*2 There is some variability in the names given to Vermeer’s paintings. I use those from Walter Liedtke’s complete catalog.
*3 For more on perspective theory, see part 3.
*4 That Vermeer applied his own ground is suggested by the fact that the canvases found at his death inventory were listed as “unpainted” and also that he seemed to alter the ground depending upon his conception of the painting.
*5 I learned this from Donnée Festen, a painter in Amsterdam who still mixes her own paints the old-fashioned way.
PART 2
From the Lion’s Corner
* * *
ON NOVEMBER 4, 1632, four days after Johannes Vermeer was baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk, another infant boy was brought there for the same ceremony. The baby and his parents, Philips Thonisz. and Grietge Jacobs., were accompanied by the boy’s paternal grandfather, Thonis Philipsz. Leeuwenhoek, his uncle Huijch Thonisz. Leeuwenhoek, aunt Magdalena Jacobs. van den Berch, and aunt Catharina Jacobs. van den Berch. The boy was given the name Thonis Philipsz., after his grandfather. The family lived in a brick house with a tile roof on a corner of Leeuwenpoort Street, and will later take a surname from their address: Leeuwenhoek, meaning “from the Lion’s corner” (it is pronounced, roughly, “Lay-ven-hook”).*1 Nearly fifty years later, when he is renowned throughout the world for his microscopical observations, Thonis, who will always sign his name “Antoni,” will add a dignified “van” to the family’s name, becoming Antoni van Leewenhoek.
In the baptismal records in the Delft archives, the entry for Antoni’s baptism is recorded several lines under the record for Joannis Vermeer. For the next forty-three years, the lines tracing the trajectory of their lives will frequently veer close, even, perhaps, intersecting on occasion, until 1676, when their names again appear on the same page in the Delft archives—in an entry recording Antoni’s appointment as executor of the estate of the recently deceased painter.
-1-
Antoni’s father was a basket maker from a family of basket makers; theirs was a lucrative trade in Delft, as the thriving export business required large numbers of well-made baskets for packing and transporting merchandise. His mother’s family, which had already begun using the surname van der Berch, van den Berch or sometimes van den Burch, was in the brewery business in Delft—an even more profitable trade. Many brewers were members of the local government, and the name van der Burch shows up many times in the lists of the “council of 40,” the most important political organization of Delft. Philips and Grietge (short for Magriete) had married ten years earlier, in 1622. Before her marriage, Grietge lived on the Oude Langendijck, only a few doors down from the house later purchased by Vermeer’s future mother-in-law.*2 It is possible that a young Antoni visited his grandparents on the Oude Langendijck, where he might have met the two Bolnes sisters, Catharina and Cornelia, and joined them in their games.
Antoni would have enjoyed a happy early childhood; children in the Dutch Republic were prized, cosseted, and encouraged to spend their time playing games—many of which were depicted on the blue-and-white tiles produced by the potteries. A writer on education urged parents to allow children to exercise their childishness. “Let them freely play and let school use play for their maturing … otherwise they will be against learning before they know what learning is.” Foreign visitors were sometimes surprised by the tenderness and overt affection shown to children by their parents; they were cuddled, hugged, and—to the discomfort of the sterner Calvinists—routinely kissed good-night at bedtime. Aglionby complained of the Dutch that “they are a little too indulgent to their Children,” but noted with some satisfaction that they “are punished for it; for many of them rebel against their parents, and at last go away to the Indies.” He was peeved, though, by the parents’ response to his criticism: “Does anyone spoil their own Face, or cut off their own Nose?” Such anecdotal evidence for the cherishing of Dutch children is confirmed by statistics showing that the Dutch had very low rates of abandonment and infanticide in this period compared with the French and the English.
As a child, Antoni would have amused himself by raising silkworms; this was a common pastime in Delft, since the worm of the domesticated silk moth Bombyx mori eats only the leaves of mulberry trees, such as those lining the Delft canals. Young boys and girls would buy silkworms and feed them mulberry leaves, observe them as they spun their chrysalises, and then sell the cocoons to the silk spinners, who would boil them, killing the moth forming inside, and unravel the silken threads. Many years later Antoni would describe the breeding of silkworms by the children of Delft, grieving that since a disease had recently killed all the mulberry trees, youths were no longer able to enjoy this wholesome and lucrative occupation.
However, before Antoni’s sixth birthday, in 1638, tragedy struck the family: two of his siblings died, followed quickly by his father. His mother was left with five children, including an infant daughter. Grietge did not remarry right away, suggesting either that Antoni’s father had left enough money for the family to survive on or that Grietge’s family and the basket weavers’ guild had helped out with her expenses. Two years later she wed Jacob Jansz. Molijn, also known as Jacob du Molyn, a painter and a member of the St. Luke’s Guild. Jacob Molijn, then in his sixties, had been widowed twice; he had five children from his first marriage and three from his second, including two sons, Jan and Gerrit, both around twenty and both painters and guild members. This branch of the Molijn family was probably related to another part, which produced the famous landscape painter Pieter de Molijn, born in London of Flemish parents in 1595 and living in Delft—where he married a second time after his first wife died—between at least 1616 and 1629. Both the father, Jacob Molijn, and his son Jan were official “town painters” in Delft, and carried out important commissions for the city government, for which they were well compensated. Gerrit worked with his father on at least one project: painting and repairing the house of the painter Michiel van Miereveld.
Antoni’s new stepfather, Jacob Molijn, was a versatile painter, though not a creator of works on canvas; he usually painted walls, statues, and “armories” (that is, heraldic coats of arms), but could also paint figures. In 1608 he was commissioned to paint a man’s and a woman’s face in order “to distinguish the privies where the men and the women go.” Antoni’s stepbrother Jan was most often called upon to paint armories and do other types of painting work for the Hoogheemraadschap, the Water Board, which was the government agency chartered with monitoring the elaborate system of dikes and locks as well as water cleanliness. In 1643 Antoni’s older sister Margriete (born nine years before him, in 1623) married Jan. He would later prove to be a link to both the art world and the civic government for the young Antoni.
Around the time of her remarriage, Grietge sent Antoni, then about eight, to school at Warmond, a small town nineteen miles north of Delft. She may have felt that her new husband preferred not to have too many young children underfoot. The fact that Grietge sent her son to Warmond, so far away, at such a young age, is interesting, for it raises the question of whether the Leeuwenhoek family was secretly Catholic. Warmond was known in the seventeenth century for having Catholic schoolmasters and teachers placed furtively in the village schools by the Catholic noble families there; by the early eighteenth century the population of the village was overwhelmingly Catholic. Antoni’s mother may have wished him to attend a state-run school that was essentially a Catholic school, without the possible sanctions that would accrue if she were caught sending him to a “hidden,” non-state-run Catholic school in Delft. (Some Catholics in the Dutch Republic refused to send their children to the state schools, administered by the Reformed Church; because of that, Catholics had a lower literacy rate than did Protestants.) The headmaster of the school in Warmond also taught Latin, so Leeuwenhoek would have studied at least some elementary Latin there.
The suggestion that the Leeuwenhoek family was Catholic is more compelling when it is considered that Antoni
’s parents had had seven children in their relatively short marriage. In the Dutch Republic during this period, most Protestant families had two or, sometimes, three children, while Catholic families were much larger. (As a point of comparison, Johannes’s parents had only two children, whereas Johannes himself, when he converted to Catholicism and married a Catholic girl, would have eleven children.) Also telling is the fact that the Leeuwenhoek family home—after which they took their surname—was right next to the Bagijnhof, the courtyard area near the Oude Delft around which the group of devout Catholic women—lay nuns of the Roman Catholic Church—called beguines had lived since the thirteenth century. Attached to the Bagijnhof was a “secular” Catholic church, that is, one not attached to any particular religious order, hidden in a private home. After Antoni’s marriage, he bought a house near this area, as if he wanted to continue living close to a Catholic enclave. (Sadly, his childhood home no longer stands; in its place is a concrete playground in the midst of a middle-class housing estate.) Since Catholics in Delft tended to socialize as well as worship together, this could have provided another avenue of acquaintance for Antoni and Johannes.
-2-
It is unclear how long Antoni remained at Warmond. Some years afterward, probably by 1646, he was sent to Benthuizen, nine miles northeast of Delft, where he lived with his uncle Cornelis Jacobsz. van den Berch, the sheriff and bailiff of the village. The sheriff’s role was something like that of a judge today. Sheriff Van den Berch apparently intended to teach Antoni the principles of the law and its enforcement. When it began to emerge that his interests were more practical and business-oriented, Antoni’s mother sent him in 1648, at the age of sixteen, to Amsterdam to learn a trade.
Many members of the Van den Berch family were successful merchants. Grietge’s grandfather Sebastiaen Cornelisz. van den Berch and her uncle Johan Sebastiaensz. van den Berch were in the cloth trade, as was her brother-in-law Pieter Mauritz. Douchy. Douchy lived in Amsterdam, where he was an influential wool merchant. He agreed to accept Antoni into his home and promised to find a position for him at a firm of good standing.
Antoni’s uncle kept his promise. He found a place for the young man at the establishment of William Davidson, an Amsterdam cloth merchant who had been born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1616 and had been living in the Dutch Republic since 1640, eight years before Antoni came to work for him. Davidson would go on to have a colorful life. He was knighted in 1661 for services he had earlier rendered to Mary, widow of Prince William II of Orange; the dowager princess had stayed with Davidson while in Amsterdam to plead with the States General—the central organ of the united Dutch Republic—to appoint her young son stadtholder, or leader of the republic, even though they had suspended that office in a kind of republican fervor. (In the end Mary prevailed, and her son eventually became both the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and king of England, as William III.) Later, during the English-Dutch wars, Davidson suffered a downturn in his fortunes when he was suspected of spying and being a traitor to his adopted home.
The Scots had long been well represented among the merchant classes in the Netherlands. By the late seventeenth century some eight hundred Scots were living in Rotterdam alone. The Dutch Republic—especially the major port cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam—was a popular choice for Scots going abroad. In 1642 the Scottish clergyman Thomas Fuller exhorted his country folk, “If thou wilt see much in a little, travel the Low countreys. Holland is all Europe in an Amsterdam-print, for Minerva, Mars, and Mercurie, Learning, Warre and Traffick.” Many Scottish soldiers, brought over as mercenaries on the Dutch side during wars against Spain and France, had stayed on, and so did some of the young men who had come to attend the universities in the Dutch Republic. Because the Dutch Republic had the most robust economy in Europe in those days, it was an attractive place for Scottish merchants, who traded in Dutch ports.
Most Scottish merchants who came to live in the Dutch Republic learned Dutch quickly. Probably, by the time Antoni came to work for Davidson, the Scottish cloth merchant was already speaking Dutch with his servants and his business associates, as well as with his wife, a Dutch woman named Geertruyt Schuyringh (he would later be widowed twice, ultimately marrying three Dutch women successively). Still, although Antoni later denied knowing any languages other than Dutch, it seems probable that the young apprentice would have heard, and picked up, some English during his six-year apprenticeship. Davidson would most likely have spoken in English to his Scottish and English visitors during these years, as well as to English-speaking business associates. By 1653, when Antoni was granted proxy power for Davidson—that is, the right to answer letters and sign documents for his master when he was away—Antoni would have needed at least some reading knowledge of English in case an absent Davidson received any important letters, orders, or bills in that language.
A young man like Antoni would have marveled at the hustle and bustle of Amsterdam, then the largest city in the Dutch Republic with 140,000 inhabitants, almost seven times the population of Delft. Amsterdam had grown exponentially, its population doubling between 1567 and 1610, and then again between 1610 and 1620. In 1607, the ruling families of Amsterdam approved the Plan of the Three Canals, a major urban expansion project increasing the size of the city from 450 to 1,800 acres and establishing the topography of the city that remains today. The plan called for the digging of three great semicircular canals, links between them and existing canals with radial canals, the erection of buildings on pilings, sanitary arrangements for each house, a complex network of drains and sewers, and, near the Amstel River, the construction of warehouses and merchants’ houses with storage facilities on the upper floors. Each canal was seventy-five feet across, which provided space for two-way traffic as well as a lane for moored boats. The canals were bordered by a line of elm trees. Next to the canals were quays for loading and unloading merchandise; these were prescribed at thirty-three feet wide. Even the size of the housing plots was ordained by the plan: each plot could be only twenty-six feet wide fronting on the canals (wealthy merchants could buy two plots, and thus build wider houses for their families).
Most of the increase in population was due to immigration: Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Huguenots from France, prosperous merchants and printers from Flanders, and economic and religious refugees from the Spanish-controlled parts of the Low Countries. They flocked to Amsterdam, a city already known for its religious and political toleration. When Descartes arrived there, he would exclaim that there was no other country “où l’on puisse jouir d’une liberté si entière [where you can enjoy complete freedom].” Immigrants from all over the world were welcomed, as long as they held up their end of the bargain and worked productively; vagrants or vagabonds were considered “outsiders” and not tolerated—they could be thrown out of the city—even if they were Dutch-born.
The peculiar guild structure of Amsterdam made it easier there than elsewhere for newcomers to prosper. There were only thirty-seven guilds with a total of eleven thousand members, a relatively small percentage of the working population compared with that of other Dutch cities, where the guilds were much more pervasive. That left many trades and craft professions open to those who would not have been welcomed by the guilds, especially Jews, who gravitated to industries not covered by guilds, such as tobacco spinning and the diamond industry. (Other “open” industries in Amsterdam at the time included cane sugar refining, brewing, soapmaking, and calico printing.) The influx of Flemish printers, as well as the reputation for tolerance, made Amsterdam a center for the European free press, attracting men—like Descartes—who wished to publish without the threat of censorship from either the Catholic Church or a royal government.
Amsterdam was known as the “marketplace of Europe,” because of its bourse, or stock exchange, the first in the world. The city became the hub of the European art market; buyers purchased art from all over on behalf of clients in England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. Amsterdam was also the industr
ial capital of the Dutch Republic: it imported raw materials and turned them into valuable exports such as finished silk, leather, wool, and tobacco products. It imported wool from Sweden, which was finished into fine cloth in Leiden and sent to Italy (where it was made into clothing) in exchange for olive oil made locally, and spices imported from the Middle East. Sometimes, Amsterdam took this strategy too far, as when it was accused by English merchants of importing Wiltshire and Gloucestershire woolens, “finishing” them in Holland (usually just by adding a label), and passing them off as “Dutch goods.”
As Descartes exclaimed in delight after moving to Amsterdam, “Where else on earth could you find … all the conveniences of life and all the curiosities you could hope to see?” On the Nieuwe Brug, Antoni could find bookshops, stationers, and nautical goods purveyors selling charts, maps, sextants, and other instruments for navigation; ironmonger shops, dye shops, and apothecaries. On the Singel Canal was a large farmer’s market; in the Nes, pastry shops and bakers; in the Kalverstraat, print shops and haberdashers; in the Halsteeg, cobblers and boot makers. Drapers like Davidson—many of them on the Warmoesstraat—displayed shimmering Lyons silk, crisp Spanish taffeta, lustrous caffa, and Haarlem linen bleached in the sun in “linen yards” to dazzling whiteness.
There were many pleasures to be had for a young man in Amsterdam. Inns were to be found on every corner, serving not only beer but also spirits—including the juniper-infused genever, later called gin when it made its way to England—many of which were being distilled near the port of Amsterdam, where ships would come in laden with spices and herbs used in the distilling process. Music was played on the street by itinerant musicians entertaining folks with instruments whose very names sound musical to us today: not only fiddles and bagpipes but also the hurdy-gurdy, the shawm, the dulcian, the rommelpot, the crumhorn, the hommel, the midwinter horn. Delft, in the grip of its severe Calvinism, had outlawed such displays, so they would have seemed particularly exotic to Antoni. There were less-wholesome pleasures as well. Although the dominance of the Reformed Church had led to the suppression of prostitution throughout the Dutch Republic, Amsterdam was still known for its brothels and “bawds,” as it had been since the Middle Ages. At the time that Antoni was in Amsterdam, there were about one thousand prostitutes and hundreds of brothel keepers; Amsterdam’s police force of only thirty men could not hope to prosecute all of them. Some of the women worked out of whorehouses (hoerhutzen), others were employed as waitresses at disreputable inns; most of these types of establishments were located in the poorer neighborhoods near the harbor, where immigrants and passing sailors tended to live—and where Amsterdam’s red-light district remains today.
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing Page 6