Part 2

The beautiful blue Danube had so little water in it just then that the voyage to Budapest would have taken almost twice as long as it should, and there was not time. To make the journey by train, just for one day, was an unbearable thought at that moment; although I now regret that we did not go. The Budapest Vermeer is a portrait, a Dutch Vrouw, standing, looking full at the world, without any accessories whatever. Not having seen it, I can express no opinion as to its authorship, but Dr. de Groot is doubtful, although he reproduces the picture in his book among the practical certainties. So also does M. Vanzype, the most recent of our painter’s critics, whose monograph, “Vermeer de Delft,” in the “Collection des Grands Artistes des Pays-Bas,” was published in 1908. M. Vanzype goes farther, for he also includes the portrait of a young man in the Brussels gallery for which the curator, M. A. J. Wauters, has made out so eloquent a case, but which Herr Bredius and Dr. de Groot both repudiate. For myself, all I can say of it is that one does not jump to the denial of it as one did to the putative example in our National Gallery, just completed by the addition of its lost half. The Budapest Vermeer is in reproduction a beautiful picture--a youngish Dutch woman with the inevitable placidity, but not so open and easy-going as the personalities whom the artist chose for his own pictures: she has folded hands and large white cape and cuffs. M. Vanzype admits that this portrait and that of the young man at Brussels lend colour to the theory of Thoré and M. Arsène Alexandre that Vermeer studied for a while immediately under Rembrandt; but he goes on to show that this was practically an impossibility.

Turning reluctantly away from Budapest, we went next to Dresden, which has two Vermeers and a light and restful hotel, the Bellevue, very agreeable to repose in after our caravanserai at Vienna. The Bellevue is on the bank of the river and close to the Picture Gallery, into which one could therefore drop again and again at off hours. The famous Raphael is of course Dresden’s lodestar, and next come the Correggios, and there is a triptych by Jan Van Eyck and a man in armour by Van Dyck; but it is Vermeer of whom we are talking, and the range of Vermeer cannot be understood at all unless one sees him in the capital of Saxony. For it is here that his “Young Courtesan” (chastely softened by the modest Baedeker into “The Young Connoisseur”) is found. It is a large picture, for him, nearly five feet by four, and it represents a buxom, wanton girl, of a ripe beauty, dressed in a lace cap and hood and a bright yellow bodice, considering the value of the _douceur_ which a roystering Dutchman is offering her. Behind is an old woman curious as to the result, and beside her is another roysterer, whose face might easily be that unseen one of the artist in the Czernin picture, and who is wearing a similar cap and slashed sleeves. The party stands on a balcony, over the railing of which has been flung one of the heavy tapestries on which our painter loved to spend his genius. The picture is remarkable as being a new thing in Vermeer’s career, and indeed a new thing in Dutch art; and it also shows that had Vermeer liked he might have done more with drama, for the faces of the two women are expressive and true; although such was his incorrigible fastidiousness, his preference for the distinguished and radiant to the exclusion of all else, that he cannot make them either ugly or objectionable. The procuress is a Vermeer among procuresses, the courtesan a Vermeer among courtesans. The fascination of the canvas, though totally different from that of any other of his works, is equal in its way to any: it has a large easy power, as well as being a beautiful and daring adventure in colour.

The other Dresden picture is also a little off Vermeer’s usual path. The subject is familiar: the Dutch woman reading a letter by a table, on which is the customary cloth and a dish of apples; the light comes through the same window and falls on the same white wall; but the tone of the work is distinct, sombre green prevailing. It would be thrilling to own this picture, but I do not rank it for allurement or satisfaction with several of the others. It comes with me not even fifth or sixth. Vermeer’s best indeed is so wonderful--the “View of Delft,” the “Girl’s Head” at the Mauritshuis, the “Milkmaid” and “Woman Reading a Letter” at the Ryks, the “Pearl Necklace” at Berlin, the “Street in Delft” at the Six Gallery, and the “Young Courtesan” at Dresden--that anything below that standard--such is the fastidiousness which this man’s fastidiousness engenders--quickly disappoints; although the student working up to the best and reaching the best last would be continually enraptured.

Next Berlin. After the “Girl’s Head” at the Mauritshuis, which among the figures comes always first with me, and the “View of Delft,” it is, I think, the Berlin “Necklace” that is Vermeer’s most charming work. I consider the white wall in this painting beautiful beyond the power of words to express. It is so wonderful that if one were to cut out a few square inches of this wall alone and frame it one would have a joy for ever. Franz Hals’ planes of black have never been equalled, but Vermeer’s planes of white seem to me quite as unapproachable. The whole picture has radiance and light and delicacy: painters gasp before it. It has more too: it is steeped in a kind of white magic as the “View of Delft” is steeped in the very radiance of the evening sun. Berlin is to me a rude and materialistic city with officials who have made inattention a fine art, and food that sends one to the “Continental Bradshaw” for trains to Paris; but this picture is leaven enough. It lifts Berlin above serious criticism. I hope that when we have fought Germany in the inevitable war of which the papers are so consistently full, it will be part of the indemnity.

The other Vermeer in the superb gallery over which Dr. Bode presides with such dangerous enthusiasm (dangerous, I mean, to other nations), is not so remarkable; but it is burnt into my memory. That white Delft jug I shall never forget. The woman drinking, with her face seen through the glass as Terburg would have done it (one likes to see painters excelling now and again at each other’s mannerisms); the rich figure of the Dutch gentleman watching her; the room with its chequered floor: all these I can visualize with an effort; but the white Delft jug requires no effort: the retina never loses it. Vermeer, true ever to his native town and home, painted this jug several times. Not so often as Metsu, but with a greater touch. You find it notably again in the King’s example at Windsor Castle.

Berlin has also a private Vermeer which I did not see--Mr. James Simon’s “Mistress and Servant.” Judging by the photogravure, this must be magnificent; and it is peculiar in respect of being almost the only picture in which the painter has a plain table-cloth in place of the usual heavily-patterned tapestry. The lady in ermine and pearls is evidently ordering dinner; the placid, pleasant maid has a hint of Maes. The whole effect seems to be rich and warm. Two other pictures I also ought to have seen before leaving Germany--one at Brunswick and one at Frankfort. In the Brunswick painting a coquettish girl takes a glass of wine from a courteous Dutch gentleman at the table, while a sulky Dutch gentleman glooms in the background. On the table is another of the white Delft jugs. The Frankfort picture is “The Geographer at the Window,” dated 1668, which in the reproduction strikes one as a most beautiful and dignified work, wholly satisfying. The geographer--probably Antony van Leeuwenhoek--leans at his lighted table over a chart, with his compasses in his hand. All the painter’s favourite accessories are here--the heavy tapestry on the table, the window with its small panes, the streaming light of day, the white wall, the chair with its brass-headed nails. And the kind thoughtful face of the geographer makes the whole thing human and humane. Vermeer, I fancy, was never more harmonious than here. I shall certainly go to Frankfort soon to translate this impression into fact.

At Amsterdam we went first to the grave and noiseless mansion of the Six family at Number 511 Heerengracht, one of the most beautiful and reserved of the canals of this city. A ring at the bell brought a rosy and spotless maid to the door, and she left us for a little while in a lobby from which Vermeer might have chosen his pictures’ blue tiles, until a butler led us upstairs to the little gallery. I am writing of 1907, before the negotiations for the purchase by the State of Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” were completed, and we therefore saw it in its natural home, where it had been for two hundred and more years. But now, at a cost of 500,000 florins at twelve to the pound (or at nearly £155 a square inch) it has passed to the Ryks. The price sounds beyond reason; but it is not. Granted that a kind and portly Dutchwoman at work in her kitchen is a subject for a painter, here it is done with such mastery, sympathy, and beauty as not only to hold one spellbound but to be beyond appraisement. No sum is too much for the possession of this unique work--unique not only in Vermeer’s career (so far as we know), but in all painting. What the artist would have asked for it we do not know. At the sale of his works in 1696 it brought 175 florins.

Vermeer here is at his most vigorous and powerful. His other works are notable above everything for charm: such a picture as the “Pearl Necklace” at Berlin represents the ecstasy of perfection in paint; but here we find strength too. I never saw a woman more firmly set upon canvas: I never saw a bodice that was so surely filled with a broad and beating bosom. Only a very great man could so paint that quiet capable face. Some large pictures are very little, and some small pictures are large. This “Milkmaid” by Vermeer is only eighteen inches by fifteen, but it is to all intents and purposes a full length: on no life-size canvas could a more real and living woman be painted. When you are at Amsterdam you cannot give this picture too much attention; be sure to notice also the painting of the hood and the drawing of the still life, especially the jug and the bowl. It was this picture, one feels, that shone before the dear Chardin, all his life, as a star.

The other Six Vermeer is that Delft façade which artists adore. The charm of it is not to be communicated by words, or at any rate by words of mine. It is as though Peter de Hooch had known sorrow, and, emerging triumphant and serene, had begun to paint again. And yet that is, of course, not all; for De Hooch, with all his radiant tenderness, had not this man’s native aristocracy of mind, nor could any suffering have given it to him. Like the “View of Delft,” like the “Young Courtesan,” this picture stands alone not only in Vermeer’s record, but in the art of all time. Many grow the flower now--there is a modern Dutch painter, Breitner, whose whole career is an attempt to reproduce the spirit of this façade--but the originator still stands alone and apart, as indeed, by God’s sense of justice, originators are usually permitted to. The sale of twenty-one of Vermeer’s pictures at Amsterdam in 1696 included the “Street in Delft” which the Six family own, and also a view of houses, a smaller work, which fetched forty-eight florins. (That is one of the Vermeers which have disappeared, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, sir.)

The Vermeers at the Ryks were, in 1907, two in number (now made three by the “Milkmaid”); and of these one I do not like, however much I am astounded by its dexterity, and one I could never tire of. The picture that I do not like, “The Love Letter,” shows, with the “New Testament Allegory” at the Hague, the painter in his most dashing mood of virtuosity. Neither has charm, but both have a masterful dexterity that not only leaves one bewildered but kills all the other _genre_ painters in the vicinity. Both were painted, I conjecture, to order, to please some foolish purchaser who frequented the studio. But the other Ryks picture--“The Woman Reading a Letter”--here is the essential Vermeer again in all his delicacy and quietude. It was the first of his best pictures that I ever saw, and I fell under his spell instantly. What I have said of the “Milkmaid” applies also to the “Reader”; she becomes after a while a full length. The picture is only twenty inches by sixteen, but the woman also takes her place in the memory as life-size. It is one of the simplest of all the pictures: comparable with the “Pearl Necklace,” but a little simpler still. The woman’s face has been injured, but it does not matter; you don’t notice it after a moment; her intent expression remains; her gentle contours are unharmed. The jacket she wears is the most beautiful blue in Holland; the map is a yellowish brown; the wall is white. The woman, whose condition is obviously interesting, is, I like to think, the Vrouw Vermeer, possibly the mother of the young girls in the pictures at the Hague, Vienna and Brussels.

The Hague is the most comfortable city that I know in which to see pictures. It is so light and open, the Oude Doelen is so pleasant a hotel, and the pictures to see are so few--just a handful of old masterpieces at the Mauritshuis and just a handful of the romantics at the Mesdag Museum. That is all; no formal galleries, no headaches. Above all there are here the two most beautiful Vermeers that are known--the “Young Girl”--and the “View of Delft.” Writing in another place some years ago I ventured to call the Mauritshuis picture of a girl’s head one of the most beautiful things in Holland. I retract that statement now, and instead say quite calmly that it is _the_ most beautiful thing in Holland. And to me it is in many ways not only the most beautiful thing in Holland, but the most satisfying and exquisite product of brush and colour that I have anywhere seen. The painting of the lower lip is as much a miracle to me as the flower of the cow-parsley or the wing of a Small Heath. I said that the “Pearl Necklace” was steeped in white magic. There is magic here too. You are in the presence of the unaccountable. Paint--a recognized medium--has exceeded its power. The line of the right cheek is surely the sweetest line ever traced. I don’t expect you to come a stranger to this face and feel what I feel; but I ask you to look at it quietly and steadily for a little while, in its uncoloured photographic presentment, until it smiles back at you again--as surely it will. Yes, even in the photogravure reproduction that stands as frontispiece to this book lurk the ghosts of these smiles.

Who was this child, one wonders. One of the painter’s, I think. One of the eight, whom it amused him to dress in this Oriental garb that he might play with the cool harmonies of yellow, green and blue, and the youthful Dutch complexion. If this is so, it is one of his latest pictures, for all his many children were under age when he died. It is probable that the child in the Duke of Arenberg’s picture at Brussels, in the same costume, was a sister. There is certainly a family likeness between the two, and if, as one may reasonably suppose, Vermeer’s wife was his model for certain of the other pictures, we may easily believe that both were her daughters, for they have her candid forehead, her placidity.

Think of what has been happening in the world during the years since this sweet face was set upon canvas--the evolutions and tragedies, the lives lived and ended, the whole passionate fretted progress of the nations! “Monna Lisa” has smiled a century and more longer, and she has been looked upon every day for centuries: this child, not a whit less wonderful as a conquest of man over pigment, smiled unseen; for when she was bought at a Hague auction a few years ago by Herr Des Tombes for two florins thirty cents she was covered with grime. Think of it--two florins thirty cents--and if she found her way to Christie’s to-day I don’t suppose that £50,000 would buy her. I know that I personally would willingly live in a garret if she were on its wall. But leaving aside the human interest of the picture, did you ever see, even in a reproduction, such ease as there is in this painting, such concealment of effort? It was no small thing at that day for a Dutchman to lay his colours like this, so broadly and lucidly. It is as though the paints evoked life rather than counterfeited it; as though the child was waiting there behind the canvas to emerge at the touch of the brushwand.

And the “View of Delft”--what is one to say of that? Here again perfection is the only word. And more than perfection, for perfection is cold. This picture is warm. Its serenity is absolute; its charm is complete. You stand before it satisfied--except for that heightened emotion, that choking feeling and smarting eyes, which perfection compels. The picture is still the last word in the painting of a town. Not all the efforts of artists since have improved upon it; not one has done anything so beautiful. It is indeed because he painted these two pictures that I have for Jan Vermeer of Delft such a feeling of gratitude and enthusiasm. Wonderful as are many of his other pictures that I have described, they would not alone have subjected me to so much travelling in continental trains by day and night. But to see this head of a young girl and this view of Delft I would go anywhere.

To the “New Testament Allegory” I have referred above: it does not give me pleasure except in its tapestry curtain. That detail is, I suppose, among the wonders of painting. The other Mauritshuis Vermeer is the “Diana and Her Nymphs”--that gentle Italianate group of fair women, the painting of which Andrea himself might have overlooked. It is at once Vermeer and not Vermeer. It is very rich, very satisfying; but I for one should feel no sense of bereavement if another name were put to it. As a matter of fact Nicholas Maes was long held to have been its author. A fifth Vermeer the Mauritshuis chanced to possess when I was there, for Herr Bredius had recently discovered in a Brussels collection a very curious example from the magic hand--a tiny picture of a girl with a flute, in a Chinese hat (or something very like it), with an elaborate background: not a very attractive work, but Vermeer through and through, and so modern and innovating that were it hung in a Paris or London exhibition to-day it would look out of place only by reason of its power. The picture is seven and a half inches by six and three quarters, and now belongs to Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

After Delft, where we roamed awhile to reconstruct Vermeer’s environment, but where, I regret to say, little is known of him, Brussels. For Vermeer there, one must, as in Vienna, visit the home of a nobleman--the Duke of Arenberg--and here again one falls into the hands of a discreet and hospitable butler. The d’Arenberg mansion is in the Rue de la Régence, just under the crest of the fashionable hill. It is open to the picture lover, like that of Count Czernin, only on certain days. The gallery is small and chiefly Dutch, with a few good pictures in it. The Vermeer is isolated on an easel--the most unmistakable perhaps of all, although so cruelly treated by time, for it is a mass of cracks. Yet through these wounds the beautiful living light of a young girl’s face shines--not the girl we have seen at the Hague, but one very like her--her sister, as I conjecture--dressed in the same Eastern trappings, a girl with a strangely blank forehead and eyes widely divided, akin to the type of Madonna dear to Andrea del Sarto. The same girl I think sat for the “Player of the Clavichord” in our National Gallery, to which we soon come. She is a little sad, and a little strange, this child, and only a master could have created her. At Brussels also is one of Vermeer’s “Geographers,” in the collection of the Vicomte du Bus de Gisegnies; but this I did not then know. And in the Picture Gallery is the conjectural portrait of the young man of which I have written above.

After Brussels, Paris--a good exchange. Paris has one Vermeer in a private collection--Alphonse de Rothschild’s--an astronomer, which I have not seen, and one in the Louvre--the beautiful “Dentellière”--before which I have stood scores of times. This too is very small, only a few inches square, but the serene busy head is painted as largely as if it were in a fresco. The lighting is from the right instead of the left--a very rare experiment with Vermeer.

It is greatly to be regretted that our National Vermeers are not better, because to many readers of this essay they must necessarily be the only pictures from his hand that they can study at all times; and my ecstasies will appear to be foolish. The lady standing at a spinet is a marvel of technique; the paint is applied with all Vermeer’s charm of touch; the room is filled with the light of day; there are marvellous details, such as the brass-headed nails of the chair, and the little spot of colour on the head is fascinating; moreover there is an agreeably ingenious scheme of blue, beginning with the gay sky of the landscape on the wall, passing through the delicate tippet of the lady and ending on a soberer note with the covering of the chair. But it is not a picture of which I am fond; it is a _tour de force_; and I think I positively hate the ugly Cupid on the wall, which would be a blot on any man’s work, most of all on Vermeer’s. One feels that he must have painted this to please the husband of the sitter, who insisted on his pictures being immortalized. Vermeer, left to himself, would have painted a map. The other--the seated girl at the piano--lacks the painter’s highest radiance. It is the same girl that we saw in the Brussels picture.

Of the other London Vermeers two (only two!) belong to Mr. Otto Beit. One of these is a tiny “Lady seated at a Spinet,” not in the first rank of fascination, but a little masterpiece nevertheless, and the other, “A Lady Writing a Letter,” notable for the strong and beautiful painting of the lady’s face, foreshortened as she bends over her task. Beside her stands her blue-aproned maid, waiting to take the missive to the door. The table has its usual tapestry and the wall its picture, this time an old master. But the head of the lady is what one remembers--with her white cap and her pearl drops and her happy prosperous countenance.

Mr. Beit’s Vermeers are in Belgrave Square: there is another in Hyde Park Gardens, the property of Mrs. Joseph: “The Soldier and the Laughing Girl” it is called. The girl sits at the table with a bright and merry face; the soldier, who has borrowed his red from Peter de Hooch, is in the shade; on the wall is a splendid rugged map of Holland and West Friesland. The picture is paintier than is usual with Vermeer, but very powerful and rich. Mrs. Joseph (I am told) has been forced by the importunities of collectors and dealers to have recourse to a printed refusal to sell this work!