Because so many Dutch citizens desired to purchase paintings, a lively art market arose. Reynier Vermeer recognized this as an excellent business opportunity early on, and was one of the first professional art dealers in Delft (the other was Abraham de Cooge, who registered with the guild a year after Vermeer).
At this time, the guilds played a dominant role in the economic life of Dutch towns. There were guilds of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers (as the eighteenth-century nursery rhyme has it), as well as fishmongers, grocers, shoemakers, tailors, bargemen, porters, and artisans. These guilds were something like today’s unions—they restricted participation in the regulated profession to citizens of the towns who possessed certain qualifications (in some cases, such as the brewers’ guild in Ghent in the sixteenth century, membership was limited to sons of existing members). The guilds also regulated the work practices and quality control of the activity, so they not only provided security against competition for its members but also protected consumers from shoddy or unsafe goods. The guilds collected dues from their members, which they used for contributions to local charitable institutions, especially those set up for sick, incapacitated, or elderly guild members and their families or widows and orphans.
The guilds were also thriving social organizations. Before the Reformation they played a large role in religious festivals and processions. Afterward the guilds transferred their energies to the civic festivals; these were numerous, because the new republic celebrated its existence as often as possible. The guilds all had their own insignia, collections of ceremonial objects such as drinking horns, salt cellars, basins, and goblets, all engraved with the insignia of the guild and their town—which would be brought out at the large feasts sponsored by the guilds—and their own buildings, often the most imposing structures in the towns hosting them.
Inscription in the St. Luke’s Guild in Delft was required, according to the 1611 rules, for “all those earning their living here with the art of painting … in oil or watercolors, glassmakers, glass-sellers, faienciers, tapestry-makers, embroiderers, engravers, sculptors …, scabbard-makers, art-printers, booksellers, and sellers of prints and paintings, of whatever kind they may be.” The St. Luke’s Guild protected local artists by forbidding the auction of any paintings by artists who were not members of the Delft guild. The only exception to this rule was during the annual fair. (Dealers did get around this rule by holding “raffles” and “lotteries” rather than auctions for pictures by nonlocal artists.) The artists’ guilds in the Dutch Republic imparted a “corporate spirit” to artistic activity. Even more, they played a major role in the lives of artists, especially in Delft. The St. Luke’s Guild would come to play an important role in the life of Johannes Vermeer.
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From the time he was nine, young Johannes lived above a bustling and successful inn, where his father served the public while entertaining artists and potential buyers for their paintings. He was learning how to read and write, probably at a neighborhood school, and may have studied some drawing and mathematics at the little academy run by one of his neighbors on the Voldersgracht, the painter Cornelis Rietwijck. Between this period and his marriage thirteen years later, we know nothing with certainty about his life.
But we can draw some inferences—here is where the detective work of history comes into play. Johannes registered with the St. Luke’s Guild at the very end of 1653 as a painter; in order to do so, he must have served a six-year apprenticeship with a master painter who was registered in an artisans’ guild in either Delft or another city (sometimes, young artists would divide this period between two master painters). This was a requirement of the guild.
With whom could Vermeer have studied from the late 1640s? Johannes may have studied for one or two years with Evert van Aelst, a Delft still-life painter who had left a painting on commission with Reynier Vermeer in 1643. We know Van Aelst owed Reynier money when Johannes was eleven years old, only a few years before the boy would have begun his apprenticeship. Providing free lessons to Johannes could have been how Van Aelst paid off his debt, and how his father, despite some money troubles around this time, could have afforded to send Johannes to a teacher. (The cost of a local teacher would have been worth about 50 guilders a year, or roughly $787 today; the cost would have risen to twice that, plus room and board, for a teacher in Amsterdam or Utrecht; Rembrandt, for example, charged his pupils 100 guilders for lessons alone.) Van Aelst’s brilliance in depicting the gleam of light on reflective metals could have been a formative part of Johannes’s artistic upbringing. And although Vermeer never painted a still life as such, it is clear that he was influenced by still-life painting in Delft. This is seen in the wicker basket of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, the bowl of fruit in A Maid Asleep, and the sensuous fruit falling out of the tilted charger in The Letter Reader.
The painter’s nephew Willem van Aelst had apprenticed with him when he was very young, a few years before Johannes’s apprenticeship would have begun. Willem was later known for his effusive use of the ultramarine pigment, a habit that Johannes also developed. The painter and biographer Arnold Houbraken would later say of Willem that “he knew how to imitate life so naturally, that the work of his brush seemed to be no painting but life itself”—which is almost exactly how Constantijn Huygens described the way the camera obscura could be deployed by painters. One wonders whether Willem and his uncle were using the camera obscura at the time Vermeer was studying, and whether Evert was the one who introduced the young Johannes to that technology.
Most likely, even if Johannes did study for a time with Van Aelst, he apprenticed with another painter for part of his six-year period. Vermeer probably went to Amsterdam—the center of fine arts at the time, where his father had apprenticed and where his mother’s family probably still lived. He may have studied with either of two painters: Erasmus Quillenus II (who was based in Antwerp, but spent time in Amsterdam in the 1650s) or Jacob van Loo. Both Quillenus and Van Loo painted canvases in the early 1650s that are reminiscent of Johannes’s first-known paintings: Christ in the House of Mary and Martha and Diana and Her Companions.*2 Johannes’s trajectory as a painter resembled Van Loo’s as well: both began by painting large canvases with mythological and religious scenes and later switched to smaller genre studies.
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We may never know for certain with whom Johannes apprenticed. But we do know what he would have learned from his master. First, the young painter in training would have been instructed in drawing from plaster casts (such as the plaster face seen on the table in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting); then he would have progressed to depicting models from life. He would have learned at least the rudiments of perspective theory, which would have taught him how to depict three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane. Understanding perspective required some knowledge of geometrical relations; this is why the painter Rietwijck, Johannes’s neighbor on the Voldersgracht, was known for teaching both mathematics and drawing.*3
The painter’s apprentice needed to learn how to prepare the canvas to receive the paint. The use of canvas was fairly new in the Northern Netherlands. Up to the first quarter of the seventeenth century, painters there used mainly wooden panels, not canvas. The panels—made of oak, mostly from the Eastern Baltic states, and often cut at the Delft lumberyards—were prepared with a mixture of chalk and glue, thinly laid on; this was to seal the openings in the wood grain and assure a smooth surface. Then this mixture was scraped with a knife, and covered with a thin layer of lead white and umber. This provided a yellowish ocher-colored surface that could function as an intermediary tint among the dark and light colors of the painting itself. Even after canvas came into widespread use, panels were still sometimes used; Johannes would use them for his Girl with a Flute and Girl with a Red Hat, so he learned how to prepare the wooden panels at some point. He may also have painted on panels more than the body of his surviving works might suggest; the inventory taken after his death found six unpainted p
anels, along with ten unpainted canvases.
Canvas offered many advantages over panels, especially its greater ease of transport and the ability to paint larger pictures that would not be unworkably heavy. Canvas could be any kind of woven material but was usually made of linen. The fineness of a canvas was given by its thread count, just like the quality of any other fabric. It is believed that, by Vermeer’s time, some artists bought canvas that was already prepared from specialists who sold preprimed canvas; a Rotterdam shop is known to have dealt exclusively in painters’ supplies, including both primed and unprimed canvas. Even if Vermeer at some point bought ready-prepared canvases, he had most likely learned how to prepare them himself. To prepare canvas, the apprentice would learn that he must first remove the protruding threads and other irregularities of the weave. He would next brush the surface with animal glue, applying one or two coats to fill any remaining irregularities and provide a smooth surface, while also protecting the linen from penetration by the binding medium in the ground.
The ground was then applied, usually by the artist himself, even if he had bought the canvas already primed. The ground was generally a mixture of chalk, glue, and linseed oil, as well as various pigments.*4 Most often, in Holland in this period, the ground was a reddish brown ocher followed by a gray or flesh-toned layer containing mostly lead white. Johannes would later use this method in The Love Letter. Sometimes the pigment of the ground was a mixture of lead white and a bit of umber, resulting in a light buff or warm grayish color, as Johannes would use in A View of Delft. Or the ground would be painted completely in lead white, as he did for Girl with a Pearl Earring (adding just a touch of ocher and carbon black to make a cool gray), Young Woman with a Wineglass, and Woman with a Pearl Necklace. He would learn that the first stage in painting was to apply the dead color, or monochrome underpainting, which at the time referred to local development of the composition to indicate light and dark areas. Johannes would go on to use this very subtly to determine the required tone. For instance, in A View of Delft he would underpaint the sky with a layer of lead white on the brown ground, which provided the cool tone of the blue sky. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, he would lay black paint under the jacket and the turban to provide dark shadows in their blue colors. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace, he used different kinds of black in his underpainting: bone black, which has some brown in it (and is a warm tone), and carbon black, which tends toward blue (and is a cool tone). For shadows on the face, he laid on red and brown underpainting. The skin has underpainting in warm, creamy tones. Johannes would eventually develop an economical technique that used the underlying layer of paint—sometimes the ground, sometimes the underpaint—as part of the final composition. In The Art of Painting, for example, he used the ground as parts of the stalks of the model’s laurel wreath. Next, the final layers of paint were applied, sometimes thickly, sometimes more thinly, and even transparently for the final glazes.
Johannes would have also learned how to prepare and store the paints. Synthetic colors, such as cobalt and Prussian blue, came on the market only around 1750. Premade paints sold in little tubes were not available until the nineteenth century. There is some evidence that already in the seventeenth century, in certain cities in the Netherlands, there were “colormen” who sold premixed paints. In the early part of the century the painter Gerard ter Brugghen suggested that artists not waste their time in mixing their own colors, because the colors that could be purchased already mixed were far superior. Half a century later, Van Hoogstraten would also advise his readers to have their pigments made by a meticulous amateur. In some cities, vermilion (a red color), smalt (a cheap blue pigment), lead white, and “mountain green” were produced on a large scale and sold to artists. However, it is unclear how widespread the availability of such premixed paints was, and many painters mixed their own paints from raw materials that could be obtained from the local apothecary.
Some of these materials were hard and had to be crushed in a mortar, and then ground fine on a grindstone; the newest apprentices or the painter’s servants were usually delegated this task. Other materials, such as those prepared from plants, had to be dissolved, boiled, and filtered. The earth-based paints or ochers needed no grinding, for they were already soft and crumbly. All the powdered substances were turned into oil paints by combining them with linseed oil, a process requiring that the powder be worked into the oil on a hard smooth surface, like a marble block, with a flat-ended stone called a muller (in Dutch, a loper). Johannes would have been taught that the consistency of the finished paint should be fairly thick, able to stand up in tiny peaks like whipped cream. He would have learned through trial and error that different colors are more difficult to blend, requiring more elbow grease; vermilion, the red-colored paint most preferred by painters of the day, was quite hard to get right.*5 A painter’s apprentice would often go to bed with aching shoulders, with the putty-like smell of the linseed oil lingering on his clothing and in his nostrils.
Each type of paint had its own special method of preparation, and the recipes were passed down over the years from master to apprentice. The painter had to be a kind of alchemist, capable of memorizing and reproducing recipes like this one, for making the red color vermilion (which was also called cinnabar):
Take two parts Quicksilver [liquid metallic mercury] and a third part Sulphur, put it in a pot, melt the Sulphur and the Quicksilver under a weight, when cold grind well together. Then put it in a Glass, which is already completely covered a finger-breadth thick with hairy Loam [a combination of sand and cow’s hair]. Previously prepare an Oven of the width of your Glass or Retort. Set this Glass on the Oven. Or put it on an iron Tripod, or in another little distiller’s oven, make a little Tin lid over the Basket of the Retort, and a little hole in the middle of the lid, seal it well with the prescribed Loam, push an iron in through this hole that you may stir all with it. First make a small fire under it of dry wood and gradually increase it. And take great note of the Glass too, for out of it you may see smoke, and steam also from out the Glass, but take no heed of it, but mind that you keep a steady fire under it without ceasing until you see that the smoke is as red as blood, then it suffices. Then let it get cold and so you have good cinnabar.
Over time, an apprentice watching over this toxic stew could suffer from pink cheeks and nose, and possibly even loss of hair and teeth, muscle weakness, and sensitivity to light—all signs of mercury vapor poisoning in children.
Other, less deadly red paints were “Indian red, brown-red, and red lead.” There was also “Florence lake, Haarlem lake, ball-lake and distilled red lead; Bresille-red, dragon’s blood, carmine, crimson madder.” Crimson madder came from the juice of the root of the madder plant; dragon’s blood derived from the sap of the Indian palm called Dracano Drago. Florence Lake, also known as carnelian, was obtained from the crushed remains of the cochineal beetle, a kind of cactus louse. This dye was so precious that its price was often quoted on the Amsterdam stock exchange; because of its value, Mexico, its principal exporter at the time, kept the animal origins of the dye a secret—anyone caught trying to smuggle out the beetles was put to death—and so no one knew that the color was made from animals until Leeuwenhoek examined some of the dried dye with his microscope in 1687 and saw tiny insect parts. (Leeuwenhoek says that he examined the cochineal twice, the second time finding “some shells of little animals that were black, each having a reddish spot in the center.” He does not mention from whom he got the cochineal sample—it could have been from one of his artist relatives or acquaintances.) The paint color was sometimes obtained by means of steeping wool that had been dyed with the cochineal beetle, rather than using the crushed beetle itself. This beetle-based dye is still used today to color some cosmetics and foods because it is a “natural” additive. Johannes would use it in The Love Letter and The Procuress.
Johannes was most struck by the blue and yellow paints, which he would deploy with such bravura later on. For the color blue, Van Hoogs
traten related that painters had at their disposal “English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalt, blue lac, indigo, and the invaluable aquamarine.” Smalt was made of crushed blue glass rubbed in linseed oil. It was hard to work with; the color was best when the glass particles were larger, but then it was hard to smooth on the canvas and had a tendency to drip off. Johannes stayed away from smalt after deploying it in his painting Christ in the House of Mary and Martha and other early works. As Van Hoogstraten noted, the ashes were unstable, often fading to a gray color over time. Johannes was drawn to the “invaluable aquamarine,” which he would later use more than other Dutch painters—even to his own economic ruin. It was the most sumptuously stunning paint, made from the colored part of the relatively rare semiprecious stone lapis lazuli. Not only was the lapis itself expensive, but the process of dividing the splendid blue coloring from the other components of the stone, such as the limestone, was time-consuming and tedious. By repeatedly crushing and then washing off the sludge, one could remove the limestone from the compound, but each time the limestone took something of the blue with it. The remaining concoction, known as aquamarine ash, was not always the same color, ranging from blue-gray to light gray-blue. However, if a painter could afford to obtain some pure ultramarine, he would have an intense blue color. In Johannes’s time the prepared ultramarine, already in powdered form, could be purchased from an apothecary, but it cost a small fortune, selling at 60 guilders ($790) per quarter pound. In 1649 the inventory of the painter Jacob Marrell records half an ounce of ultramarine as being worth even more: 10 guilders, or 80 guilders per quarter pound—(about $1,050 today). Paintings produced with such expensive paints tended to have more time and care lavished on them. The concept of “fine painters,” or fijnschilders, who would use expensive materials to create highly polished and luminously colored art that was sold to connoisseurs, developed in the Dutch Republic around the late 1620s, led at first by Rembrandt, then his student Gerrit Dou.
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing Page 4