Faience and Light

Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and RivalryBy Adriaan E. Waiboer, editor, with Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. and Blaise DucosYale University Press, 2017 When the little page steals in from the right in Gerard ter Borch’s painting “Two Women Making Music” (ca. 1657), he is holding a silver tray, his eyes intent upon the viewer. A woman on the left plays a lute, accompanying a singer who is seated at the center. In “The Duet” by Frans van Mieris (1658), a page similarly enters from the right, tray in hand, but his eyes are now downcast. This time the lutenist on the left is a man; the woman, standing at the center, a keyboardist. In Jan Steen’s “Young Woman Playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man” (1659), the woman is seated at the keyboard, the man on the left leaning on the instrument and watching her closely. And there he is: on the right, through a distant open door, enters the page, his silver tray replaced by a lute for the man to play.Inspiration and influence—this excellent exhibition catalogue documents the relationship between these forces in some of the world’s most beloved works of art. The exhibition itself, curated by the team of Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Adriaan Waiboer, and Blaise Ducos, opened at the Louvre in February, ran from June through September at the National Gallery of Ireland, and is now showing through January in Washington at the National Gallery of Art. It contains nearly eighty pieces dating from approximately 1650 to 1675, an era that Waiboer, the catalogue’s editor, calls the “apogee of Dutch genre painting.”Genre painting refers to scenes from everyday life, with the understanding that the scenes were idealized—sometimes highly idealized—and the life often that of the affluent. Grand allegories, religious narratives, decisive moments in history—these are not the subjects of these paintings. Genre scenes instead capture a private moment and feature a small number of figures: a lady at her embroidery or contemplating herself in a mirror, a gentleman-scholar poring over a map or a book, a man and woman together in intimate conversation or the former listening to the latter playing music. Part of the magic of these studiedly small works is that they suggest more than meets the eye.The catalogue is divided into two approximately equal parts. The first contains seven essays written by the curators themselves and by contributors Eric Jan Sluijter; Marjorie E. Wieseman; E. Melanie Gifford and Lisha Deming Glinsman; and Piet Bakker. The essays, each in the neighborhood of fifteen pages, treat a variety of topics including the technical (Gifford and Glinsman’s on the materials the painters used and how they used them) and the speculative (Wheelock’s on why genre painting continues to exert such a lasting appeal). Interlarded among the essays are images, close-ups, and charts that make the arguments more persuasive and the points more interesting.The second part of the catalogue contains twenty-two considerably shorter entries, more than half of them written by the curators, pertaining to specific topics or themes the paintings are said to explore. For instance, both “Corresponding Love” and “Pen to Paper” deal with paintings of men and women in various states of writing, sending, receiving, or reading letters. “Interlacings” concentrates on four works, each showing a woman by herself, engrossed in the task of sewing or making lace. “Reaching for the Stars” likewise discusses four works, these portraying men alone in their studies, occupied with their work as astronomers or geographers. Each of these shorter entries begins with a tumbnail representation of the paintings, so the reader might behold at a glance the works under discussion. Larger representations follow, some covering an entire page, along with images of paintings not included in the exhibition, but still relevant to the individual author’s point.Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) may nowadays be the most well-known genre painter, but in his time he was far from the only such artist or the most famous. He was instead a member of a small band renowned for producing masterpieces for discerning patrons. Gerard ter Borch and Gerrit Dou, for instance, were early figures in the history of genre painting. Waiboer credits ter Borch with introducing “many new subjects, compositions and motifs readily adopted by younger artists.” Dou, meanwhile, was celebrated for the fineness of his brushwork, a perfectionist who achieved his miraculous results by lavishing untold hours on his canvasses. He was so meticulous, according to Ole Borch, a Danish botanist and chemist who visited his studio, that a viewer could examine a work of Dou’s—the work Borch had in mind depicted a sick woman in her bedroom—and “count the threads in the bed curtain.” The visiting botanist even records this priceless fact: the artist was “in the habit” of wearing three pairs of glasses to achieve his finest effects. “This,” writes Blaise Ducos, “is a rare description of a work in the painter’s studio, and indeed of the painter’s working method.”Few records exist of these artists meeting or exchanging letters, but it is highly likely that they encountered one another’s work at auctions, in the workshops of artists, or in the homes of collectors. They must have made sketches of memorable paintings, the better to retain their compositional details, even if the sketches themselves do not survive. Artists traveled extensively within the Dutch Republic, especially those living in the province of Holland, where the towns were close to one another, travelling by coach, on foot, or by an efficient and reliable system of barges called trekschuiten. Throughout their lives, they tended to reside in different places; peregrinating as they did, they absorbed new influences all the while influencing others.Genre painters of the Dutch Golden Age engaged in what Eric Jan Sluijter terms “emulative imitation,” meaning that they studied each other’s work and consciously appropriated and varied what they saw. So it may well have been with the works mentioned earlier—those by Ter Borch, Van Mieris, and Steen—in which a dutiful page appears on the right-hand side of each paining. Artists used emulative imitation with different ends in mind, striving to please connoisseurs (and earn high fees), hoping to acknowledge their debts to their teachers and exemplars, burning to outdo each other in painterly virtuosity, and always—always—pushing themselves to enlarge their store of images.Commonly appropriated items include architectural features or details of décor. Marble tile floors or chimneypieces appear in many paintings, as do gilt leather wall hangings and brass chandeliers. (Chandeliers, however, are something of an “artistic fantasy,” explains Marjorie E. Wiseman, as in the seventeenth century “they were found almost exclusively in churches and official buildings.”) Certain household items likewise recur from painting to painting, among them the fashionable tin-glazed earthenware known as faience, often appearing as wine jugs of an eggshell white. Faience vessels attracted painters for the way light reflected off them. Other recurring items include musical instruments, especially string instruments (lutes and viols) and keyboards (virginals and harpsichords). Often the keyboards—especially their lids—were ornately painted; here, then, was another opportunity for artists to demonstrate their prowess: by faithfully rendering the painted lid—or strategically changing it to fit the composition of the entire tableau.Emphasizing that these genre paintings document “an extraordinary process of artistic exchange,” E. Melanie Gifford and Lisha Deming Glinsman turn to the matter of technique. X-ray florescence (XRF) analysis reveals the composition of the pigments employed. Some artists (Vermeer, Ter Borch, Van Mieris) favored ultramarine blue, made at the time from ground lapis lazuli. Deep and vivid, ultramarine blue was expensive. Seeking a comparable color at a cheaper cost, other artists (Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch) instead used smalt (ground cobalt glass), either in whole or in part. Paint dries at different rates, depending on the pigment; XRF analysis shows which artists used copper or zinc sulphate as a catalyst to speed up drying time. In depicting the folds of a carpet or the sheen of a satin dress, whether favoring hard- or soft-edged contours, working either fast (Metsu) or slow (Van Mieris), “each painter,” according to Gifford and Glinsman, “established a ‘trademark’ manner... that made his work instantly identifiable.”Perhaps the greatest strength of Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting is its many lucid comparisons of related paintings. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., for example, compares one of Vermeer’s most famous compositions, “Woman with a Balance,” with the closely-related “Woman Weighing Coins” by De Hooch. Both were painted around the same time, 1664, but it is likely De Hooch’s came first. In each, a window to the left lets in light on a woman on the right. Her face is composed in a look of deep concentration. Depending from her right hand is a balance, the sun glinting off the weighing platforms. So much for similarities. De Hooch’s painting, for Wheelock, carries no further message: a woman weighs coins against each other, and that is that. How utterly different the “weighty moral allegory” provided by Vermeer, its gravity owing to a painting of “The Last Judgement” that dominates the upper right quadrant. Christ’s upturned arms are mirrored by the downward-pointing chains of the woman’s balance. Thus, in Wheelock’s view, Vermeer explicitly connects the acts of weighing and judging even as he contrasts the realms of the temporal and the eternal.“Given the narrow slice of humanity and social status depicted in such elegant Dutch genre paintings,” writes Wheelock in his essay in the first half of the book, “one must ask why they speak so directly to a wide spectrum of today’s society.” The answer is complex, and only part of it can be suggested here. There is, to begin with, the lure of elegant ladies and gentlemen. (Witness the fuss this past spring over the red dress worn by Huma Abedin at a party given by Anna Wintour.) There is, too, the implicit respect accorded to scholars and inventors of the day, whatever that day might be. Vermeer, Dou, Van Mieris, and the rest depicted these and similar figures so as to make them admirable, fit repositories of respect—even if the respect is admixed with an increment of envy.Another appeal of the great Dutch genre paintings is that their images form a code. Becoming conversant with the symbols of that code—for example, the tile floors of black and white marble, the rich fabric of curtains and drapery—is a powerful way of making a distant world more intelligible. As viewers make connections between the symbols of one painting and those of another, as they begin to break the code in which these artists spoke, they find themselves enjoying a rich allusiveness, along with occasional and superior in-jokes.Last, there remains the psychological keenness of the painters themselves, who brought forth works of such durable beauty. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting is full of them—images of particular men and women whose expressions reveal much (though not all) about their thoughts and fears, aspirations and vanities; their grievous sufferings, their worldly and otherworldly joys. The “narrow slice of humanity” depicted by these paintings is at length only narrow-seeming. What Johannes Vermeer and the masters of the Dutch Golden Age captured so brilliantly was humanity in its everydayness—humanity in its universality. This is why their work transcends its circumstances and speaks to us today, tomorrow, and for centuries to come.____John Check teaches at the University of Central Missouri. His reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, and elsewhere.