In Vermeer’s Hometown, Seeking Clues to His Interior Life



Little is known about the life of the Dutch Golden Age master painter Johannes Vermeer, although such masterpieces as “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and “The Milkmaid” are some of the most beloved paintings of our era. He lived and worked his entire life in Delft, a canal-ringed city in the western Netherlands that remains virtually unchanged in shape and hue from Vermeer’s time, offering the disorienting sensation that one is walking into a 17th-century painting.

And it is on Delft’s cobblestone streets, along its curving canals lined with tidy brick and half-timbered houses, past its original windmill and churches dating to the Middle Ages, that we can still imagine Vermeer purchasing his pigments or his canvases. Somewhere inside one of these houses, he is at work on scenes of domestic intimacy, inviting us inside muted chambers with checkerboard floors, high-back chairs and light slanting through stained-glass windows.

Though it’s still possible to buy heavy ceramic milk jugs and pewter tableware like those he depicted in the city’s antiques shops, as well as the city’s signature blue and white delftware tiles at the still-functioning Royal Delft pottery factory, it’s more difficult to identify the true landmarks of Vermeer’s life. That is partly because he rarely painted outdoors, so his work offers almost no clues about his personal terrain.

But late last year, a significant discovery was made about the location of one of Vermeer’s most famous paintings, “The Little Street” — considered by Vermeer scholars to be the most naturalistic townscape in all of Dutch painting — that has reordered the art world’s thinking about the artist, and about the way that this tranquil city of 96,000 views its much-loved son.

After about a year and a half of research, Frans Grijzenhout, an art history professor at the University of Amsterdam, found data in a 17th-century tax registry from the Delft archives that allowed him to pinpoint the location of the house in Vermeer’s image. It is on the east side of town, near the main square at Vlamingstraat 40-42. The house, it turns out, was owned by Vermeer’s widowed aunt, Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, or Ariaantje.



This discovery has resulted in a new wave of interest in Vermeer’s life in Delft, culminating in a citywide celebration, the Year of Vermeer, along with an exhibition featuring “The Little Street” — returning to Delft for the first time in 320 years — and the development of a new app-guided walking tour “Where Is Vermeer?” that helps visitors explore the city with new insights about his life and his family.

“It’s difficult to find any true fragments of Vermeer’s life in Delft,” said Gregor Weber, head of the Fine and Decorative Arts department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Dutch national museum. “Everyone would like to know more, and everyone is searching for something new because he is so well loved and appreciated.”

Finding “The Little Street” in a real place in Delft, he said, allows us “to get that little bit closer” to Vermeer, in the city where he was born and raised, married the love of his life, Catharina Bolnes, fathered 15 children, painted about 45 exquisite works of art, and died at 43 in 1675.

Until July 17, the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft hosts the exhibition, “Vermeer Is Coming Home / The Little Street Returns to Delft,” with the original masterpiece as its centerpiece, on loan from the Rijksmuseum. In addition, the exhibition features other artworks and archival documents that place the “The Little Street” and its location in a new context.

To experience this updated version of Vermeer’s Delft, I took an hourlong train ride from my home in Amsterdam in April. When I arrived at the Delft train station, I noticed a woman dressed in 17th-century washerwoman garb, quietly sweeping up the very modern entry hall with a broom made of a birch branch. I realized that she was dressed as one of the figures from “The Little Street,” so I asked her for directions. She smiled and pointed me toward a Vermeer tourism kiosk inside the station, past a large billboard of “The Little Street,” where I was supplied with Vermeer maps and brochures.

As I walked through the quaint city toward the museum, I noted many banners of “The Little Street” waving from lampposts throughout the city and Vermeer-inspired design products in shop windows and “Vermeer menus” at local restaurants. What I didn’t see was a lot of tourists: The city seemed as sleepy and serene as I have ever encountered it. Although wonderfully preserved, Delft is not an open-air museum like Bruges, Belgium, or Venice; it still has the local feel of a town engaged in contemporary life.

Finding the location of the painting doesn’t merely provide an opportunity to promote tourism, Professor Grijzenhout said when I visited him at his office at the University of Amsterdam. It also offers Vermeer lovers a new perspective on how his relationships might have evolved during his life, and how he chose what to paint.

Born the son of a Protestant art dealer and innkeeper, Vermeer later became the husband of an heiress from a Roman Catholic family — a rare mixed marriage for his times. When he converted to Catholicism and they moved in with his mother-in-law on the west side of town, his social milieu shifted.

“Vermeer changed from a very average, simple, lower-middle-class surrounding, into a definitely higher social circle,” Professor Grijzenhout said. “Until now, we thought that meant that he turned his back on the eastern part of the city, which was the poorer region.” Learning that Vermeer painted “The Little Street” in his former neighborhood, indicates that he didn’t renounce his past life at all. “We can now say that, at least in this painting, he lovingly registered a part of life in that poorer neighborhood in the east.”

At the Prinsenhof Museum, I met the art historian Anita Jansen, chief of the collection department and curator of old masters, who organized the current exhibition. First, we went through the museum’s “Little Street” show, which begins with presentations of a half-dozen previous theories about the location of the painting (there have been scores of guesses) then provides historical context for the painting, via city maps and artworks by genre painters of the era, and culminates in a small chamber where the original work takes pride of place on the last wall of the exhibition.

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“The Little Street,” in spite of its title, is not a depiction of a street so as much as it is a portrait of two houses: one large 15th-century brick house with crow-stepped gables, and green and red shutters on its iron-grilled windows, and part of a smaller house, as well as two adjoining doorways leading into two byways. Through the doors, we see women busy at work, one with needlework and the other washing laundry over a wooden barrel. A boy and girl are crouched on the pavement absorbed in a game.

Having oriented ourselves with the help of the exhibition, we headed into Delft; it was like stepping onto one of the 400-year-old city maps we had just seen hanging on the wall. Before us was Oude Kerk, the 13th-century Gothic church with a 250-foot tilting tower known as “the crooked John,” where Vermeer and four of his children are buried in a family crypt.

Leaving the church and heading down the cobblestone Oude Delft street along the canal, we see the wealthier section of town where Vermeer lived with his in-laws, with its monumental patrician canal houses, some still featuring ornate sandstone family shields. We passed the location of the former home of Vermeer’s only real patron, the son of a brewer, Pieter van Ruijven, and his wife, Maria de Knuijt. They bought 21 paintings by the artist, which remained in their family until 1696.

Turning onto Boterbrug, we quickly arrived on the Grand Market Square, a sprawling open cobblestone space in the old city center, where we gazed up at the 14th-century Protestant Nieuwe Kerk (new church) with a 350-foot spire. Vermeer was baptized in the church and officially betrothed across the square in the Raedhuijs or town hall in 1653. He and Catharina married over the protestations of her parents, the successful brick maker Reynier Bolnes and Maria Thins, who came from a well-to-do patrician family in Gouda, a town in the southern Netherlands famous for its cheese.

To the west of town hall, in an area called “Papist’s Corner,” there is the mansion where Catharina’s mother, Maria Thins, lived after she left Mr. Bolnes, who was reportedly abusive to his wife and children. Vermeer and Catharina later moved in with her, and raised their 11 surviving children there (four died young). Not only did he have to leave his old neighborhood, he also was apparently erased from the civic records because of his conversion (after Protestants deposed the Catholics in Holland, the public practice of Catholicism was banned in Delft and other cities for about 200 years). From his mother-in-law’s house, he painted and ran an art dealership and the inn he later inherited from his father.

Passing the cafes and shops that encircle the lovely square, we saw a plaque that read, “Vermeer was born here” at the site of a long-gone inn and tavern Huis Mechelen. Ms. Jansen said the information is no longer considered accurate. Though Vermeer did live at the inn, from about the age of 9, historians now believe that he was born around the corner at Voldersgracht 25, at another inn called De Vliegende Vos, or the Flying Fox, which Vermeer’s father and mother ran.

It turned out that if you walked northeast on the Voldersgracht, along the narrow canal with stirring olive green waters, the street name changes to Vlamingstraat, which Professor Grijzenhout through his research identified as the location of “The Little Street.” So, I realized, Vermeer painted the image, essentially, on the street where he was born — indeed, very close to home. We continued onto Vlamingstraat and stopped in front of No. 42, the former home of Vermeer’s Aunt Ariaantje and our destination.

“To me, knowing that he painted his aunt’s house makes ‘The Little Street’ an image of remembrance,” Ms. Jansen said, as we stood in front. “It was a personal image, a part of his own family, his life.”

So as not to disturb the private owners, we continued along the canal and crossed a little bridge to the other side of the canal. We had a better view of the two homes that have since replaced the ones that Vermeer painted. The 15th-century house on the right was replaced by an elegant two-story building that was probably built in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, with large picture windows and neo-Classical detailing on the facade. The house on the left, with rectilinear brickwork, was probably built more recently.

What was the same was the rhythm of the structures — a house, then two doorways and then another house. Overlying the image of Vermeer’s painting in my mind, I was fairly convinced that this could be the place. Standing in front of it, I wondered whether knowing — or at the very least, believing — that this was the place where Vermeer painted one of his greatest masterpieces made me feel closer to him.

It didn’t, or probably not in the way that the art historians and the city’s tourism bureau might hope I would. But standing there for a while longer, I began to ponder how long it took Vermeer to capture the detailed worn masonry of the medieval buildings with such exquisite precision. Unlike with his intimate interiors, which he could inhabit for months, if necessary, to capture his languorous scenes of domesticity, here he would have been exposed to the ever-changing Dutch weather — often dark, rainy and blustery. Who passed him on the canal side as he painted? Who stopped by to say hello? Who brought him a beer to quench his thirst?

I thought: What if he painted this picture simply because he loved to be here? Or as an excuse to visit his former neighborhood, to be closer to his aunt and near his mother and sister, who also lived on the Vlamingstraat? Perhaps after converting to another religion, moving across town and living in a fancy mansion left him with a sense of longing.

After saying goodbye to Ms. Jansen and heading back toward the train station, I realized that having been able to situate Vermeer in a real place in Delft, and standing in that place for a little while, did raise new interesting questions, and far more personal questions, for me, about his process. What motivated Vermeer to paint a domestic scene from afar? And what did it feel like, for this painter of intimate interiors, to be the outsider looking in?

IF YOU GO

What to Do

Museum Prinsenhof Delft.A museum with about five rooms (Sint Agathaplein 1, Delft; 31-15-260-23-58; prinsenhof-delft.nl/en) showing until July 17, “Vermeer Is Coming Home | The Little Street Returns to Delft,” an exhibition on the search to identify the place that inspired Vermeer to paint his masterpiece.

Vermeer Centrum Delft.This volunteer-run organization (Voldersgracht 21, Delft; 31-15-213-85-88; vermeerdelft.nl/en) provides information about Vermeer, demonstrates his painting techniques and exhibits reproductions of his works. It also has a shop that sells Vermeer-related trinkets.

Royal Delft.Delft’s famous blue and white ceramic tiles are produced here atKoninklijke Porceleyne Fles, (Rotterdamseweg 196, Delft; 31-15-251-20-30;royaldelft.com/home_en), where a visit to the factory and museum includes a replica of Vermeer’s kitchen. There are workshops and a brasserie.

Where to Eat

Beestenmarkt.Just a short walk from the Grand Market Square in the center of Delft is the Beestenmarkt, a quieter, smaller square with nice cafes and bars.

Brasserie’t Crabbetje.A sustainable seafood restaurant (Verwersdijk 14, Delft; 31-15-213-88-50; crabbetjedelft.nl) offering Mediterranean-style dishes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/travel/vermeer-hometown-delft.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftravel&action=click&contentCollection=travel&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

Last edited by Goose (6/29/2016 1:48 pm)