Mick Hartley

Andrew Graham-Dixon appears to have made some extraordinary discoveries about Johannes Vermeer that shed a new light on his life and work. He writes in the Sunday Times today.

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.

It seems that Vermeer was part of an “underground peace movement”, the Remonstrants, its membership predominantly women. He painted his most memorable works to honour them and the ideals in which they believed.

There’s even a possible identification of the subject of his most famous painting:

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.

In summary:

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?

Yes, there’s a book out later this month – Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.

For Vermeer in London, there’s currently a (free) showing – Double Vision – at Kenwood House of their Vermeer, The Guitar Player, alongside another almost identical painting on loan from Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose provenance is in doubt.