Andrew Graham-Dixon - Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found

 Andrew Graham-Dixon, Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found (Allen Lane)

As with Shakespeare, we are told very little is known about Vermeer so one wouldn't expect it to take a 360 page book to cover their lives. Plentiful background and a good deal of informed speculation are the main ingredients with which authors fill out their work. It's useful and one wouldn't want to take the artist out of context but Vermeer isn't born until page 78 out of the 327 of the main text here. We are by then, however, well informed about the Thirty Years War - which might explain why Vermeer's earliest known paintings have one or two soldiers in them, his mentor, Gerard Der Borch and the likeable, liberal Protestants, the Remonstrants, dissidents in a time of Calvinism, into which part of the community he was born.  

History is all too often the story of war and carnage and the Thirty Years War was pro rata the most expensive in lives lost. The Remonstrants' more open attitude to religious faith could be interpreted as 'enlightenment' and so it is tempting to see Vermeer's clear, calm pictures with light being let in as a product of a newly achieved peaceable territory that values its humanity. 16 years old when it ended, Vermeer had arrived at an opportune time to benefit. 

The point of all the peripheral detail becomes clear. The abusive marriage of Vermeer's mother-in-law explains why Catharina Bolnes was so attracted to Vermeer as a husband, because he was, as far as can be told, not violent, not misogynist and,

would spend much of his life painting pictures of women that radiate empathy and tenderness.

which we are ready to believe on the evidence of his art but we might bear in mind that those biographers of Shakespeare who find him so attractive a personality on account of his gift for writing might not be deducing as much reliably.

But Graham-Dixon brings great scholarship to his readings of the paintings and finds great depths of religious imagery, not least in a nail in a wall in two paintings, an idea likely to have been lifted from Rembrandt, symbolizing the crucifixion. If no word is wasted in a good poem then surely no brushstroke is recondite in a good painting.  

So, the 'sphinx of Delft', at least in the first part of his career, turns out to have been a religious painter. It might seem important to have known that about one's favourite artist but the 'sphinx' aspect of what are such luminous pictures is in a way more attractive than the fuller understanding of them. We can enjoy things without appreciating them properly. In fact, once completely bottomed out there's nothing left to know and so perhaps the mystery is part of their appeal. But one can hardly ignore the main premise of this brilliant book, it only makes Vermeer an even more involving artist than the one we thought we knew.

His best work was nearly all done for one patron in a period of not much more than a decade. In Maria Thins he has a mother-in-law that would give credence to the work of Bernard Manning and a ready-made baddie in a story in which our hero all but stops doing his paintings in the period before his death, aged 43. I'm distressed to find that the Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, c.1665, as per the print on the wall just to my left here, is 'coarse' and,

the picture as a whole is lacking in conviction. It looks like a Vermeer, but with the lights switched off.

I might try to find some decadent glamour in the idea of the genius in decline but that picture might have to go. But I find some resonance in how,

Demoralized by the return of war, saddened by personal loss, and dispirited by the realization that a thousand years of promised peace was not going to begin any time soon, he may have been so deeply disappointed there was no coming back from it.

I make no claim whatsoever to anything like the things that Vermeer went through but find a much diminished parallel with how, when young in the 1960's and 70's, anything seemed possible and some good things happened but, later on in life, the future looked bleak again.

What's so great about Vermeer is his frugal output, the possibly unfathomable depth of his best work, the outrageous talent apparently so quietly, almost anonymously, applied to what few pieces he left behind and what seems to be not much interest in doing any more than what he did, a few important things among which are lost.

And what's great about Andrew Graham-Dixon is how he has so rigorously and objectively set out his ground-breaking thesis without falling into quite the same idolatry that certain Shakespeare authorities can't help but become victims of. Without the evidence that Vermeer was beyond reproach, he only finds nothing to reproach him with and that allows us to think what we will of him while taken aback by his art.