Free The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick Page B

in a statement that was a mandatory part of the process of declaring bankruptcy, and then “in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” He was forty-three.
    The rest of the story is scraps and gaps. Vermeer’s grandfather, one scholar has learned, was a watchmaker who strayed into coin-forging. He managed to leave town a step ahead of the police, but two of his accomplices were convicted and beheaded. Of Vermeer’s career, almost nothing is known beyond what the paintings themselves reveal. He seems to have painted mainly for individual patrons rather than for the market at large: a printer named Jacob Dissius owned nineteen Vermeers. (They were auctioned off, for an average price of about $500 in today’s money, after the printer’s death.)
    Vermeer left no diaries or letters. His personality, his motivation, his judgment of his own achievement—mysteries all. Perhaps we know what he looked like as a young man: some scholars believe that a figure in an early work called
The Procuress
is a self-portrait. Vermeer served a six-year apprenticeship to an older artist—this was a requirement for membership in Delft’s art guild, which he joined in 1653, at age twenty-one—so we know that someone taught him. No one knows who. Vermeer himself took no pupils. No one knows who posed for him, though some historians speculate that his wife may have modeled for
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
or several other works, or that one or another of his grown daughters may have modeled for
Girl with a Pearl Earring
or
Girl with a Red Hat
, among others.
    “The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.”
    Vermeer’s obscurity lasted from his death, in 1675, until 1866, when a French critic named Théophile Thoré wrote three articles hailing the work of the painter he dubbed “the Sphinx of Delft.” (Thoré went on to purchase,for prices in the range of a few thousand dollars in today’s terms,
Woman with a Pearl Necklace
, now in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin;
The Concert
, stolen from the Gardner in 1990; and
Young Woman Seated at a Virginal
and
Young Woman Standing at a Virginal
, today both at the National Gallery in London.) Fascinated by Vermeer’s use of light, the impressionists took up the cause, celebrating Vermeer as an ally two centuries ahead of his time. But not even the most fervent of those early admirers could have imagined that Vermeer would someday draw crowds who would wait in line for hours to see blockbuster shows devoted to his work.
    By 1813 Vermeer had fallen so far out of favor that the exquisite
Lace-maker
, now in the Louvre, sold for £7, roughly $400 in today’s terms. In 1816 his
Head of a Girl
, which depicts a different girl with a pearl earring, brought a mere three florins, about fifteen dollars in present-day terms. Today the painting hangs in the Met. A poster would cost more than the painting itself once fetched.
    In the years of Vermeer’s obscurity, no one quite knew which of several almost identically named Dutch painters was which. Was Johannes Vermeer, who painted women reading letters and suchlike, the same man as the portrait painter Johannes van der Meer? Which of the two Jan van der Meers was which, and was either of them Vermeer? Few knew and fewer cared.
    That confusion both contributed to Vermeer’s obscurity and reflected it. A bigger factor working against Vermeer was his tiny output. No one knows why Vermeer painted so little. The technical perfection of his canvases—his achievement in capturing the varied textures of cloth and bread and tile and skin, for instance—reduces even the coolest critics to invoking “miracles” and “mysteries” that lie beyond technique. In the face of such seemingly effortless mastery, it seems natural to assume that