In Search of Johannes Vermeer

A LITTLE MORE THAN A year ago, one blustery May morning, we took the train to Delft to escape the relentless march of crowds from the famed lanes of Am­sterdam. While the idea of bolting from big cities has always resided at the core of our travels, it hasn’t been the only one. Poking around quaint villages and sleepy towns for treasure has featured as a recurrent theme in our wander­ings. And so, with humming interest, we went in search of Vermeer’s art and the town where he painted it all, to find the Dutch spirit in a setting that thrives beyond its big cities, bicycles and borrel (afterwork drinks).

Even though we ditched the plan to cycle around Delft, which is easier to do on foot given its cramped build, there was no dodging the cycling locals with their Dutch bikes trundling down the paved paths lining the opaque, algae-filled canals, tidy brick and half-timbered houses and bakeries smelling of fresh dough and cinnamon. The sky above us was spread out bigger and clearer than it seemed in Amsterdam, and though the luminosity of the soft-edged ochre-yellow sun of Vermeer’s View of Delft was missing, a mere shaft of clean light slashing through the bank of grey clouds offered the hope of a brighter day ahead. The pier in front of us had a few boats anchored, bobbing about, and beyond the wide, flowing Schie, the city of Delft—laid out in a network of streets and canals—came into view.  The cloud-piercing spires of the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), buildings and trees stood in the distance as if in a smudge of paint on this unremarkable, overcast day, creating an aura entirely different from what we held in our heads from our amateur impression of Vermeer’s sunlit, tranquil cityscape.

In 1660-61, when Johannes Vermeer painted his city of birth he wasn’t known for his exceptional artistic talent, nor would he be known for another two centuries; yet this unas­suming landscape painting, a distilled impression of a moment in time, would become one of the art world’s most-celebrated masterpieces. Born in 1632 to an art dealer and innkeeper in then prosperous Delft, very little is known about Vermeer’s painting technique, one of the Dutch Golden Age’s legend­ary painters, beyond his intimate depictions of domestic life in the 17th century. His paintings are famously characterised by the play of natural light and shadow, of life contained in rooms that are almost always lit by light from a window on the left. The render­ing of this surreal light effect in details such as rinsed cobbles, whitewashed walls, the glimmer of satin, the dullness of heavy carpets adorning tables, the softness of a milkmaid’s hands around a pitcher, or the effect of blur, radical for its time, has held the world in its thrall. These paintings, exquisite in texture, appear so real, almost as tangible as photographs, that many experts have claimed Vermeer might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture the scenes in front of him before setting them to canvas.

THE DAY HAD turned windy as we picked our way through the time-burnished streets of Delft, a vi­brant city of about 100,000 inhabitants, about an hour away from Amsterdam in southwest Netherlands. Delft grew into a wealthy city during the Dutch East India Company’s trading prime, and became known for its printing, its Delft Blue porcelain pottery and, by the 17th century, fine art with exponents like Pieter de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and, much later, Vermeer. Although the ancient merchants’ homes and little stone bridges over the maze of canals effortlessly transport one to the days of the past, the chic boutiques, hip breweries, cosy restaurants with people scattered on terraces, emitting a cackle here, a stirring of movement there, keeps one firmly planted in the 21st-century modern city that Delft is today. The sound of birdsong, the neat files of mallards gliding on canals, the rattle of an approaching bicycle, the clutter of wares displayed in front of stalls, the magnificence of fresh blooms tied in bunches soaking in tin buckets, all made us dally a little longer.

Strolling under the semi-clear sky, glimpsing, passing, everything otherwise mundane seemed sprinkled with a touch of magic, throwing little surprises in our path. We spotted a newly wed, impossibly tall couple kiss outside the gilded Town Hall to the cheer of family, friends and passers-by, as we walked to the Vermeer Centrum Delft. The volunteer-run cultural centre exhibits high-quality reproductions of all 37 of Vermeer’s known paintings at scale along with digitised archives and films relating to his subjects, his technique that produced hyper-realistic paintings and his impact on art as we know it today. And it is here that we encounter a whiff of the essential Dutch ethos, captured in the glow­ing interiors of Vermeer’s creations, relishing the delightful details embed­ded in his brushstrokes, where life has withdrawn behind the window of light with women reading letters wearing expressions of anxiety or mischief, men in dark hats congregating, sometimes bent over globes and maps holding compasses, and maids with serene faces and plump hands attending to their chores. Away from the extravagant flourishes of classical Renaissance art, Vermeer’s genre paintings reflected a world of stillness and comfort, of everyday human life and relationships playing out against the backdrop of an era when the Dutch were breaking new ground in business, science, religious beliefs and culture.

Walking down Delft’s streets, one can never quite overlook the sense of Vermeer’s vision after encountering his art. Mystery surrounds his talent as he never dated his paintings and nobody knows who taught him how to paint as no letters or diaries survive. And yet, his impressions surround his native town where one can still snatch a glance at The Little Street from several centuries ago around the corner, where Vermeer might have stood at his window working on an easel, paint scattered all around, as he watched days unfold over the little stone bridges that connect the city; or chance upon the View of Delft out on the horizon at dawn, imagining the soft light of an early summer morning, with the town lazily rising from a night’s sleep.

Painterly ambition, however, is not the only source of distinction that the city is known for. Delft, named after the verb delve, which means ‘to dig’, origi­nated on a delf, a manmade watercourse that is now identified as canals. A seat of significant historical and political import, the city served as the base for Prince William of Orange in the 16th century from where he waged his war against Spanish rule. He never left and, anointed as father of the nation, was buried in the New Church after his assassination in 1584. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, known for mastering the fledgling invention of the micro­scope and the study of microbiology, was also a native of Delft.

Having grown portly with very profitable trading in fabric, butter, beer, and pottery by the 17th century, Delft was easily able to support its many art­ists. The porcelain pottery brought back from China proved to be universally coveted, and in 1653, De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles or the Royal Delft began making and exporting the blue-and-white ceramics. Political unrest and civil wars in the Far East made trad­ing difficult and the ever-innovative Dutch leapt in to make the Chinese-inspired porcelain from abandoned beer factories, thus making way for the blue faience or iconic Delft Blue. Our heads were still soaked in the muted light from Vermeer’s paintings when we reached the De Delftse Pauw, a Delft Blue workshop, housed in a blue-bordered, white-stoned modest brick structure. Inside, we attended an exhibit of elegant ceramics, not just bearing blue and white patterns, but vibrant notes of scarlet, rust and gold. We watched artisans paint motifs of dainty blossoms, birds and fruits by hand, working unperturbed in the buzz of the afternoon, surrounded by kilns, glazed tiles, pale moulds and clay dust. If Vermeer were around, one could only hazard a guess, he would probably have immortalised one of these artisans at work just like he did with The Lacemaker.

In Delft art is everywhere. You can find Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring graffitied on the wall as you turn into an alleyway, and spot Delft Blue tiles with delicate windmills and clogs adorn­ing houses and businesses. With big northern skies, where the light changes every other hour, showering the city with brightness, or casting it in a cloud-filled gloom, one becomes prone to living under a spell, as if in a world on hold, just like it appears in Vermeer’s art. The following evening, when Am­sterdam stood covered in long groves of darkness, we met Vermeer again at the Rijksmuseum. The museum’s blockbuster exhibition was underway and we were lucky to be viewing 28 of his works on display in the origi­nal. Amidst the sprawl of dark velvet curtains and muffled chambers, we re-entered Vermeer’s enigmatic world of the women and men held within gilt frames. I peered closer to study the cracks in the centuries-old canvases and could almost hear the hush of his muted tones.

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