If all that isn’t enough, Vermeer reveals the perfection of his best pictures to be poignantly human by going into a minor–but noticeable-artistic decline during the last five years of his life. The post-1670 works make what came before glow all the more.
For a contemporary of Rembrandt, whose every haberdasher’s receipt seems to be public record, Vermeer left behind an awfully sketchy account of his life. He was born the son of an art dealer whose family moved north to Delft from Flanders. At 21 he married Catharina Bolnes (who bore him at least 14 children). Less than a year later, Vermeer was a “master painter,” and at 30 he was elected head of the local painters’ guild. Over the next dozen years Vermeer sold a few paintings, borrowed a little money, inherited his parents’ house and essentially stayed around town. But when he diedat 43, he left behind 10 minor children and a load of debt, much of it from failed dealing in other artists’ paintings. The executor of his estate had to hold a public sale of Vermeer’s pictures in 1677 to pull Bolnes out of bankruptcy.
Would that Vermeer’s life had been as poetically precise as his pictures. He deftly combined perspective, understated figure drawing and both opaque and glazed paint applications into practically seamless wholes. “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (1665) is one of the artist’s almost agonizingly balanced interiors, in which the light always enters-differently in each case–from a window at stage left. “The Little Street” (painted by a 25-year-old!) renders a frieze of reimagined architecture (two buildings that were never neighbors placed side by side) with every brick individually visible, yet with none of them stalling the quiet flow of facades across the canvas.
This exhibition, which makes a final appearance in Holland in March, won’t travel further in America. True, 11 Vermeers are on public view in this country. But not in one place. Anyplace with 21 on the walls deserves a pilgrimage. Go.
