Vermeer — the riddle of the mysterious Dutch master is solved at last
For centuries the Girl with a Pearl Earring painter’s life was a closed book. After a decade in the archives, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon reveals his links to a radical sect
Johannes Vermeer, the painter of View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring, is one of the world’s most popular artists, but also one of the most mysterious. Born in 1632, he died at the age of 43 and almost immediately fell into an obscurity that endured for nearly 200 years.
“The Sphinx of Delft” was the nickname given to him by Théophile Thoré, the French art critic who rediscovered him in the mid-19th century. He has become sensationally popular — a retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2023 sold out in days — but has remained a riddle. His life is a closed book and his hypnotically intense pictures, many of which show women lost in thought in interiors flooded with light, have defeated all attempts to decipher them.
Having spent much of the past decade delving into the rich historical archives in Vermeer’s home town of Delft, as well as nearby Rotterdam, I have been lucky enough to unearth a mass of new information about the painter and his network of friends and patrons. As a result, he can step forward at last from the shadows, no longer an enigma but a man with many friends (and a few enemies too), who was deeply engaged in the world, and painted because he had important things to say.
The real Vermeer turns out to have been a thoroughly good person. He was part of an underground peace movement, its membership predominantly women. He painted his most memorable works to honour them and the ideals in which they believed.
None of this was known or even guessed at before, although there were always hints in the historical record that there was something unusual about the curious case of Vermeer.
He was unique in many ways, not least in having painted virtually all his work for a single husband and wife to hang on the walls of their canalside home in Delft. No other great artist ever worked so exclusively for a single client and for a single place — which explains, among other things, why Vermeer was never famous, and quickly forgotten after he died.
The husband and wife were Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt. They lived at a house called the Golden Eagle, filled with Vermeer’s most famous paintings. It is the location of that house, unknown until discovered late last year by a friend called Titus van Hille searching the Delft archives on my behalf, that contains the key to unriddling Vermeer, his work, and the world within which he moved.
The Van Ruijvens’s house stood on the Oude Canal in Delft, in the heart of the old town. It is still there — now very nice student accommodation for Delft University — and so too, directly behind it, is the hidden church of a once proscribed religious movement, formed in rebellion against the Dutch Reformed Calvinists, whose adherents called themselves Remonstrants.
Comparison of the site as it is today with the data of the past makes it clear that Vermeer depicted both buildings in one of his best-loved pictures, known as The Little Street and displayed in the Rijksmuseum. He signed his name in the whitewash beneath the window of his patrons’ home. This has long been regarded as a merely topographical picture, but it is nothing of the kind. It is a hymn to the benevolent influence of the Remonstrant Church on the neighbourhood that it occupies, depicted by Vermeer as a kind of heaven on earth: a place where children play under the gentle supervision of women cleaning and sewing, as the sun breaks through the clouds above.
The proximity of the Van Ruijven household to Delft’s hidden Remonstrant church was no coincidence. Neither was the presence of Vermeer’s paintings in the home of such people. Pieter Claesz van Ruijven was from a family of diehard Remonstrants, his father and grandfather having risked imprisonment by supporting the movement at a time when it was outlawed throughout the Dutch Republic. His wife, Maria de Knuijt, was not only a Remonstrant herself but also participated in the activities of a yet more radical outgrowth of the movement whose followers became known as Collegiants.
Research into Vermeer’s family background shows that he was born and brought up a Remonstrant, and that he too participated in the gatherings of the Collegiants. The same is true of his mother and father, sister and brother-in-law, indeed of almost everyone in his immediate circle. His wife was a Catholic, but she too must have been in sympathy with the Remonstrants, or she could not have married a man so committed to their cause.
Who were these Remonstrants and their brethren, the Collegiants? They were idealistic, wise and in many ways ahead of their time. They were evangelical Christians, but with a difference, in that they were deeply suspicious of the established churches and dreamt of a time when all followers of Christ would forget their dogmas and differences. They preferred to take their lead from no priest or preacher but from the words of Christ, in particular those of the Sermon on the Mount: “Suffer the little children” and “Love thine enemy” were among the few rules they set themselves.
They modelled their own lives on those of Christ’s apostles or his female followers such as Mary Magdalene, whom they greatly revered. Although they have been largely (and unjustly) forgotten, these Dutch men and women were among the most significant forerunners of the Enlightenment and gave enduring expression to the values on which a tolerant and liberal society — our own, even — might be based.
They were pacifists who dared to dream of a Europe in which all nations would live at peace with one another. They were staunch republicans, who regarded even the most supposedly benevolent monarch as a tyrant in waiting. They were egalitarian and extremely charitable, the richest among them giving most of their money away to found orphanages or places of refuge for the old and infirm.
Above all, they believed in, and passionately upheld, the universal freedom of conscience. No one should be constrained to a particular belief, let alone punished or killed for that belief. All should be allowed to practise whatever religion they chose, without fear of persecution. By this they included not only those of every Christian persuasion, but Jews and Muslims too. Tolerance was their golden rule, and it was to be absolute.
Collegiants also believed in the absolute equality of men and women. In fact the majority of Collegiants were women. Many would attend services at the Remonstrant church, where sermons were preached on the virtues of open-mindedness. But they increasingly embraced the ideal of a Christianity without churches of any kind, holding meetings for prayer and Bible reading at home, away from the supervision of priests.
Maria de Knuijt held such meetings weekly at the Golden Eagle, where she and her female friends would worship and make music together. Maria, rather than Pieter, was Vermeer’s principal patron. We know this because she left him a large amount of money in her will (it is the only such bequest recorded in all the annals of Dutch art history). It was she who commissioned and owned most of his life’s work. She did so not merely to decorate her home, but to furnish herself and her friends with images that would express their hopes and ideals, inspire their prayers and encourage their pious reflections.
The assumption behind nearly all writing on Vermeer thus far has been that his works were painted for the open market and should therefore be regarded as genre paintings intended to amuse or entertain. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every single one of his paintings was inspired by the religious beliefs cherished by Maria de Knuijt and those close to her, who included Vermeer himself. Her house was like a church, all of Vermeer’s pictures like a single fresco cycle painted for that church.
Once this is grasped, his pictures effortlessly reveal themselves in their true colours, allowing us finally to see and understand them on their own terms. All sorts of things that have until now seemed deeply puzzling about Vermeer’s work — its solemnity of mood, its meditative stillness, its almost exclusively female cast of characters — make perfect sense once we know that it was all created for a group of extremely religious, highly idealistic women who met weekly in the rooms where these pictures once hung.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, made even more famous by Tracy Chevalier’s fictionalised account of the girl in her novel and the film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, is likely to be a portrait of Maria and Pieter’s daughter, Magdalena. She would have been 12 in the autumn of 1667, and assuming that she was a Collegiant like her parents, she would have solemnised her commitment to Christ at that age. The picture shows her marking that by dressing as Mary Magdalene, turning, with such depth of feeling, to Jesus Christ.
Previously unheralded aspects of Vermeer’s work suddenly become clear once its religious or spiritual aspect is properly understood. Many of his pictures were conceived and painted in pairs, a fact not previously noted (and further obscured by the titles under which they are known, all of which are modern inventions and deeply misleading).
For example, the so-called The Concert and so-called The Music Lesson, the former stolen from Boston some years ago, the latter now in the Royal Collection, are companion pictures that were designed to hang side by side: what they show us across two canvases is Maria’s very own group of Collegiants making music as they did at the end of their meetings, thereby not only demonstrating the harmony of their little group but presenting us with a microcosm of the world at peace, as it might be if all learnt the lesson of mutual tolerance.
Likewise, The Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum and Woman Holding a Balance in Washington’s National Gallery of Art, treated by all modern writers on Vermeer as if they were separate pictures, were unquestionably created as a pair. Painted to the same scale as one another, each shows a woman weighing or measuring, illuminated by an identically orientated window, and standing against a wall into which the same nail has been hammered in the same place.
What they represent are the two sides of a Collegiant woman’s best self. On the one hand she reflects on her own conduct, weighs up her actions against her conscience. On the other, she behaves charitably to others, giving of her time and her labour to help those less fortunate than herself. The subject of Woman Holding a Balance, standing before a painting of the Last Judgment, is judging herself and finding that she has done no evil, the scales she holds being quite empty and therefore as light as her conscience.
The so-called milkmaid is measuring out milk and about to crumble bread into it, preparing a dish traditionally distributed among the poor, whose teeth were often too weak for solid food. The woman weighing is reflecting, assessing, meditating. The woman pouring milk is working for others, measuring their needs. Like Martha and Mary in the Bible, they stand for faith and works, the spiritual life and the active life. The nail in the wall is there to remind them (and us) of Christ’s own example, of the nails that pierced his hand and feet when he was crucified at Golgotha.
The realisation that all of Vermeer’s paintings are spiritually motivated flies in the face of most modern preconceptions about his work. But it is my conviction that all this may seem somehow less shocking than expected. It may even come as a relief. I think people have always instinctively known that there was something of this kind afoot in Vermeer’s work, that it is too serious, too beautiful, too otherworldly for the more literal interpretations of it to be true. Why else would so many hundreds of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to see his work each time a retrospective of it is staged?
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon is published on Oct 23 (Allen Lane £30 pp416). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Andrew Graham-Dixon will give a lecture on Vermeer to launch his new book at Friends House, London, on Oct 23. For tickets go to andrewgrahamdixon.com