Johannes Vermeer was a cheat. He was a printmaker, a tracer, a copyist. Some might say he was not a real artist at all. So suggests Jane Jelley in a new book, Traces of Vermeer, on the Dutch master. It is borderline sensational.
I was once a Vermeer groupie. I fell in love with his painting The Guitar Playerwhen it was briefly stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead, and set out to discover who this perplexing girl might have been. I hunted down almost all the 36 (or so) Vermeers across Europe and America, and corresponded with the Vermeer pundits John Michael Montias and Arthur Wheelock. In 2004 I went with Tracy Chevalier, author of the delightful novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, to open the bidding in the Sotheby’s auction of the last painting to be attributed to Vermeer – and endured an agonising few seconds until a next bid came in.
Almost nothing is known of Vermeer but that he died at 43 and in debt. Assiduous digging has concluded that he was nothing like Chevalier’s moody bohemian with a sexy assistant. He was the son of a Protestant art dealer who trained as an artist but fell in love with a Catholic girl, Catharina, and went to live in her mother’s house in Delft’s Catholic quarter. The couple were clearly close for the rest of their lives, having 15 children, of whom 11 survived.
Vermeer spent his time trying to earn money from picture dealing and property. He can have had little time for painting. There was no studio or apprentices, no sketches or drawings, and Vermeer’s tiny oeuvre, even allowing for losses, suggests painting was virtually a hobby. He painted at home, his subjects were domestic and his models were probably his ever-pregnant wife, daughters (including the girl wearing a pearl earring and the guitarist) and their maid, Tanaka.
One thing we do know about Vermeer is that Delft in the mid-17th century was crazy about lenses. After seeing through one, a contemporary wrote: “All painting is dead in comparison.” The local lens master was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a known friend and trustee of Vermeer’s. Two of the latter’s paintings, The Astronomer and The Geographer, depict a man in a similar way to prints of van Leeuwenhoek.
Vermeer must have lived among lenses. Many historians have therefore wondered whether his strangely distorted angles, compositions and perspectives might be the result of the use of a camera obscura, a box or cupboard into which an image is projected on to its far side. David Hockney regards this as the only explanation for some of the paintings, which would be virtually impossible to execute using the naked eye. But hard evidence is lacking, and most experts take the view that Vermeer was too great a genius to have dabbled in fads.
Yet there are puzzles. X-rays of Vermeers show no sign of prior sketching or under-drawing, as is normal in old masters. There are no lines or signs of later correction, only a base layer with a dark shadowy outline of the image, beneath later layers of colour.
Jelley claims to have cracked the mystery by trying, as a painter herself, to use a camera obscura to mimic what Vermeer might have done. She set up a box backed by a sheet of greasy paper, on to which she projected her composed scene through a lens. She then traced over the image in dark paint, and laid it paint downwards on a canvas. When she peeled off the paper, the resulting rough print looked just like a Vermeer under-layer. It had the same distorted proportions and unclear shapes, the same exaggerated foreground and off-centre composition. It explained the lack of corrections: it was a facsimile of real life.
To Jelley, Vermeer’s genius lay elsewhere, in his choice of subject and, above all, in what he did next, in adding colour to create his ethereal evocation of light. His pictures are a kaleidoscope of splashed shades, at times impressionistic, at times of Jackson Pollock intensity. He treats colours as if they were his orchestra, with his brush as baton. The dispassionate faces are just that, those of his patient family, dragooned into sitting before his box as raw material for his magic.
I find this revelatory and wholly convincing. Jelley devotes a chapter to the history of art innovation, in a Netherlands that was the California of its day, and explores it in depth. We can understand why Vermeer painted so few pictures, and such intimate ones, and was not a big name in his day. He was not the typical image of an old master, a Chevalier sex god or a Puccini bohemian. He was a hard-pressed but happily married man, an optical nerd popping upstairs to tinker with his secret toy, his camera, much as a modern husband might escape to his train set. Genius was an add-on.
These were times when experimenting was second nature for the Dutch. They were the richest nation in Europe, exploring every corner of the world – and of science. Everything was new and exciting. Vermeer was no “cheat”, no fraud or common artisan, though he does appear to have been secretive about his methods. He was an experimenter as much as an artist.
I find it exhilarating to learn that Vermeer might have used a sort of printing in his work. Jelley takes as her text a Georges Braque quote: “Painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.” To discover that Vermeer used printing to express his message is merely to state that he was an artist of real life. He was the Andy Warhol of his day, the golden age equivalent of Hockney, who uses his index finger as a paintbrush to create pictures on his iPad.
There is a modern cult around what constitutes “authenticity” in art, as if real artists should stand at their easels and use the unaided eye – or real musicians use only ancient instruments. It puts artists in a purist premier league, with a second division for printmakers, illustrators, craftsmen and landscape designers. It is rubbish.
What matters is what we find beautiful. The more I know of Vermeer – and I now know a lot more – the greater my admiration for his work. If someone thinks he “cheated”, good for them. I wonder what his contemporary Rembrandt got up to.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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