The man who painted some of the most ethereal, calm-inducing, and subtly majestic scenes of everyday life might have experienced an inner-world just the opposite. That, at least, is the contention of Andrew Graham-Dixon, as he plays part art critic, part investigator, as he tries to get to the bottom of a life shrouded in mystery.
In The Madness of Vermeer, a documentary written and presented by Dixon, new research is utilized in the course of forming a “psychological profile” of the 17th-century Dutch artist.
Vermeer died at the young age of 43, in the stressful throes of a financial quagmire. The final stage of his life was wracked with worry, and in the span of less than 48 hours — which culminated in a “frenzy,” according to an account by his wife — he increasingly got worse and died. This collapse over mounting stress is what Dixon describes as Vermeer’s “madness.”
“Madness” probably isn’t the best word, but Dixon’s eager quest to discover what led to the dismal end of this extraordinary painter becomes near contagious by the end of the film. And with such a dearth of evidence about Vermeer’s life, speculations about the man can seem all the more alluring.
Indeed we know only a small set of facts — and what we do know pertains almost exclusively to his life after the age of 21. This information comes in the form of archives, of which Dixon makes effective use. “In recent years,” he says, “a mass of new evidence has been unearthed about [Vermeer’s] family.” It’s not always easy to tell what information in the documentary has been known by scholars for some time, and what is new; but this lack of clarification isn’t a great hindrance to enjoying the film.
After all, the total amount of material evidence for Vermeer’s life is still exceedingly small, which leaves a large amount of guesswork to be done. But Dixon’s mission to put himself “into the mental landscape of Vermeer” is, for all that, rather fun to watch, even if much of what he says is impossible to prove.
But there are still good conjectures and bad ones, and much of what he hypothesizes seems quite reasonable.
Dixon’s two main interwoven theories in the film are that Vermeer had a stormy and chaotic personal and family life — at times exceedingly grim — and that, in light of this new knowledge, we can understand better why he painted what he did, and in the way that he did. Ultimately, Dixon suggests that the contemplative mellowness and blissful tranquility — which characterize so many of his paintings — was Vermeer’s attempt to “[paint] away the pain of realty.”
This, of course, can neither be proved nor disproved. It’s interpretation; it’s guesswork. But Dixon’s views, on the whole, seems sensible — and, agree or not, there’s something satisfying about entering the world of an artist whose life has been “obscured [and] lost in the darkness of the past.”
As Dixon shows with his archival research, it was a life that had more than its fair share of secrets, sins, and struggle.
Both Vermeer and his wife, Catharina, were connected to a multitude of familial chaos. In the case of the artist, his family tree reads like the outlines of a crime novel; his grandfather, grandmother, and an uncle were all engaged in criminal money-making affairs. Staying afloat financially, it seems, was always a struggle.
And as for Catharina, her much more refined and upper-class childhood didn’t prevent her from living in a household in which her father would at atimes abuse her mother, Maria Thins. It’s somewhat of a cruel irony that Vermeer and his wife, though from different spheres of society, would end up having a disastrous family past as a commonality.
These myriad emotional upheavals, when compared to Vermeer’s work, offer a striking contrast. The moods and scenes of his paintings — quiet optimism, solitary reflection, domestic women at peace — seem often to have been absent in his real life. Dixon doesn’t sound too far off the mark when he says that “[Vermeer] took a turbulent reality and made it look like heaven on earth.” What Vermeer couldn’t capture in life, he sought to capture though painting.
But the death of Vermeer at the age of 43, penniless and burdened with worry, came about for greater, and more complex, reasons than family chaos.
Dixon hones in on the year 1672 for the commencement of unraveling. With the French attack and the Dutch counter-reaction of flooding their own dykes, so much of the edifice that had supported Vermeer’s work as an artist came crashing down. The art market was destroyed and his wealthy mother-in-law’s source of income (which he relied on) was disturbed because of the flood’s destruction. And, to make matters even more perilous, his patron died the following year.
It was a whirlwind of conditions that led to those final agonizing days of Vermeer’s life, where he was a completely shattered man. In light of this, along with the chaotic experiences of his domestic life, what can we glean from his pictures? Dixon, as mentioned, thinks Vermeer was (in part) creating a world that was unavailable to him. But there’s a larger conjecture he also makes that is perhaps more interesting: Vermeer’s freedom to “paint what he wanted” gave him the chance to portray a 17th-century Holland that appears far more tranquil than it actually was. This idea too, has something going for it — especially when Vermeer’s paintings are compared to those by his Dutch contemporaries.
Ultimately, however, we won’t ever know the inner-workings of Vermeer’s mind or the rationale behind his paintings. But that shouldn’t stop us from enjoying them for another 300 years.
Spectatio 