The Violence in Vermeer
In October, 2022, a man approached Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in the Mauritshuis museum, in The Hague, and rested his shaved head against the painting. He was not an eager art historian who believed that the work demanded the closest possible inspection and hoped to meet the subject eyeball to eyeball. (A not unreasonable plan: the speck of reflected light in each of the girl’s irises is a famous touch.) He was a climate protester, wearing a T-shirt that bore the slogan “Just Stop Oil,” and he was seeking to glue himself to the glass that shields the canvas from assault. A sidekick, similarly clad, then doused him with a canful of Campbell’s tomato soup, thus lending the stunt a mild but confusing flavor of Andy Warhol. The two men were barked at by angry visitors, removed by museum staff, and later charged with “violence against property.” The painting was undamaged. The planet continued on its fateful course. As for the girl with the earring, nothing changed. It was as though she had seen it all before.
Of the many ways in which people have tackled “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the adhesive method used that day is merely one. Others include the spectrometric, the iconographic, the gemological, and the horny. In 2018, eight microscopic paint samples taken from the work were examined for varieties in isotopic composition; you will be relieved to learn that “the data were consistent with seventeenth-century Dutch lead white.” Another study, in 2020, revealed that there was no perceptible hook attaching the earring to the girl’s ear; only in our mind’s credulous eye do we see an earring at all. Oh, and one small thing: the pearl is not a pearl. According to the catalogue of a comprehensive Vermeer exhibition, at the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, in 2023, it is “probable that in Vermeer’s work we are looking at imitation glass pearls, which in his time were mainly sold by Venetian glassblowers.”
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As for the pearl, so for the girl. She, too, is hard to catch. In a 2001 book on Vermeer, Anthony Bailey, a former staff writer for this magazine, tries to pin her down. “One wonders if the model’s name was Margriet, since that is the Dutch form of the Latin margarita, meaning ‘pearl,’ ” he writes. An alternative theory is that Vermeer employed one of his daughters, Maria, as the model. And don’t ignore Griet, the servant who sits for Vermeer in Tracy Chevalier’s novel “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1999). With her firm grasp of pictorial structure, Griet has no doubt that the painting needs the earring—“Without it there were only my eyes, my mouth, the band of my chemise.” As the artist unleashes his lead isotopes, the excitement mounts:
As yet, archival research has failed to substantiate this conversation, although it appears, more or less intact, in the 2003 movie version of Chevalier’s book, with Colin Firth, as a well-wigged Vermeer, issuing instructions to Scarlett Johansson, as Griet. Meanwhile, we have a fresh contender for the role of the girl in the painting. In a new book, “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found” (Norton), Andrew Graham-Dixon identifies her as Magdalena van Ruijven, the daughter of Vermeer’s most significant patrons, and offers a reason for her parted lips: “Not only does the girl seem on the point of utterance, she has the air of someone about to say the most urgent thing they have ever said.”
The someone, we are told, is another Magdalena—Mary Magdalene, who, in the darkness of early morning, goes to Christ’s tomb and finds it empty. She sees Jesus but believes him to be the gardener. (Is there a more wonderful example of mistaken identity—revelation delayed by human error?) In the words of St. John’s Gospel, “She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.” Virtuous women, it would seem, do open their mouths in paintings. That momentous turning, according to Graham-Dixon, is what we observe in Vermeer’s picture. As the girl looks over her shoulder, we are standing where Christ stood. And what of the pearl? “It is no simple jewel,” Graham-Dixon writes, “but a reflection of the state of her soul, bursting with joy and irradiated with divine light.” Try sticking your head to that.
How, why, and by what right does a person produce tranquil art in the midst, or the wake, of tumultuous times? Well, it helps if you hail from flat, contested northern lands. Think of Watteau, born on the join between present-day France and Belgium, in 1684, six years after the end of the Franco-Dutch War. Twenty-seven miles south lies the town where Matisse grew up and which German soldiers invaded when he was a year and a day old, at the dawn of 1871. (At the far end of his life, the éclat of his cutouts was conjured under Nazi occupation. His daughter, Marguerite, was tortured by the Gestapo.) Matisse’s father began in the textile trade, as did Reynier Jansz Vermeer, who was living in Amsterdam and engaged in the manufacture of caffa, a costly woven fabric, when he met a woman named Digna Baltens. They married in 1615, and it was not until 1632 that their son, Johannes, was born. As befits such an environment, his handling of tactile stuff—not just silk and fur but bread and brickwork, too—never deserted him. The raised ridges of a map, unrolled and hung on a wall, asked to be registered in paint.
There are areas in the life of Vermeer, who died in his forties, in 1675, that have never been mapped. In all likelihood, they never will be. Given how acutely some of his work refers to Italian artists of the previous generation, for instance, it’s not inconceivable that he went to Italy; regardless, no record of the visit exists. To the millions of people who recognize “Girl with a Pearl Earring” or “The Lacemaker,” Vermeer is little more than a name and a place: Delft, where his life began and ended, and where he is buried in the Oude Kerk, or old church. (A sign in the church declares that the coffin of one of his children was laid on top of his.) Beyond the bounds of Delft, the living Vermeer was largely uncelebrated. His reputation, such as it was, went into eclipse, until he was reclaimed and illuminated by French critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
An earlier book by Graham-Dixon—his vigorous biography of Caravaggio, from 2010—was alert to the brunt of pestilence and the ardors of the Counter-Reformation, and “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found,” likewise, deals with a deeper background. Thanks to the religious hostilities that burst open in the late sixteenth century, the prevailing hue is blood. Among the atrocities committed by Catholic Spanish-led forces in the Low Countries, bent on the suppression of local rebels, was the 1576 Sack of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish troops. In Graham-Dixon’s account, they “descended on the city like wolves.” As many as eight thousand citizens were massacred. One of the children who somehow survived the slaughter grew up to be the maternal grandfather of Vermeer.
The reader who pauses for breath, after this recitation of horrors, is soon rewarded by being plunged into a yet more catastrophic mire. The Thirty Years’ War, which was concluded by the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, spread across mainland Europe and killed some eight million people. Aware that its battlefields have been exhaustively tilled by historians, Graham-Dixon prefers, wisely, to snag our attention on a few details that we would rather forget. “People were so crazed by hunger that they tore the bodies of dead criminals from gallows and gibbet,” he writes. Vermeer, in short, grew up in a world where the living consumed the departed. One German mother, we are told, ate her own son.
What does all this have to do, pray, with a woman pouring milk from a jug, or reading a letter, or patiently making lace—the kind of activity, that is, pursued in Vermeer’s art? One answer would be that the more savage the storm, the more urgent the need for safe havens. If you wanted to live in peace, however frail; to worship as you wished, however furtively; to prosper in business and to educate your children; to walk the streets without dread and to die a natural death, uneaten; if that was your desire, in the guts of the seventeenth century, then Holland was the best, maybe the only, place to be. There was even a transport network, via trekschuiten, horse-drawn barges that travelled along the canals; an appendix to “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found” lists a timetable, showing that the daytime service from Delft to The Hague ran every half hour. Given what the rest of Europe endured, such benign civic efficiency verges on the comic. Indoors, reportedly, one came across a corresponding ease, to the surprise of outsiders. An English visitor of the period is cited by Graham-Dixon:
Compare this with the United States of 2026, where you can’t hear yourself think for the jangle. There is a trap, though. All too readily, we can slide into treating Vermeer as an agreeable intimist—a transcriber of the smooth-running niceties of the domestic. Hence the merchandise that I found, recently, in a gift shop on the Voldersgracht, in central Delft, where Vermeer once lived: placemats, cookie tins, tote bags, and chocolate bars adorned with images from his art. Many major painters get the same treatment these days, but Vermeer has more than most to lose from the indignity, because of the mysterious tensions in his work that are not there for the selling. One thing that sets him apart from a contemporary such as Pieter de Hooch, to whom he is instinctively likened, is a murmur that the stillness may not hold. Something in these quiet rooms is getting ready to happen. The letter, held in a lady’s hand, might bring transforming news. The paradox is well captured by Lawrence Gowing, in an elegant monograph on Vermeer, from 1952:
At the start of “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found,” Graham-Dixon pays tribute to Gowing, but he ventures along very different paths. Where Gowing concentrates on what he calls the “unremitting internal pressure” of Vermeer’s compositions, Graham-Dixon gauges the pressures from outside. His contention is that the people who inhabit the paintings are breathing a specific spiritual atmosphere, bred by the company that Vermeer kept. The parents of Magdalena, say, nominated by Graham-Dixon as the “one plausible candidate” for the girl with the earring, were Maria de Knuijt and Pieter Claesz van Ruijven. A wealthy couple, they owned around twenty pictures by Vermeer, the majority of his known output, keeping them in their house in Delft and finally bequeathing them to Magdalena. They are listed in an inventory of possessions that was compiled after she died, in 1682.
Pieter van Ruijven was a Remonstrant—that is, he belonged to a radical Protestant movement whose roots lay in the teachings of Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). Most of Arminius’s family had been murdered by Spanish soldiers. Schooled in Calvinism, he had moved away from the severity of its doctrines, notably that of a predestined elect, toward a more tolerant (and, among the Dutch, grudgingly tolerated) faith. Remonstrants mustered, semi-secretly, in private houses, or schuilkerken, hidden churches. One such meeting place was the home of van Ruijven and his wife: such, at any rate, is the thesis propounded by Graham-Dixon. He sets the imagined scene:
This becomes the wellspring of the book. From it flows a new interpretation of most, though not all, of Vermeer’s work. At the Met, for instance, “A Maid Asleep” (or, “A drunken sleeping maid at a table,” as it was described when sold at auction, in 1696) shows not a young hedonist who has been overdoing the booze, as might be inferred from the glass in front of her, but someone who has just unveiled her heart to God. Her ghost of a smile should be parsed as beatific rapture. As for the glass, the affinity is with communion wine. In the same vein, if you are struck by Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance,” in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and by the curious fact that the balance is empty, Graham-Dixon can explain. Indicating the jewels on the table in front of her, he says that she has undone them and laid them down, the better to renounce her worldly possessions for higher treasures: “She has put her conscience in the scales, and found it so light as to be weightless. She has done no evil, bears no burden of sin.”
It’s hard to predict how readers of the book will respond to these readings of the art. They are delivered with a confident brio, though the author is careful to enter caveats. Of “Woman Holding a Balance,” he says, “Such an image might have spoken clearly and directly to pious women gathered in Maria de Knuijt’s house, giving a shape and a direction to their prayers, also perhaps acting as a catalyst for their discussions or free prophecies.” Fair enough, though what I want to ask is, How would that catalysis function in practice? Did somebody guide the assembled worshippers through the import of each painting, like a teacher with a chalkboard? Or was everyone present sufficiently schooled in Vermeer’s symbolic array? It was, after all, a somewhat private mythology, more so than its Italian Renaissance counterparts. When Botticelli or Fra Angelico painted the infant Jesus holding a pomegranate, they could rely on viewers who understood that the blood-red fruit denoted the Resurrection. Who in Delft, however, outside the Remonstrant clan, would know that your soul could be measured like a gold coin, or, for that matter, hung from your ear?
Parts of the Vermeer industry, I suspect, will bridle at the determined speculation that lends such energy to “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.” In an essay published in 2001, “Religion in the Art and Life of Vermeer,” Valerie Hedquist devotes no more than a few brief lines to the Remonstrant cause. A greater emphasis, instead, is laid on the painter’s marriage to Catharina Bolnes, in April, 1653. Bolnes was a Catholic, as was her rich and frankly terrifying mother, Maria Thins, with whom the young couple lodged. (If anyone ever compiles a list titled “Sitcoms of the Dutch Golden Age,” that setup would be the winner.) Hedquist comments, “Without documentation confirming Vermeer’s individual acceptance of Roman Catholicism, it is difficult to state definitively that he converted. Nevertheless, his marriage and eventual living situation firmly place him in the Roman Catholic center of Delft.” So, where did Vermeer belong, or take refuge: in the hidden church or the family home? No wonder the pictures are so coded and discreet. They might have been painted by a spy.
Getting into the Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, in 2023, was tough. Having failed to secure a ticket, I was taunted with pitying one-upmanship by acquaintances who had had more success. “You should have applied to be a friend of the museum beforehand,” they said, as if the chance to peer at twenty-eight Vermeers, through a swarm of rival fans, were akin to attending the hottest Broadway play. To see the paintings was, in a way, less important than the social exultation of having seen them. Hit exhibitions are seldom an unalloyed delight, and Vermeer, in particular, does not take kindly to being mobbed. He survived more than a hundred and fifty years of restful obscurity, and sometimes one can’t help wishing, for his sake, that he could dwindle back into the gloom.
A better way to study Vermeer is the Barney technique. It goes like this:
Barney is the orderly who guarded Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s “The Silence of the Lambs.” This exchange comes from the sequel, “Hannibal,” and Barney’s interlocutor is Clarice Starling. Lecter is now at liberty. His taste in art was always less eccentric than his taste in flesh, and Barney has been well advised. To arrive at a lone Vermeer at the end of a patient pilgrimage is to invest the work with the meditated gravity that it deserves.
Not that the itinerary is too arduous. The Eastern Seaboard is especially fertile, though the thieves who relieved the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of its entrancing Vermeer, “The Concert,” in 1990, saved you a trip to Boston. Flee to Europe for a still richer harvest—first to London and Edinburgh, and thence to Dublin for “Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid,” which has itself been stolen, twice, once for the I.R.A. and once by a local gangster. In spite of that thrilling history, the painting leaves Graham-Dixon unmoved. The light of it is “hard as stone,” he says, and he’s not wrong; yet I confess to being arrested, so to speak. The folded arms of the servant, who stares away from her mistress and out of the casement, tell a tale of long-suffering attendance, and, as so often in Vermeer-watching, you find yourself tempted to dig up a concealed plot.
From here, the Barney tour becomes a homing in. Berlin, Braunschweig, and Frankfurt. Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, for “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” and the spectral mirroring of her features in the glass. (The whole museum, I’d say, need detain you no longer than a lifetime.) Paris for “The Lacemaker,” if you don’t mind camping out in the line for the Louvre, plus Vienna for “The Art of Painting,” if you can scrub from your brain the fact that it was once owned by Adolf Hitler. “Cool colour is not a visual preference,” the art historian Kenneth Clark remarked of this crowning masterwork, “but expresses a complete attitude of mind.” He also compared the seated figure of the painter—framed from behind, and maybe intended as a self-portrait—to a giant cockroach. So, that’s what Vermeer was like.
In the end, you come to the Netherlands, and to the hints of Vermeer that litter the cityscape, clueing you in before you reach the pictures. Shutters decorated with two black triangles? View them in Delft, on a dwelling on the Voldersgracht, and then, again, in Vermeer’s “View of Delft,” in The Hague. The journey from one town to the other took me twelve minutes by train, though the slower pace of a trekschuit, three hundred and fifty years ago, would have been more suitable, and I kept looking out for a horse. As for the Mauritshuis, it provides further proof, if any were needed, that to greet a painting in reproduction is to see it through a glass, darkly. See it face to face, wherever you can, and in proximity to the faces of other works; wittily positioned beside “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” for example, is another girl with a pearl earring, depicted in profile by Gerard ter Borch. (Do the two girls whisper to each other, after hours?) Then, there’s a dramatic landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, with gray clouds muttering on high and brighter blues impending in the sky below. Two stretches of yellow-brown wall have caught the sun.
For the same details, walk into a nearby room and consult “View of Delft,” which was painted a few years earlier. The main difference is that Ruisdael cranes upward, to behold a castle on a hill, whereas Vermeer levels his gaze across open water. For all the splendor of Ruisdael’s picture, it is the second that partakes—in ways that countless gallerygoers have keenly felt but struggled to articulate—of the miraculous. My favorite sentence in Graham-Dixon’s book has him probing the nitty-gritty of Vermeer’s roofs: “It is possible that he ground actual red terracotta tiles in with his pigments and oil to get the required result.” So compelling are these critical closeups that I found myself leaning in to investigate the surface of a yellow roof on the right, and found it stippled and dotted, as if it bore a message in Braille. I was warned away by a guard, despite the fact that my shirt was not blazoned with “Just Stop Oil.” Breaking news: oils can just stop you in your tracks.
Needless to say, I am not the only person to glory in that luminescent patch. As Proustians and Vermeer junkies alike will rush to remind you, it’s one of the last things witnessed by Bergotte, a fictional writer, in “Remembrance of Things Past.”(Before expiring, he blames his swoon on undercooked potatoes.) What tends to be overlooked, in the aesthetic shock, is Proust’s elaborate hymn to its moral and spiritual implications. Brace yourself:
That draws near, I think, to the territory laid out by Graham-Dixon. He regards the radiance in “View of Delft” both as that of a familiar, peaceable town, glittering after the rains and tempests of a brutal epoch, and as a vision of the heavenly city, as vouchsafed in the Book of Revelation. To look at the painting, he writes, is to sense “a rainbow at our backs.”
Amen to that—and, indeed, to the arguments that are sustained throughout “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.” You may disagree with them, fiercely so, but they could not be more persuasively put, and they rescue Vermeer from the shelf, as it were, on which we have placed him for our convenience. Far from being “forever unknown,” in Proust’s phrase, he is now in danger, like his countryman van Gogh, of being blurred and dulled by global fame. Graham-Dixon’s task, as it was in his biography of Caravaggio, is to resacralize an art that the current age consigns to the realms of the secular. In opting for Caravaggio the sexually roistering bad boy and Vermeer the charming celebrant of the mundane, we discard the imprint of faith. Graham-Dixon presses its claim afresh, and, in the process, discovers it everywhere. The light that falls from the left, through half-open windows, onto Vermeer’s walls, some of them bare, testifies not so much to an overcast Dutch day as to a suffusion of grace. Andrew Graham-Dixon may be on a mission, but so, he believes, was Vermeer. “He painted for the same reason that people pray: to make things come true.” ♦