Yellows were easier to obtain. They could come from the ochers, clays of different shades of brown or yellow; or they could be made of massicot, white lead that has been heated to 300 degrees Celsius, yielding a pure, almost lemon-yellow; or from schietgeel, “fade-yellow,” made of a decoction of yellow flower petals, which Johannes would use later on. Lead white by itself was one of the most commonly used paints, because it was so durable and covered well. Johannes would later exploit the bright white color for the pointillés, or highlights, found in many of his paintings. However, lead white was one of the most toxic paints, as well as one of the least pleasant to produce, requiring a process that employed vinegar and horse manure. Most of the black paints were produced by the burning of organic substances: ivory, bone, vine tendrils. The most intense black, called lampblack, involved collecting the soot of a burning flame and mixing it with the oil. Johannes would have learned that each of the blacks had its own color qualities: bone black has some brown in it and is a warm black, carbon black is as flat a black as charcoal, and lampblack tends more toward a bluish, cold black. Painters could exploit these different blacks to great effect; Van Gogh would later say admiringly of Frans Hals that he “must have had twenty-seven blacks.”
Green paints always gave painters trouble; “Spanish green” was harsh, as well as being poisonous, made from copper filings steeped in the juice of vine tendrils; terra verde, a form of ocher, was not a strong green; and “green ash” was unstable, turning gray over time. Consequently, the painter would often just mix blue and yellow on his palette to produce his own green. This had its own problems; in several of Johannes’s paintings, foliage is seen as blue, which is probably due to his having mixed ultramarine with fade yellow, but as the yellow faded over time, only the blue was left behind.
Johannes, like other apprentices, was also taught how to keep the paints. Those that were easiest to prepare and used most often, the brown and yellow ochers, were usually made in larger quantities and kept in little earthenware pots, covered with parchment to keep them from drying out. The more valuable colors, such as ultramarine blue, were prepared in small amounts, and kept in pig’s bladders tied up with a string—arrayed on a shelf, the bladders looked like a row of large figs. When needed, a small hole was pricked in the bladder with a short nail; the paint was squeezed out, as from today’s tubes of paint. When the painter was finished using the color, the little hole in the bladder was closed up again with the nail. A pig’s bladder could be used for about ten years before getting too dried out and hard.
In the middle stages of his apprenticeship, after he learned how to lay on the paint on canvas in careful layers, Johannes would have completed parts of his master’s paintings, especially the solid colored backgrounds and areas of dense foliage or other simple patterns. Later, toward the end of his time with his master, he would have progressed to helping with the more difficult parts of the painting, such as drapery or the folds of a dress or blanket. When the apprentice was deemed ready to execute his own paintings, he would sign them with his master’s name; all work completed during the apprenticeship “belonged” to the master, with the exception of work executed during vacations—three weeks in summer and two weeks in winter. This is why the studios of those painters who attracted large numbers of students, such as Rembrandt, turned out great quantities of paintings, all in the same style, and some at one time or another attributed to Rembrandt—but eventually recognized as being the work of his “school” or workshop. A painter could sign and sell his own works only after joining a guild in his own right. At that point, he or she (there were some women guild members) could also sell the works of other painters, and many of the artists of the time earned extra money as art dealers.
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After completing his apprenticeship, Johannes returned to Delft. We are not sure when he arrived in Delft, but we know that by the beginning of April 1653 he was in residence there, hoping to get married to a young woman named Catharina Bolnes. On the evening of April 4, the well-known Delft painter and former head of the St. Luke’s Guild, Leonaert Bramer, and a sea captain named Bartholomeus Melling called on the imposing Maria Thins, a woman living on the Oude Langendijck. They were accompanied by Johannes Ranck, a Delft lawyer. This party had come on Johannes’s behalf to convince Maria that the young up-and-coming artist was a good match for her daughter Catharina and should be allowed to marry her. The visitors asked Maria to sign a document permitting the marriage banns, or vows, to be published. Maria refused to sign such an act of consent. However, after some discussion she did agree that she would not oppose the publication of the vows—she would not block the marriage.
The next morning, Ranck drew up an official document attesting to what had occurred the night before. This was witnessed by Bramer, Melling, and two other men: Gerrit van Oosten and the Delft notary Willem de Langue, a prominent art collector who owned an important art collection, including works by Bramer and Rembrandt, and who had frequent dealings with many artists, as well as with Vermeer’s family. The Delft city archives contain a document written by De Langue and dated April 5, 1653, stating that the two witnesses, Bramer and Melling, had heard Catharina Bolnes’s mother, Maria Thins, say that she did not intend to sign the act of consent for the registration of the marriage banns of her daughter Catharina with Johannes Vermeer, but that she was willing to “tolerate” the banns to be published. With this document the marriage could be performed.
Catharina’s mother had reasons to be displeased with her intended son-in-law. She had come from a well-to-do family, but Johannes was a painter with no apparent source of income, from a family of counterfeiters and innkeepers. Even more upsetting to Maria Thins, Johannes and his family were Protestant, while she and her daughter were Catholic—Maria’s sister had even become a nun in Louvain. It was most likely a condition of Maria Thins’s “toleration” of the banns that Johannes would undergo conversion to Catholicism, because the Council of Trent (1545–63) had declared marriages between a Catholic and a non-Catholic null and void.
Marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic was not unheard of in the Dutch Republic at this time, but still it was a fraught enterprise. Since the break from Catholic Spain, the official religion of the Dutch Republic was Protestantism. At the Union of Utrecht, which formed the “United Provinces” of the Dutch Republic, the Reformed Church was proclaimed the “public church”; members of other faiths were granted freedom of conscience, but not freedom of worship. Restrictions on the practice of Catholicism waxed and waned over the next decades; most of the time, Catholics were allowed to worship as Catholics in private, and sometimes the public practice of the Catholic religion was tolerated as well. At other times, though, Catholics had been persecuted. In the minds of many patriotic citizens, Spanish oppression was linked to Spanish Catholicism, and even the burgomasters of the towns could not always hold back their citizens. One of the first things some citizens did after the formation of the republic was go out and pillage Catholic churches, convents, and monasteries, smashing stained glass windows and statues. Antipathy toward Catholics intensified in 1584, when the first leader of the United Provinces, Prince William I, was assassinated in Delft by Balthasar Gerard, a Catholic supporter of King Philip II of Spain.
Delft had a fairly large Catholic population, which had grown from about zero in 1616 to 5,500, or 26 percent of the population, in 1656. Catholics were prominent in business and industry, and so the magistrates found it difficult to carry out anti-Catholic edicts. Delft officials complained, for example, in 1643, “[The Catholics] have increased in boldness and not only continue their gatherings but also in great numbers come to other people [i.e., proselytize] … and have bought house after house, which they have made their own for this purpose, which have entrances in the dividing walls such that they cannot be disrupted successfully.” Catholics also paid “protection money,” bribing officials to allow them to hold their services undisturbed.
For a brief period in the early
days after the Union of Utrecht (before the murder of William I), Catholics had been allowed to worship openly in the Oude Kerk, while the Protestants used the Nieuwe Kerk. This arrangement lasted only a few months, however, and soon Delft’s Catholics were forbidden to worship publicly. They began to create “secret churches,” or schuilkerken, hidden in the homes of Catholic families. They also formed hidden Catholic schools. A Catholic revival throughout the Dutch Republic in the 1620s brought a new backlash, along with further restrictions, upon Catholics in Delft. Not only were the Catholics forbidden to hold their Masses, but one of their priests, the Jesuit Lodewijk Makeblijde, was harrassed. Hostility toward Catholics in Delft reached its peak in the 1640s and continued into the 1650s, when the Reformed consistory of Delft took up the attack, petitioning the town’s burgomasters to demonstrate their “Christian zeal” by cracking down on these semiclandestine Catholic practices such as the secret Masses and hidden Catholic schools. Although the local government resisted such calls, the situation grew so heated that in January 1645 the papal nuncio in Cologne, Fabio Chigi (the future Pope Alexander VII), had reported to Cardinal Barberini in Rome that the Catholics in Delft had suffered so much “insolence” on the part of “the heretics” that they had petitioned the city authorities for help. In 1649 the consistory formally asked the government to close the secret churches and schools; the authorities told the consistory that they would “keep an eye” on the priests, but refused to close down the churches. By the middle of the 1650s, the tension in Delft had abated somewhat, but Catholics still mainly segregated themselves, choosing to live together in areas like the Paepenhoek, or Papists’ Corner area, a collection of about fifteen buildings housing families as well as a hidden church and a Catholic school, located in the shadow of the Nieuwe Kerk.
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Vermeer’s intended bride, Catharina, had been born in Gouda, a city known for its large Catholic population. Secret Catholic Masses were sometimes held in Maria Thins’s house in Gouda when Catharina was a child. Maria had moved to Delft with her two daughters after obtaining a legal separation from her husband, Reynier Bolnes, who frequently beat her—once when she was nine months pregnant with Catharina—and squandered Maria’s dowry by drinking and gambling. Their son, Willem, remained with Reynier, and turned out, not surprisingly, to be quite a troublemaker himself, once even pulling down his trousers in public to “moon” his mother. Maria was able to obtain a legal separation because, in the Dutch Republic, husbands were not allowed to tyrannize their wives. As the poet-moralist Jacob Cats put it, “In our Netherlands, God be praised, there are no yokes for the wife, nor slaves’ shackles or fetters on her legs.”
Other factors also allowed Maria to leave her husband with her finances intact—at least, what was left of her dowry after Reynier’s spending spree—so that she could support herself and her daughters. (This was important, as her husband refused to pay the support she had been awarded by the court.) Women had legal rights in the Dutch Republic that they lacked elsewhere at the time: they could inherit and bequeath property, and on a husband’s death the widow would generally recover her marriage portion as well as the possessions she had acquired during the marriage. Women also had recourse to legal action: paternity suits, actions to reclaim her marriage portion if her husband was squandering it, and suits for divorce in cases of abandonment or adultery (or, as in the case of Johannes’s mother-in-law, extreme cruelty, though Maria’s Catholicism kept her from going as far as divorce). Women could make commercial contracts and notarized documents and thus were able to have business dealings in their own name. Because of these rights women could have independent careers so they could support themselves and not rely on fathers, brothers, or husbands for their sustenance.
After she moved to Delft with her two daughters, Catharina and Cornelia, Maria purchased a house in the Paepenhoek, on the Oude Langendijck across from the Nieuwe Kerk and next door to the secret Catholic church founded by the Jesuits in 1616. Sometime before April 1653, Johannes and Catharina became acquainted and developed the “tender sentiments” regarded as indispensable for a successful marriage in the Dutch Republic. Johannes may have encountered Catharina at the home of his first teacher, Cornelis Rietwijck, who was Catholic. Or if, as some believe, Johannes’s painting master was the Utrecht painter Abraham Bloemaert, who was a distant relative of Maria Thins’s, Bloemaert may have introduced him to Catharina. Johannes may have met her at Mechelen—young women were not discouraged from taking a glass of beer in a respectable inn—or even on the Market Square. It was easy for men and women to meet on the street, as it were, because young, unmarried women could come and go, unaccompanied and unchaperoned, to market, to work, and to engage in conversation just like men. Thanks to this freedom, unheard of in most other countries at the time, unmarried Dutch women were sometimes assumed by foreign visitors to have “loose morals”; John Ray noted that “the women are said not much to regard chastity while unmarried, but once married none more chaste and true to their husbands.” There may in fact be some truth to this; while few babies were born out of wedlock, many were born “early,” that is, seven months—or less—after marriage.
Since Maria Thins was initially opposed to the marriage, Johannes and Catharina may have dispensed with the traditional method of courtship of the time, in which after an initial encounter a potential suitor would seek permission to visit the girl at home—under the watchful eye of a chaperone. After some weeks of such visits, the couple could “go public” by taking walks and attending church together. This would be followed by a formal “betrothal act,” a notarized agreement, sometimes signed in the blood of the young couple.
The marriage of Johannes and Catharina was evidently a love match, not only because Catharina’s mother was against the connection, but also because in the Dutch Republic at this time most marriages were initiated by the young man and the woman themselves, and not by their parents, as was then more common in other parts of Europe (at least in the middle and upper classes). Marriage in the Dutch Republic was seen as being for more than just producing a family, it was also for companionship; young men and women were expected to enjoy the company of their future spouses. And they were exhorted to enjoy their spouses once married, with frequent “fleshly conversation.” One marriage manual from 1687 felt the need to warn new couples that husbands should not overdo it: four or five ejaculations per night were the maximum without risking his health and fertility. Visitors from other countries were often shocked by the public displays of affection between husband and wife, and remarked on the contrast between such displays and the extremely modest clothing dictated for women by social custom. (One disgruntled French officer complained of the women that one “can see nothing of their bosoms since they cover them up so carefully.”)
At the same time, Johannes may not have been unmindful of the advice often given to young artists then, as now: marry well. Fabritius, for example, had married the sister of a successful cloth merchant, who owned several grand houses in Amsterdam and helped support his brother-in-law. Van Hoogstraten would later codify this rule in his book on painting, reminding young artists that affluence was essential for their “peace of mind,” especially if they were to strive for “highly refined effects” (such as, one cannot help but think, the effusive use of the expensive ultramarine). Over the years to come, Maria Thins would offer invaluable aid to the couple: shelter, money, and connections.
The couple wed on April 20, 1653, at the secret Catholic church in Schipluy (today’s Schipluiden), a small town an hour’s walk southwest of Delft that was known as a Catholic enclave. They moved into rented rooms on the Market Square. At the end of that year, on December 29, when he was twenty-one years old, Johannes registered as a member of the Guild of St. Luke. He was unable to pay in full the entrance fee of six guilders (about seventy-eight dollars today); instead, he gave one and a half guilders as a down payment. Thus, inauspiciously, Johannes Vermeer launched his career as a painter. In a time when pain
tings were sometimes referred to as conterfeytsel, Vermeer would himself become a kind of counterfeiter, like his grandfather: a counterfeiter of nature, copying his vision of the visible world.
*1 It is notoriously difficult to estimate current value from Dutch currency of the seventeenth century. At that time there was no central mint, and each of the provinces produced its own coins and also accepted coins from Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. For the most part, the value of coins was determined by their silver or gold weights. As a very rough guide I am converting the value of the Dutch guilder during various years of the seventeenth century into today’s purchasing power by using the website of the International Institute of Social History’s “Value of Guilder to Euro” converter, http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/calculate.php.
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing Page 5