Johannes Vermeer: ​​biography of this painter from Delft

When Johannes Vermeer died in December 1675, his wife Catharina was left in a rather precarious financial situation. In a desperate plea for help that the widow herself sent to the authorities in the Netherlands, she stated that, 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 barely 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 unpaid bills. Indeed, the widow of Johannes Vermeer had to go to great lengths to catch up on the debts the family had accumulated, which which leads us to the following question: how is it possible that one of the most famous painters in the history of art ended 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, which inspired his critical-paranoid study Sunflower, in which the face of the young woman 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 he was strongly impressed by his realism, which he compared with contemporary painters such as Gustave Courbet. And of course, the luminous brushwork of the Delft artist fascinated the impressionists. Auguste Renoir marveled 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 Kythera, from Watteau.

Currently, the artist from Delft is awarded just over thirty works, some of them of doubtful attribution. By all accounts, his pictorial production was really scarce, partly because of the time he devoted to painting each work. His main patron, who commissioned most of his paintings, was the wealthy Pieter van Ruijven, who purchased twenty of his paintings. (among them, some of his best compositions), and assured him a certain economic stability that, as we have seen, did not last in the time.

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The "Delft Sphinx"

Thoré-Bürger nicknamed him, not without reason, the delft sphinx, alluding to the mystery that surrounds the life of the painter. Indeed, Until relatively recently, little information was available about its trajectory.. However, recent studies have managed to find some documents that show, among other things, that Johannes Vermeer was a painter. He was recognized in the artistic circle of his hometown, since the Delft painters' guild elected him its president in a couple of occasions.

Johannes Vermeer was born, lived and died in Delft. He is not known to stay outside his hometown, with the exception of a brief trip to Amsterdam. In Delft he learned the art of painting; according to what they say, observing the paintings that his father, Renyier Jansz, had hung, with the aim of selling them, on the walls of the inn that 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 city with a Protestant majority, so the temples lacked the images that were common in Catholic churches. This considerably reduced the possibilities of the artists, who had to work for another type of patron: the wealthy bourgeois 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 scene had begun to emerge in the territory, in which cities such as Harlem or Amsterdam.

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.

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change faith for love

From Delft Johannes took the light and the tonality of his works. Despite the fact that most of his paintings represent interiors (only two exteriors remain, the View of Delft and the alley of the same city), the light that filters through the windows perfectly captures the atmosphere of the painter's hometown.

The same scenario is repeated in Vermeer's work: 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 in which he founded his new family (consisting of no less than 15 children, four of whom died as children) belonged to Catharina's mother, Maria Thins, to whose rich estate Vermeer owed his life the art of him

Maria Thins had finally managed to separate from her husband (who mistreated her and her two daughters) and settle in Delft. At first, the woman did not look favorably on her daughter's marriage to Vermeer, since, In addition to both belonging to very different social spheres, there was the thorny problem of the religion. And it is that the Thins family was Catholic, while Johannes Vermeer belonged to the city's Calvinist majority.

It is not clear if Vermeer converted to Catholicism upon marriage or if, instead, he remained faithful to his Protestant faith. However, his relationship with his mother-in-law improved considerably after the wedding, which, together with the fact that two of his sons (Ignatius and Franciscus) carried names attached to the Jesuits, makes specialists think that, probably, the conversion did effected In any case, Vermeer lived until his death in the house of his mother-in-law, located in the Papist Quarter of Delft, where the Catholic minority lived.

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intimate scenes

The protagonists of the scenes that invariably take place in the study of María Thins' house are mostly women. Vermeer is the "painter of women" par excellence; and not because he captures the best attributes of the female anatomy on his canvases, but because he captures them in everyday scenes, as if they were suddenly surprised by an unexpected spy.

Some of his best-known paintings testify to this intimate atmosphere; one of the most famous is Girl reading a letter in front of the open window, executed in 1657 and which is considered one of the painter's most beautiful.

On the canvas, a young woman, whose features have been related to those of the painter's wife, is engrossed 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 stay. It was not until much later that it was certified that the layer of paint that covered the Cupid corresponded to a period in which the painter was already she had passed away, which meant that, in Vermeer's lifetime, the Cupid was on the wall, which related the letter to a theme loving. 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 painting card reader in blue (1663-64), as well as the woman dressed in yellow who contemplates her servant 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 layout of the windows, the map that often musical instruments hang from the back wall... On the other hand, the women who appear in his compositions 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 scenery.

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The "Mona Lisa of the North"

Perhaps Vermeer's most famous painting is 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 dressed in Catharina's pearl earrings.

The reality is that we do not know the identity of the woman portrayed. Vermeer did not record who his models were, and even in the paintings in which Catharina is believed to be depicted we can only conjecture. 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 on the typical study of his other interior works) and she is dressed in a kind of turban, which gives her an air exotic. The mixture of ingenuity and eroticism emanating from his gaze and his gesture is also remarkable, 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 led to the canvas being known as The Mona Lisa of the North.

allegories

But if there really is a picture that is radically different from everything produced by Johannes Vermeer, it is his allegory of faith, completed in 1674 (one 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 in a Protestant context. Because, although we have already commented that Vermeer's political family was Catholic (and that, surely, he himself converted with his marriage), let's not forget that Delft's potential customers were mostly calvinists. In fact, the first known owner of the canvas was a merchant Protestant, but it is not ruled out that Vermeer painted it in the first instance for a Catholic from the circle of him; possibly the Delft Jesuits.

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 door, a serpent has been hit by a stone, fortuitously sent by Christ. Although, according to Cesare Ripa (1555-1622) 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 from behind, whose face we do not see but who has traditionally been associated with Vermeer. The woman dressed in a silky blue dress would be Clio, the muse of history, represented again according to the Ripa's iconographic precepts: she holding a wind instrument and a book and her hair adorned with laurel.