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The city fathers were wondering the same. It took some time but, finally, in September of 1676, they drafted a writ: “Their worships the Sherriffs of the Town of Delft do hereby appoint Anthonij Leeuwenouck [sic] to be Trustee [curateur] for the estate and property of Catharina Bolnes, widow of the late Johannes Vermeer (in his lifetime Master Painter) and petitioner for writ of insolvency, for what he remained possessed of.” Leeuwenhoek was given the job of overseeing the complicated and messy process of settling Vermeer’s estate.
Leeuwenhoek’s appointment as the executor of Vermeer’s estate seems to be conclusive evidence of some kind of relationship between the two men. But Michael Montias, the foremost investigator of the documents in the Delft archive relating to Vermeer, has found three other cases in which Leeuwenhoek was appointed by the city council as the curateur of an estate. Because of this, Montias concludes that his appointment as the executor for Vermeer’s estate was just a routine part of Leeuwenhoek’s duties as a civil servant.
In Vermeer’s and Leeuwenhoek’s lifetime, however, there were about 2,500–3,000 deaths of adults in Delft per decade. In the fifty-year period in which Leeuwenhoek served in his civic position, then, there would have been between 12,500 and 15,000 adult deaths. Yet Leeuwenhoek was appointed executor only four times. Clearly this was not a routine responsibility of his position. What needs to be explained is why Leeuwenhoek was appointed those four times.
In doing a little more historical digging than Montias, I have found that in each of the three other cases in which Leeuwenhoek was appointed curateur, Leeuwenhoek had close connections to the person or the property involved, or both. So the existence of these three other cases in which he was appointed executor is not evidence against Leeuwenhoek’s personal connection with Vermeer, but is actually evidence for it.
One of the three cases Montias uncovered is that of a “Maria de Neij,” who, owing to her “melancholic and somber thoughts,” was found to be incapable of administering her own possessions. Leeuwenhoek was appointed on April 24, 1674, to oversee her property because of her psychological state—he was given a kind of power of attorney over her finances. There is no record at all of any Maria de Neij in the Delft archives; there is, however, a Maria de Meij. She was the sister of Barbara de Meij, Leeuwenhoek’s first wife, making her Leeuwenhoek’s sister-in-law. Maria de Meij was baptized in September of 1626, three years before Barbara, and later served as the godmother of Barbara and Antoni’s daughter Maria. She was a schoolteacher who had remained unmarried until 1674, when she was forty-eight years old. On March 3, 1674, a marriage license was filed for Maria and Pijeter Schepens, a widower. But in December of that year, the license was amended to note that the couple had separated. Possibly, Maria was depressed enough six weeks into the marriage that her brother-in-law needed to be brought in to manage her affairs. Maria died a little over a year later, in January of 1676. On her burial certificate she is still listed as the “housewife of Pieter Schepens,” suggesting that they had not divorced but were simply separated at the time of her death. Leeuwenhoek’s daughter, Maria, inherited her aunt’s house on the Oosteinde.
The same month he was appointed caretaker of his sister-in-law’s estate, Leeuwenhoek was also given the power of attorney over the property of Bartholomeus Ritmejer, for unspecified reasons. I have found that Ritmejer was Delft’s wijnkoper, or wine buyer. Leeuwenhoek may have known Ritmejer professionally, being a wine expert of sorts. Several years later, in 1679, Leeuwenhoek would be appointed the wine gauger for Delft, an important civic position requiring that the holder be familiar with both wine and measurement, as the wine gauger was the person responsible for testing wine for its purity and quality, and, for tax purposes, measuring the amounts being bought and sold. At the time of his appointment Leeuwenhoek had already used wine in his work, observing samples with his microscope to try to find “vinegar eels” left over from the wine barrel’s earlier use as a container for vinegar. Later, he would report observing “globules” in the lees of wine, the precipitate formed when wine was clarified. He would go on to look for salt particles in French wine, sherry, Moselle wine, Rheingau wine, Touraine wine, and others, and seek these globules in his own sweat after excessive drinking. So he may have been a customer of Ritmejer’s, or may have been appointed trustee because he knew enough about wine to handle the wine buyer’s property.
If we assume that Leeuwenhoek did know Vermeer, then he could also have known Ritmejer through the painter. In January of 1667 Ritmejer had married Catharina Gillisdr. Cramer. She was the daughter of Gillis Cramer, a wealthy silk merchant, and the sister of Johannes Gillisz. Cramer, who married Vermeer’s daughter Maria in June of 1674, two months after Leeuwenhoek was appointed to oversee Ritmejer’s property. (At the time of the marriage between Ritmejer and Catharina Cramer, the couple’s address is given as being on the Verwersdijk, at the house later occupied by Johannes Cramer and Maria Vermeer.) Vermeer might have asked Leeuwenhoek to look after the financial situation of his daughter’s prospective brother-in-law.
The year before, Leeuwenhoek had been given the task of overseeing the estate of the recently deceased Grietje Jans van Keijen, the wealthy widow of Willem Jansz. Kronenburch (also known as Kronenburg). Kronenburch, a successful merchant who had built up an impressive art collection, had died seven months earlier, and soon after his widow’s death the paintings were sold at auction, possibly by Leeuwenhoek himself. (We know he would later auction Vermeer’s pictures.) Kronenburch’s collection included pictures by Fabritius, Couwenbergh, and Evert van Aelst.
There are two ways in which Leeuwenhoek might have been connected to the Kronenburch family. One is through the many artists in his family, who painted works that could have been collected by Kronenburch: either his mother’s Van der Burch relatives, such as Hendrick van der Burch (ca. 1625–64), a painter who had the same name as Leeuwenhoek’s grandfather and may have been named after him; his Molijn stepfather and stepbrothers, all painters; Cornelis de Man, Leeuwenhoek’s cousin by marriage; or his wife Cornelia’s probable relative the painter Moses van Uyttenbroeck. With all these connections to artists, Leeuwenhoek might have been viewed as someone knowledgeable enough about the art of the day to take charge of selling the estate’s collection. The other way that Leeuwenhoek might have known the Kronenburch family is through Vermeer. Kronenburch had served as a witness for a power of attorney granted to Gerruit Suijer by the art dealer Abraham de Cooge, who was an associate of Vermeer’s father, Reynier; the two men had registered less than a year apart as the first two art dealers in the Guild of St. Luke. Vermeer would have known De Cooge in his own right, for De Cooge was elected headman of the St. Luke’s Guild two times while Vermeer was a member: in 1665 and 1672 (during the latter appointment Vermeer served as co-headman with De Cooge). Since Kronenburch was an art collector, he may also have bought art from Vermeer himself.
In each of the three other cases in which Leeuwenhoek was appointed curator of an estate, he either knew the person involved, or had familiarity with the property of the estate. Leeuwenhoek’s appointment as executor of Vermeer’s estate was not random; there must have been some reason for it. The best explanation is the simplest—that they were acquaintances, if not friends.
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Before an executor of the estate had been appointed, Catharina Bolnes and her mother were hard at work trying to protect what was left of Catharina’s property. A month after Vermeer’s death, on January 27, 1676, a deed was drawn up for the settlement of the huge debt owed by the family to the baker Hendrick van Buyten—617 guilders and 6 stuivers (about $8,400). That would have been for several years’ worth of bread for the family, with an occasional treat of a cake or pastry. This is the baker who already had some of Vermeer’s pictures, and to whom Monconys was sent to see some examples of Vermeer’s work. The deed states that Catharina “will pay off 50 guilders per annum. In exchange, two pictures of her husband’s, in Van Buyten’s possession, will be returne
d to her. If she does not fulfill her obligations, Van Buyten will be at liberty to sell the pictures.” These two pictures are described as “one with two figures, one of which is writing a letter,” and one in which “a person is playing the cither.” The first may have been Mistress and Maid; the second, The Guitar Player or possibly Woman with a Lute. The baker noted that he agreed to this settlement because he was “moved by the serious request and the insistence” of Catharina. But he was careful to add that “should he be compelled to sell the pictures Catharina Bolnes will settle his possible loss on the sum 617 guilders and 6 stuivers.” If the pictures were sold for less than this amount, Catharina Bolnes would be responsible for making up the remainder of the debt.
On February 22 or 24, 1676, Catharina transferred by deed the picture The Art of Painting to her mother, in settlement of a loan Vermeer had supposedly obtained from Maria Thins in July 1675. This may have been for the 2,900 guilders that Vermeer was supposed to give to Maria Thins but had instead used as collateral for the loan from Rombouts. Since Maria Thins was then forced to pay back the 1,000-guilder loan in order to get her capital property returned, the claim that Vermeer had borrowed that amount from Maria Thins was, in a roundabout way, correct. On the twenty-ninth of the month, Catharina had another deed drawn up, this one specifying that half of all of her possessions belonged to her outright, and half belonged jointly to her and her mother.
Later that day an inventory was taken of her property. The notary’s clerk walked room by room through the house on the Oude Langendijck, noting all of the movable objects that belonged to Catharina Bolnes. In the left-hand column were listed possessions of Catharina in her own right, while in the right-hand column the possessions that Catharina and her mother, Maria Thins, shared “each to be the full extent of one half”—owned jointly. However, some of Catharina’s most prized possessions had been hidden away, so that they were not recorded by the clerk; others were said to belong outright to Maria Thins, not shared between them, so they did not appear in the inventory. On Catharina’s side of the list were items such as clothing, mostly worn out, some cushions, blankets, kitchen crockery, “earthenware of little importance,” beds, and other items not worth much. Catherina’s goods also included two tronien, or faces, by Fabritius, a third painting by him, and two tronien by Van Hoogstraten, as well as unattributed portraits of Vermeer’s father and mother. There were two “tronien painted in Turkish fashion,” perhaps Vermeer’s pictures of women clothed in what might have been taken for exotic dress: Girl with a Pearl Earring and Study of a Young Woman, both of whom are wearing turban-like headdresses. There is a line for a painting of a “Woman with a Necklace,” perhaps Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace. The Art of Painting is not listed because it had already been transferred to the ownership of Maria Thins.
There were also five books in folio and twenty-five other volumes, a fairly large number for a family to own in those days. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether this collection included books on perspective or any of the works on optics that might have introduced Vermeer to the camera obscura. To Catherina were also assigned the painter’s supplies: an easel, three palettes, a maulstick with an ivory knob, six wood panels, ten canvases, and three bundles of prints. There were no pieces of gold jewelry and no gilded jug, even though we know that these items were bequeathed to Catharina in 1657 and 1661. Perhaps they had already been sold off during the lean years. But possibly these were hidden from the eyes of the notary’s clerk.
On April 24 and 30, Catharina Bolnes petitioned the court to declare a moratorium on her debts. This may be why some of the more valuable objects in the house had been concealed during the inventory. The petition stated,
She, supplicant, charged with the care of eleven living children, because her aforementioned husband during the recent war with the King of France, a few years ago now, had been able to earn very little or hardly anything at all, but also the art that he had bought and with which he was trading had to be sold at great loss in order to feed his … children, owing to which he had then so far run into debts that she … is not able to pay all her creditors.
The court granted the “letters of cessation” the same day, essentially declaring Catharina personally bankrupt and stating that she was “repudiating” the estate of her husband, which would now have to be administered by a trustee assigned by the city’s aldermen (the position to which Leeuwenhoek would be appointed).
The process of declaring oneself bankrupt or insolvent was a lengthy and complicated one. It was not uncommon: hundreds of people went bankrupt every year in Amsterdam alone. Even in 1656, at the height of his fame and talent, when demand for his paintings still outstripped supply, Rembrandt declared himself to be insolvent; he was living far beyond his means. The object of the bankruptcy proceeding, from the point of view of the state, was not to punish the delinquent debtor but to “rehabilitate” him and to repair the damage done to his creditors and the economic balance of the city as a whole, by showing that debts must be repaid. Generally, the city would charge that an agreed percentage of outstanding debts must be paid from the proceeds of an auction of the goods left by the deceased. Family fortunes—such as the dowry brought to the marriage by the bride—were exempt when the marriage settlement stated that the couple would keep their property separate. Three years after their marriage, Catharina Bolnes and Johannes Vermeer had signed a document stating that they wished to keep their assets separate; it may have been a condition of their moving in with Maria Thins, to ensure that her daughter’s inheritance would not go to Vermeer if his wife died before him. The “curator” of an estate would decide the percentage of the debt that was to be repaid to creditors; this was based on how the debts were incurred (a debt to the baker to feed one’s family was looked upon more indulgently than a debt to the haberdasher for silk ribbons and fine garments, for example). The percentage was also based on the future earnings capacity of the debtor. At the end of the process, the debtor and each of his creditors signed a “reconciliation” document, to show that their relationship had been repaired by the bankruptcy process.
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Once Leeuwenhoek was appointed to the job of managing the Vermeer estate, at the end of September of 1676, he got right to work, even though at this time he was in the midst of his most thrilling observations. But first, on October 9, he drafted the long letter to the Royal Society detailing his many observations of animalcules in infusions of pepper and other spices, as well as in well water and snow water. Then he turned to the first knot he had to untangle for the Vermeers: the partition of the estates of Catharina’s brother, Willem Bolnes, and Hendrik Hensbeeck, Willem and Catharina’s cousin, who had become wealthy as the owner of a brickmaking factory in Gouda. Willem had died several months after Vermeer, and the money that he had inherited from Hensbeeck then passed to Catharina. Leeuwenhoek accepted to transfer the rights to Catharina’s part of this inheritance to Maria Thins, in exchange for five hundred guilders to be paid by Maria Thins into the estate of her daughter. Leeuwenhoek requested (and received) sixty guilders for his services in this matter.
By this time Maria Thins had moved to The Hague, so Leeuwenhoek had to travel several times between The Hague and Delft to take care of this matter. It appears that Leeuwenhoek took the opportunity to visit Constantijn Huygens on some of these trips. In a letter to Oldenburg written in the summer of 1677, Leeuwenhoek referred to a visit to Huygens “about a year ago,” when Huygens had given him a sample of moxa—a medicine used to cure the gout by burning it on the skin of the infected part. Leeuwenhoek reported that he was burning the moxa on his own skin to examine the burned flesh afterward; he was forced to stop the experiment—not because of the pain of the burning but because of the slow healing of the skin where he would cut it with a knife to get the sample of burned flesh to view with his microscope.
In November, Leeuwenhoek needed to intervene in another crisis for the estate. Earlier, twenty-six pictures from Maria Thins’s house o
n the Oude Langendijck had been seized by Jan Coelenbier, a Haarlem art dealer, on behalf of the Delft widow Jannetje Stevens. Stevens was a seller of woolen cloth and other “shop wares.” Vermeer’s estate owed Stevens 422 guilders for “various merchandise,” and the pictures were taken as collateral for the debt. A number of these paintings were probably the ones noted in the inventory: those by Fabritius, Van Hoogstraten, and others, as well as several of Vermeer’s own works, including The Art of Painting. It is likely that so many paintings were seized not because in total they were valued at the amount of the debt, 422 guilders (which would make them appraised at only about 20 guilders each), but because they were worth much more than the debt—so that Catharina Bolnes would be compelled to pay it. Leeuwenhoek negotiated with Stevens—whom he may have known from his days as a cloth salesman—to accept a lesser amount of cash from Catharina Bolnes. In February 1677, Leeuwenhoek and Stevens appeared before the aldermen of Delft to declare that if Catharina paid Stevens 342 guilders immediately, the pictures would be returned. The following month, since Catharina was unable to come up with the money, Leeuwenhoek himself paid the 342 guilders—out of his own pocket—in order to retrieve the paintings. This amount (about $5,090 today) was more than the yearly salary of a glassworker in the Dutch Republic, and even more than Leeuwenhoek’s starting annual salary for his government position. It seems highly unlikely that a bureaucrat unconnected to Vermeer would have paid out so much of his own money to settle the painter’s debt.
Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing Page 31