1 Vermeer’s frenzy

Something about Johannes Vermeer you would rather not know, but now will never forget.


The catalogue of the triumphalistic Vermeer exhibition in Washington and The Hague does not tell of the death of its hero. Only the place and date of his burial are given: the Oude Kerk in Delft on 16 December 1675. We know more. In July 1677 Vermeer’s widow requested permission from the States of Holland and West Friesland to draw on the capital of a family trust fund. Her petition reports her husband’s death in words which I have never been able to forget.

… the aforementioned Johannes Vermeer during the ruinous and protracted war not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in, as a result of which and owing to the very great burden of [his] children, having nothing of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead. [trans. Michael Montias]

Vermeer was one of the best practitioners of a highly regarded skill. Paintings were an indispensable adjunct to good living in seventeenth-century Holland. Vermeer’s paintings themselves were brilliant evocations of exactly the kind of good living they enhanced. Think only of the paintings within his paintings. War or no war, how could the market for such desireable goods fall away so completely?

The archive research of the American economist Michael Montias provides a dispiriting answer. Studying the inventories of Dutch collectors, he noticed that the percentage of recent paintings, as opposed to older ones, showed a steady decline from the middle of the seventeenth century on. The immediate cause may well have been the First English War of 1652-54, which paralyzed the Dutch economy. Collectors who until then liked to buy recent work by living masters came to the conclusion that they already had quite enough art on the wall. The figures are shocking. In 1650 nearly 60 percent of the paintings in Amsterdam collections were by living masters. By the 1680s their share had dropped to less than 15 percent. Vermeer’s inability to sell his art was not just a result of the protracted, ruinous war with France and her allies. It fit into a long trend, which turned acute when the French invaded in 1672.

The effect of the decline in numbers of paintings sold was aggravated by another shift, away from history paintings – Biblical and mythological subjects – to genre paintings of everyday life. In the course of the century the share of history paintings declined from 44 to 10 percent, while genre rose from 4 to 12 percent. Unfortunately for the artists involved, history paintings were on the average twice as large and cost nearly twice as much as genre paintings. Not only was a painter like Vermeer selling less work – the work he was selling brought in only half as much as his teachers charged for their paintings.
The move to genre painting, and with it the creation of the images that define Dutch culture to the world, was not a real choice. It was a forced attempt by painters to find purchase on ground that was falling away from under their feet. For many of them, the attempt failed. One of them was Johannes Vermeer. An artist whose paintings can instill serenity even in crowds, came to his end in a fit of frenzy.

© Gary Schwartz 1996 and 2024. Published in Dutch in NRC Handelsblad, Cultureel Supplement, 5 July 1996, p. 3. Published on the Schwartzlist on 31 October 2024


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4 thoughts on “1 Vermeer’s frenzy”

  1. A striking historical snippet. So, do these numbers mean that 78% of the paintings after the decline were portraits?

    I was hoping to hear more about the period of (uncharacteristic) “decay and decadence” that led up to Vermeer’s frenzy.

    1. The share of portraiture was the steadiest of all, about 20%. “Decay and decadence” (verval en decadentie) were words used by Vermeer’s widow Catharina Bolnes in a heart-rending petition for aid to the States of Holland and West-Friesland. They don’t give themselves to parsing.

  2. War won’t have helped, but one wonders too about an oversold market. The number of paintings in Dutch homes, across classes, was remarkably high. They may just have run out of wall space – speaking of which, how was the market for other fine goods, such as marble floors and gilded leather wall coverings? (Not the sort of thing you drive a nail in.)

    And then there’s the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis#:~:text=The%20General%20Crisis%20is%20a,in%20the%20world%20at%20large.)

    in relation to which, the market for Dutch paintings looks just a bit like Monty Python’s “News for Cats.” Hugh Trevor-Roper got into hot water for lamenting that the English Civil Wars involved “the loss of many lives, and still worse, of many great works of art.” But the people lined up around the museum for the Vermeer show would probably agree.

    Causality is difficult enough in biography. For history . . . there’s a recent study suggesting that European arrival in the Americas caused so many deaths among native peoples that great acreage of farmland quickly became forest, absorbing such amounts of carbon dioxide that the climate cooled into The Little Ice Age, for possible effects of which, see that same Wikipedia article and dozens of others in a circular firing squad online. My favorite argues that the climate change did wonders for the Dutch whaling industry. If only artists had adapted as resiliently as the whalers did, who knows what might have happened? Who knows what did?

    1. I wasn’t talking about causality, Richard, only about the factors that played a role in Vermeer’s crisis, as do you. I’m a contengialist fan of those weird correlation statistics that show identical curves of ascent and descent between completely unrelated phenomena.

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