures. In any case, The girl of the pearl It is a different painting in the painter’s artistic corpus, since the woman stands against a neutral background (not in the typical study of his other interior works) and is dressed in a type of turban, which gives her an exotic air. Also notable is the mixture of naivety and eroticism that comes from her gaze and her gesture, something truly unusual in Vermeer’s work. On the other hand, the secrecy about the model and the aura of mystery that the portrait gives off have made the canvas known as The Mona Lisa of the North.
Allegories
But if there really exists a painting radically different from anything produced by Johannes Vermeer, it is his allegory of faithcompleted in 1674 (a year before his death) and which, along with The Art of Painting, are the only two allegorical paintings by the painter.
The Allegory of faith is a strangely “Catholic” picture that stands out clearly in a Protestant context Because, although we have already mentioned that Vermeer’s in-laws were Catholic (and that, surely, he himself converted with his marriage), let us not forget that Delft’s potential clients were mostly Calvinists. In fact, the first known owner of the canvas was a Protestant merchant, but it is not ruled out that Vermeer painted it in the first instance for a Catholic in his circle; possibly the Jesuits of Delft.
The allegorical language of the painting is complex. At the feet of the young woman who stars in the scene lies a bitten apple, an obvious symbol of original sin. Next to it, a snake has been hit by a stone, fortuitously sent by Christ. Although, as Cesare Ripa (1555-1622) records in his work Iconology, Faith must hold the chalice and the book, Vermeer arranges both elements on an altar. But perhaps the most surprising element of the work is the magnificent glass sphere that hangs from the ceiling, related to the soul and its faith in God.
The allegory of The art of painting It wasn’t always so obvious. The scene represents a painter with his back turned, whose face we do not see but who has traditionally been associated with Vermeer. The woman dressed in a silky blue dress would be Clío, the muse of history, represented again according to Ripa’s iconographic precepts: holding a wind instrument and a book and with her hair adorned with laurel.
