Out of the Shadow of the Sphinx of Delft by William Davie
Jacobus Vrel, A Seated Woman Looking at a Child through a Window. Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection.
In a desperate plea to use the remaining money in the Dieuwertje van Hensbeek trust so that she could feed and clothe her children, Catharina wrote to the States of Holland and West Friesland explaining the circumstances that led to the death of her husband, Johannes Vermeer.
‘During the ruinous war with France he 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, and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he 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 went from being healthy to being dead.’
In his lifetime, Vermeer had been a respected member of the painter’s guild in Delft. His paintings commanded high prices both there and in the neighbouring city of The Hague. However, his reputation remained localised, in part by there being no known pupils of his or teacher to champion him. Added to this, Vermeer was a slow, meticulous painter, sometimes producing as few as two or three paintings in a year. He often incorporated expensive pigments lavishly, such as ultramarine, which was produced from lapis lazuli and at the time cost more than gold.
As his father had done before him, to supplement his income as an artist and to keep his large family afloat, eleven of his children survived him, Vermeer, like many of his contemporaries, also dealt in the artworks of other artists. But this did little to elevate his family beyond financial precariousness.
With the onset of the Franco-Dutch War in 1672, known as ‘het rampjaar’, or the disaster year, the Dutch Republic was brought to its knees.
Records show that Vermeer was forced to try and secure financial support from his mother-in-law and acquaintances. He moved his family into a smaller house. But the situation only grew more dire.
In December 1675, Vermeer died, just 43-years-old.
Vermeer’s artistic legacy has followed a complex albeit astronomical trajectory. He has risen from all but forgotten artist following his death, to where he is today: an artist whose paintings are universally recognisable, and whose name, along with Rembrandt’s, is the pinnacle of art from the Dutch Golden Age in the western canon of art history.
Testament to this was the once in a lifetime retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in early 2023. Tickets for the exhibition repeatedly sold out, with 650,000 people seeing the 28 paintings that constituted the most comprehensive Vermeer exhibition to date. But in the shadow of this momentous occasion came another first: the first exhibition and monograph-cum-catalogue raisonné dedicated to the elusive painter known as Jacobus Vrel.
This was brought to fruition through a years-long international collaboration between Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich; the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection in Paris; and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Remarkably, through their extensive research, we see just how indelibly linked Vrel’s work and legacy are to Vermeer’s.
Immediately following Vermeer’s untimely death, household items and what was left in his studio were quickly sold off to pay creditors. This included paintings which were offered at such low prices that they depreciated what little remained of his market and opened up his artistic legacy to a catalogue of odious actions. The latter of which was compounded by Vermeer not always signing his works, and when he did, he did not always use the same signature. This was further complicated by there being two other painters named ‘Jan Vermeer’ also working at the time.
Paintings that were considered in a poor condition or unsellable were touched up or improved. In 2021, for example, scientific research and restoration revealed a large-scale fresco of Cupid on the wall in Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1662-1665) that had been painted over at some point.
Other paintings were deliberately misattributed to more fashionable artists such as Gabriel Metsu or Pieter de Hooch. In 1860, a touchstone moment in the rediscovery of Vermeer came when Friedrich Waagen, director of Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin, was visiting the Czernin Gallery in Vienna. There, he recognised a painting that turned out to be the now-widely regarded masterpiece The Art of Painting (c. 1666-68), which had de Hooch’s signature forged onto it. During his lifetime Vermeer had kept the painting on view in his studio as a showcase of his talents.
As a result, and owing to his localised reputation, in the centuries after his death, critical texts and compendiums that were vital in sustaining the legacies of artists largely failed to include him. Of the very few champions who did know or had heard about Vermeer, commentary waxed lyrical about his painterly abilities.
In 1792, Jean Baptiste Lebrun wrote about ‘the van der Meer the historians have ignored,’ continuing that, ‘It seems that he was particularly keen on sunlit effects, at which he was extremely successful.’ While in 1816, a critic described Vermeer as ‘the Titian of the modern painters of the Dutch school.’
But it was a chance encounter of View of Delft (1660-1661) at Mauritshuis in 1842, that ignited Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré-Bürger’s interest in Vermeer, or ‘Jan van der Meer’, as the painting was then-attributed, which would prove to be the catalyst for a sea change in how the world saw Vermeer.
Recalling that moment, Thoré-Bürger wrote in 1866: ‘When I visited the Dutch museums for the first time, around 1842, this strange painting surprised me as much as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and the other remarkable Rembrandts in the Hague Museum. Not knowing to whom to attribute it, I consulted the catalogue: View of the Town of Delft, beside a canal, by Jan van der Meer of Delft. Amazing! Here is someone of whom we know nothing in France, and who deserves to be known!’
Thoré-Bürger was a prominent art critic and vocal political commentator in France. He was exiled in 1849 for encouraging a revolution the year before, known as the February Revolution, and for writing critically of the government. While in exile, he travelled from country to country searching for paintings, documents, and anything else relating to the ‘Sphinx of Delft’, as he referred to Vermeer, due to so little being known about him.
‘In the first volume of The Museums of Holland, in 1858, I drew attention to the landscape in the Hague Museum and the two pictures in the Six van Hillegom collection,’ he wrote in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866. ‘In 1860, in the second volume of The Museums of Holland, I authenticated more than a dozen van der Meers, and brought together a quantity of information that enabled me later to recover almost the entire oeuvre of the painter of the View of Delft. This obsession has caused me considerable expense. To see one picture by van der Meer, I travelled hundreds of miles: to obtain a photograph of another van der Meer, I was madly extravagant. I even retraced my steps all round Germany in order to verify with conviction works dispersed between Cologne, Brunswick, Berlin, Dresden, Pommersfelden and Vienna. But I was amply recompensed, more especially as I had the pleasure, not only of admiring the works in museums and galleries, but in acquiring more than a dozen, some that I bought for my friends MM. Pereire, Double, Cremer and others; others that I bought for myself.’
That same year, Thoré-Bürger’s infatuation with Vermeer reached a fever pitch with the inclusion of 11 Vermeers, six of which he owned, in The Exposition rétrospective tableaux anciens empruntés aux galleries particulières at Palais des Champ-Élysées in Paris. Alongside this he published two lengthy articles about Vermeer, in three parts, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts between October and December. This also included a compendium of known works, with Thoré-Bürger attributing a total of 73 works to Vermeer, 45 firmly. Today, estimates vary on what is known conclusively to be by Vermeer’s hand but experts at the Rijksmuseum put the current figure at 37.
The exhibition was rapturously received by the French public, who were enthralled by the rediscovery of a master painter. One painting in particular struck a chord with journalists, who noted its tonal harmony and intimate sentiment. Writing in Revue Moderne on July 1, 1866, Marius Chaumelin said of the work Street Scene with People Conversing near a Barber Shop: ‘These urban interiors are not like anything we know: they show alleyways lined by red brick houses which reach all the way up to the top. And yet, air and light circulate between them. It is impossible to imagine more delicate, translucent, harmonious colouring.’ But Vermeer’s only known street scene, View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’ (c.1658), was not exhibited. The work that Chaumelin had seen and written about so enthusiastically was painted by Vrel. Even an illustration used in one of Thoré-Bürger’s articles in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts featured the only known wood engraving of a Vrel painting misattributed to Vermeer: Interior with a Woman Leaning on a Dutch Door.
No fewer than four of the Vermeer paintings Thoré-Bürger owned have now been reattributed to Vrel. But where Vermeer’s life and work have since been scrutinised and studied throughout the world, Vrel has remained shrouded in mystery.
Despite intermittent efforts by intrepid historians like Abraham Bredius, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Clotilde Brière-Misme, so far, no letters, no will, no records of baptism, marriage or death, no guild membership record, and no local biographies have been found to give shape to who Vrel was or where he was living and working.
The only official acknowledgement of his existence is found in an inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Habsburg’s art collection in 1659, compiled by the court painter David Teniers the Younger, who also acted as custodian of his collection. At least three paintings known to be by Vrel are among the 1400 documented works in the collection, which provided the foundation for the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
And so, the question arises, how to find out who Vrel was?
The answer, over 150 years later, is strikingly similar to how Thoré-Bürger approached Vermeer.
First, a total of 50 works that bore the visual hallmarks and variations of signatures were brought together and grouped into two categories, street scenes and interior scenes, with a smattering of other genres also included. Like Vermeer, Vrel did not always sign or date his works, and when he did, he employed numerous variations, including ‘Frel,’ ‘Frell,’ ‘Vrel,’ ‘Wrel,’ ‘Vrelle,’ ‘Vreelle,’ with ‘Vrel’ being used most often; three times. The paintings were then analysed by a wide range of experts including historians, archivists and scientists. Their findings, presented in the monograph-cum-catalogue raisonné, then formed the basis for a series of exhibitions at the collaborating institutes, all of which established a tangible scaffolding for future scholarship.
The most telling information is not a revelation about who Vrel was but when he was likely working.
In his catalogue essay, Professor Peter Klein, a specialist in dendrochronology at the University of Hamburg, discusses his findings on research conducted on 32 paintings. By analysing the growth-rings found on the wooden panels Vrel painted on, it is possible to determine the year certain types of trees were felled and in what geographical region they came from. All but one originated from Baltic and Polish regions, with the other likely originating from west Germany or the Netherlands. This work, Klein ascertained, could not have been painted before 1662. The date range for the other 31 paintings overwhelmingly came in the 1640s and 1650s. However, Street scene with People Conversing, in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, reveals that Vrel was highly likely to be active as an artist as early as the 1630s, with this street scene predating Vermeer’s by about 20 years. This, combined with the date ‘1654’ marked on Interior with a Woman at a Window, an interior scene reminiscent of those popularised by de Hooch which predates any of de Hooch’s known Delft-style interior scenes by four years, is eye-opening.
Until now, it was generally considered that Vrel’s artistic period was between 1654 and 1662. The latter date owing to Isaac Koedijck’s The Weavers Workshop (1662) being misattributed to Vrel. It was a comfortable fit that allowed Vrel to fall into the role of a mere imitator because he didn’t belong to, or fit neatly into, a particular school of painting despite his chosen genres being commonplace at the time. But now there is the distinct possibility that Vrel was in fact a precursor to Vermeer and de Hooch, perhaps a guiding influence in style and technique.
With this shift in perception, at the Fondation Custodia, the idiosyncrasies that litter Vrel’s work, once shackling him as a lesser artist, are now heralded by how inventive they appear in stark relief to works by his contemporaries in an adjoining room.
Vrel’s strongest works are his atmospheric interior scenes. The rooms he depicts in these are sparse and usually occupied by solitary figures, mostly women, seen in profile or from behind. Intrigue and a pervasive stillness punctuate each scene in a way that places them somewhere between the contemplative examination of sunlight as it seeps into the banality of the everyday that preoccupied Vilhelm Hammershøi, and the perplexing unease that comes from not knowing any details of the wider narrative. This is made all the more arresting by the absence of any moralising tone or activity found in so many works within this genre at this time. Instead, Vrel Leaves us with little else to grasp onto other than this intrigue.
This is seen at its most compelling and confounding in A Seated Woman looking at a Child through a Window. Rendered in muted tones that characterise Vrel’s interiors, we see an older, heavyset woman from behind in a spartan room. She leans wildly on a rush-seated chair, the only furniture in the room, towards a large window that dominates the centre of the composition. The woman’s hand is pressed flat against a pane of glass next to the faint outline of a young boy solemnly staring back at her from outside, appearing from the darkness like an apparition. It’s a visual riddle that raises more questions than it answers. Is the boy real or imagined, could he be a long-lost son, husband, brother, or lover, ruminated on in a melancholic moment in the middle of the night, or is it a child playing or lost who has caught her attention?
In his essay, Quentin Buvelot, senior curator at Mauritshuis, examines the role that prototypes and replicas have in Vrel’s oeuvre, and how this informs our current understanding of him as an artist. This has been a long-ignored facet, but a vital one due to how many there are given how small his known oeuvre is, he writes. Their presence implies a market-oriented strategy or, at the very least, that Vrel must have been well-known enough to warrant making copies of his own works. A suggestion that must have some element of truth to it given that on his purchasing trips Teniers acquired no fewer than three paintings for the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Habsburg.
Of the examples Buvelot examines, it is the three known variants of Woman Seated by the Sickbed and Woman Seated by an Alcove, which for all intents and purposes is the same composition with the sickbed omitted, where this commercial line of thinking seems most plausible. Little to no pentimenti, or underpaintings that show compositional edits, are found, and dendrochronology indicates that all of the paintings were painted around the 1650s. However, when three of the paintings were analysed through infrared reflectogram, one version in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., revealed the most sophisticated underdrawing found in any examined Vrel work. It indicates that this work was not the first version he painted. ‘He is not searching for what he wants to draw, but knows exactly how the composition should look,’ stated Melanie Gifford, Research Conservator for Painting Technology at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., in an email to Buvelot.
Jacobus Vrel, Street Scene with a Bakery by the Town Wall. Photo: Elke Walford. Courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle
Another interesting case Buvelot examines, is the two versions of Street Scene with a Bakery by the Town Wall, one in a private collection, the other in the collection of Hamburger Kunsthalle. Both are of a similar high quality and almost identical in size. Close observation reveals many small differences, the most noticeable being a stork’s nest seen on the roof of a building in the painting from the private collection that is a chimney in the painting in Hamburg. However, under infrared reflectogram, two things were discovered. First, that the painting in Hamburg was once an interior scene Vrel painted over, and when turned 90 degrees to the left, it is still very faintly visible. Second, after Vrel began painting over the interior with the street scene, he at first included the stork’s nest, then painted over it, replacing it with a chimney. This indicates that this was the replica, an assumption that is backed up by dendrochronological analysis that dates the panel to around 1653, while the panel used for the other painting was ready as early as 1646. But the all-important question as to why Vrel did this still lingers agonisingly. Was it because the purchaser requested it or was it an artistic impulse he felt, or was it something else entirely?
Vrel’s street scenes are as equally enigmatic as his interior scenes. Working against the established norms of the genre, whereby the pictorial strategies of landscape painting are transferred to views of towns and cities, Vrel instead chose to work vertically. This enhances the feeling of height that the buildings have, which often extend to the very top of the picture plane, allowing only a sliver of sky to be seen at the very top of the composition. The scenes themselves are imbued with imagination and appear choreographed rather than capturing the reality he sees around him. The few figures Vrel depicts are seen in profile or from behind, often isolated or in pairs, seemingly disconnected from their environment. However, the source of this enigma can be explained by the fact that Vrel’s street scenes rarely have a central focal point that grabs our attention and holds the image together.
Both endearingly and to Vrel’s detriment, the street scenes highlight the limitations of his brushwork and compositional skills far more evidently than his interior scenes do. In Street Corner with a Bakery and Draper’s Shop, a man’s foot is unnaturally skewed as he walks, and in both this and Two Figures approaching the Corner of a House, the proportion of the figures in relation to the surrounding architecture is jarringly off. In Street Scene with Three Figures in front of an Inn, the low brick wall seen on the right by the three figures, steals some of our focus because it dips and curves so unnaturally as Vrel struggles to get it to look as it should. But these imperfections also speak to Vrel’s perseverance and relentlessness in creation that is at once profoundly human and admirable.
Crucially, however, it is in the street scenes that clues as to where Vrel may have been working are found. But these remain speculative and at times contradictory.
A prime example is the pair of monks seen in both Street Scene with an Arched Gateway and Two Monks in front of a Porch and Square with a Bakery in front of a Church. Prior to this project, it was a widely held view that the monks in question were from The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin because of their robes and Capuche, a long-pointed hood. As a result, it was also widely believed that Vrel was, for a time, working outside of the Dutch Republic because monastic orders had been abolished there. However, this is dismissed by the editors, who believe that Vrel was more likely depicting a generic impression of monks, in keeping with the idea that Vrel’s compositions were derived more from his mind’s creative eye than real life.
In a joint essay Dirk Jan de Vries, professor of the History of Buildings, in the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Boudewijn Bakker, a leading expert on the history of landscape in the Dutch Golden Age, put forth a compelling argument for Zwolle, in the north-east of the Netherlands, where Vrel was most active.
The high brick wall with three low buildings built against it in Street Scene with a Bakery by the Town Wall, indicates a medieval town wall. Through painstaking and labour-intensive research, a photograph of Waterstraat in Zwolle taken in 1962 bears an uncanny resemblance to Vrel’s painting. Adding weight to this assertion is another photo taken in 1964 that shows the demolition of the low buildings seen in the 1962 photograph, revealing more of the town wall behind it, and bearing an even greater resemblance to Vrel’s painting.
Further evidence is found in the central foreground of Square with a Bakery in front of a Church, which sees a brick culvert used to channel water around an obstacle or direct it to an underground waterway. Upon closer investigation of various historical maps, including those which showed where the culverts were located in Zwolle, and by consulting archival records and photography, de Vries and Bakker believe that they have identified where the square is located. It’s between Low Waterstraat and the Kleine Aa river. While far from conclusive, it’s certainly a start that will help future scholars.
But what is likely to be the main source for future scholarly investigation is the beguiling Interior of a Reformed Church during a Service, a curious outlier of which no other painting collated is remotely like.
Jacobus Vrel, Interior of a Reformed Church During a Service. Steinfurt, Burgsteinfurt, Sammlung der Fürsten zu Bentheim.
The painting depicts a nighttime service taking place by candlelight, seen from a high vantage point. This gives an air of child-like curiosity and voyeuristic charge to the sober solemnity of the service unfolding below. Vrel’s refinement is crude in places, in a manner similar to the execution of his street scenes. The pillars tilt slightly and the perspective of the recesses in the vaulted ceiling are incorrect, but this does little to deter from the work’s overall impact. It’s an extraordinarily arresting and highly magnetic painting that, like An Old Woman Reading, with a Boy behind the Window, keeps us scanning for answers to the many questions it raises. But so far, it has not yielded any.
In his essay, Bernd Ebert, Chief Curator of Dutch and German Baroque Painting at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, exalts the imagination behind such an image. He writes that within the genre of church scenes like those popularised by Emanuel de Witte and Pieter Saenredam, nothing can compare to this. Candlelit scenes are especially rare, and the interior architecture, unlike any known existing church, appears to be an amalgam of many aspects of different Protestant churches brought together in an idealised form.
In their joint essay de Vries and Bakker highlight that the crescent moons that crown the choir screen, the pulpit, and the obelisks in Vrel’s painting are found in the Grote Kerk in Zwolle. But they also hypothesise that the painting may have been commissioned by Philip Conrad von Bentheim-Steinfurt. This is because it, along with a street scene, comes from the collection housed in the castle of the ancestral seat of the House of Bentheim-Steinfurt, Steinfurt, in north-west Germany, about 60 miles south-east of Zwolle. Although it is in close proximity, it does add one more twist of confusion to Vrel’s spectral legacy. They suggest that Vrel may have been asked to paint an idealised version of a Protestant service in reference to von Bentheim-Steinfurt’s own spiritual penance as a ruler of the region and his prayer for help and support of the Most High, wherein he is placing himself in a tradition that extends back as far as King David and his Penitential Psalms.
Thoré-Bürger expressed doubt on some of his attributions made in his 1866 articles. He was acutely aware that what he had achieved was only the beginning of Vermeer’s rediscovery which would be refined in time. Describing one such doubt about a painting at the Gustav Finck auction near Bramberg in Austria, which was listed as Gerhard Berckheiden’s View of a street in a Dutch Town, Thoré-Bürger wrote, ‘without seeing it in daylight, I bought the painting, supposing I had once again got my hands on an alleyway by Vermeer. It was a Vermeer, to the life, even close up; weaker and colder, though. While studying the painting, I found the signature: I. VREL. This name is hardly Dutch, nor any other language. Is it an abbreviation, a contraction, I don’t know?’
In Thoré-Bürger’s understanding of his own fallibility in his haste to discover works by Vermeer, we see just how far technology and scholarship have come. How these advances have allowed us to glimpse what Vrel has to offer our reunderstanding of the development of painting in the region at the time. But in his frustrations at not knowing who Vrel was, Thoré-Bürger prophetically captures the enduring nature of our predicament; just who is Jacobus Vrel?