Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

by Laura J. Snyder

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  This more casual attitude toward perspective theory is indicated by the topic’s relegation to only a few pages in Van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Introduction to the academy of painting), whereas a full third of Alberti’s book on painting is devoted to perspective. This was not only because for Alberti perspective was a new and exciting discovery, while by Van Hoogstraten’s day it was mundane, but also because for Van Hoogstraten and his compatriots perspective was merely one tool of many in the artist’s toolkit, and far from the most important tool at that. In 1678 Van Hoogstraten could still say that it is the eye, not the object, that emits visual rays, signaling his casual attitude about vision and how it relates to perspective. Van Hoogstraten had studied with Rembrandt, and his paintings show that he was, like his master, skilled in perspective; like Rembrandt’s, however, Van Hoogstraten’s sense of space was intuitive, not depending on the rational, geometric laws governing perspective theory. That may be another reason he was willing to dispense with classical perspective theory in his treatise for painters.

  This willingness to stray from classical perspective theory was especially true of the Delft school of painters starting from around 1650. Vermeer’s neighbors and colleagues Fabritius (who was a friend of Van Hoogstraten’s), Gerard Houckgeest, and Pieter de Hooch, along with Vermeer himself, began to explore new possibilities of spatial representation. Like the natural philosophers–inventors of the Dutch Republic, Dutch artists were eminently practical, more than theoretical. Rather than thinking of their representations of space in an idealized, geometrical way, they began to depict more realistically. They realized that an accurate sense of light and air is necessary for creating a convincing three-dimensional space. Accordingly, their interests became more purely optical than geometrical, and their paintings more concerned with the play of light and color than with the strict portrayal of proper perspective as a way of representing three-dimensional forms on a flat surface. Most artists would know, of course, that the “orthogonals,” or sight lines, needed to converge to a point on the horizon, but not necessarily the more technical details that so engaged the Italian painters. (There were exceptions to this: Pieter Saenredam, whose masterful architectural paintings of churches have a lively infusion of light, did leave a number of perspective drawings showing the extent to which he worked out geometrical perspective before beginning to paint; but besides these, few perspective drawings by the Dutch artists from this period have been found.)

  In order to explore optical effects and depict them on canvas, Dutch artists began using optical devices. Concave lenses and convex mirrors were discussed as possible aids to painters, especially for depicting perspective, as early as the sixteenth century. We have already seen prescriptions by Leonardo da Vinci and Filarete for the use of mirrors by painters. A manuscript at the British Library on the construction of mirrors and lenses “necessary for perspective” by William Bourne dates from the mid-sixteenth century. Della Porta described a role for the concave lens in painting in his Magia naturalis (1589): “With the concave lens placed up, it draws into a very small circumference objects which are in a very large plane. The painter who looks at such things [through the lens] with a small amount of effort and skill, paints all things accurately in proportion.” The benefit of using either a convex mirror or a concave lens is that it reduces the size of a large building or wide landscape to a small scale easily transferable to canvas or panel; in doing so, the optical aid heightens the intensity of color. Disadvantages include the curved and distorted edges of wide-angle images, and the reversed images created by a mirror, but such problems can be corrected by the painter. There is evidence that convex mirrors were part of artists’ workshops and studios going back to the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How widely they were used by artists during this period is in dispute.

  In recent years the artist David Hockney and the physicist Charles Falco have argued that artists going back to 1430 were extensively using mirrors, lenses, and other optical instruments. They claim that painters such as Van Eyck must have used optical devices by tracing images seen in them; otherwise, they argue, it would be impossible to account for the levels of accuracy and realism those artists attained. It is unlikely, however, that any such large-scale deployment of optical devices goes back as far as they maintain, mainly because in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries mirrors and lenses were not of a high enough quality to be used in the way the Hockney-Falco thesis suggests.

  But by the seventeenth century it is indisputable that some painters used lenses and mirrors extensively. Pieter van Laer, a Haarlem painter known in Rome as Il Bamboccio (ca.1592–1642), owned and used a black convex mirror, later referred to as a Claude glass. This was a tinted, curved piece of glass, usually in a small leather case, which reflected the scene in harmonious, subtly gradated tones reminiscent of those found in the work of the great seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorraine (although Lorraine is not thought to have used this optical tool). A painter would use a Claude glass by turning his back to the scene and viewing its reflection in the glass. The painter could then consult that glass while painting, capturing the gradations of light and tone in his picture by the judicious application of paint. Velázquez, whose pictures—such as Las Meninas and Venus at Her Mirror—feature reflections prominently, was known to have used both mirrors and lenses extensively when he painted, so much so that it is said that by 1625 he began to “look at the world like a lens sees it” and could paint a lenslike spectacle without even using one. An inventory taken after his death in 1660 noted, in addition to “a little bronze instrument for producing lines” and two compasses, “a thick round glass placed in a box”—possibly a camera obscura.

  Gerrit Dou, one of Rembrandt’s most accomplished students, used magnifying or concave lenses to achieve the incredible fineness and detail of his paintings—Houbraken would later criticize Dou for relying on such lenses too much. Dou placed a concave lens in the center of a screen between him and the object to be painted, using the device as a compositional aid as well as a means to explore the heightened colors and the perspective of objects within their environments. With this device Dou was so aware of every minuscule detail before him that he would sit at his easel and wait for the dust to settle before he began painting. This technique would account for the “preciousness” of his interiors, with the intensity of color and the intrinsic sense of belonging that the forms seem to have to their environments, as well as the disproportionately large foreground objects in a number of his works.

  Jan van der Heyden and Fabritius are also thought to have used concave lenses in order to achieve the wide field of vision of their cityscapes. Fabritius almost certainly used a double-concave lens (a lens concave on both sides) in painting his View in Delft, and for this reason it is considered one of Fabritius’s “experiments” in perspective and optics. The use of such a lens is almost required in order to explain the distortions that appear at the edges of this work. Houbraken praised Van der Heyden for his ability to paint “every stone in the building,” both in the foreground and in the distance, and noted that “one believes that he has invented a special instrument, because to everyone who knows the brush it seems impossible to achieve this [effect] in the usual way of painting.”

  Van der Heyden’s painting The Dam in Amsterdam was set up as a kind of peep show, by the attachment of an iron eyepiece to the frame through which the viewer was instructed to observe the painting from the ideal vantage point; from other angles, the cupola on the City Hall looks distorted. Van der Heyden had trained with a glass painter, and worked in the mirror store of his older brother Goris, so he would have been well acquainted with glass lenses and mirrors. He was also interested in optics, including its practical applications: in 1670, Van der Heyden was appointed the director of street lighting, and under his guidance Amsterdam became one of the earliest cities to install streetlights.

  It was in t
his experimental milieu that Vermeer began his own explorations of painting, perspective, optics, and optical instruments—first mirrors, and now lenses.

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  Vermeer abandoned the brothel-scene subject almost as soon as he had taken it up. As he became more enmeshed in the artists’ community in Delft, he would have seen that most of the successful—the most financially solvent—painters of the day were creating and selling “genre pictures,” that is, scenes of everyday life, depicting moments captured at the market, in taverns and homes, as well as on the street. Often such genre scenes employed witty metaphors, sometimes to illustrate well-known proverbs.

  Frans Hals, then working in Haarlem, was a master of this type of painting. Like Vermeer a son of a cloth merchant, Hals was painting scenes of dissolution in drinking establishments, such as that depicted in Young Man and Woman in an Inn, in which the viewer seems to have just thrown open the door in time to see a happy couple about to fall over the threshold, and Merrymakers at Shrovetide, in which a riotous scene of Carnival revelers is revealed to be a witty—and obscene—commentary on the amorous potential of the featured old man. Many of these genre paintings played around with the obscuring of moral boundaries, using intentional ambiguity: is it a home or a brothel? Is this a scene of innocent love or of prostitution? Sexual symbols abound: opened oysters, wet and pink, wine glasses offered to the viewer, liquids pouring out of gaping jugs.

  Another talented painter of genre scenes in Haarlem in the 1630s was Judith Leyster, one of the few women members of the artists’ guilds. Leyster painted some outstanding pictures—including a wonderfully frank self-portrait, now at the National Gallery in Washington—before her marriage to Jan Miense Molenaer, another artist, and the birth of five children led her to give up her own work. Her husband would later depict a woman beating her husband with a hairbrush to symbolize the “Sense of Touch,” which (one hopes) was a good-natured commentary on their marriage. Several of Leyster’s works were later incorrectly attributed to Hals, who is sometimes thought to have been her teacher because of similarities in style, in particular the way they both place the figures in a shallow space, without conveying any sense of depth. (At one point, Leyster sued Hals for “stealing” one of her apprentices, a main source of income for artists.) Unlike Hals, Leyster often depicted quiet, intimate scenes of women at home. Some of her paintings evoke Vermeer’s domestic canvases; in her Young Woman with a Lute, for instance, the woman is bathed in a radiant light; her presence—almost glowing against the dark background—arouses both a sense of intimate stillness and a sense of mystery.

  By the time Vermeer began his career, many other artists were painting domestic scenes. Gerard ter Borch—with whom, we have seen, Vermeer was acquainted—had become quite renowned for such pictures. His paintings depicting domestic activities are prized for his skillful rendition of textures. Ter Borch’s interiors tend to be dark, and, while Vermeer would soon begin to bathe his private spaces in a radiant light, his first domestic interior, A Maid Asleep, shares the darker aspect of Ter Borch’s pictures, especially on the left side of the painting, where the maid sits. Later paintings by Vermeer would feature a subject also favored by Ter Borch, the solitary woman reading or writing a letter—one of which, Mistress and Maid, has a dark background. Dou, Van Mieris, and Gabriel Metsu were also painting exquisite pictures that could have been a point of departure for Vermeer. Closer to home, Pieter de Hooch was the leading genre painter of this period, in whose quiet domestic spaces only a few figures fit comfortably—quite unlike the raucous and crowded genre paintings of Hals. De Hooch was a master of using perspective to create an interior or courtyard scene infused with light.

  Although no documents link Vermeer and De Hooch, it is highly probable that the two artists were in close contact during this period, since they were both living in Delft, and since the subject matter and style of their paintings during those years were very similar. This becomes most obvious, of course, with Vermeer’s The Little Street (ca. 1657–58): like De Hooch’s courtyard scenes, it portrays a world of domestic tranquility, where women and children go about their daily lives within the reassuring setting of their courtyards. But we see this similarity of subject and style as well in the quiet domestic scenes of the two men. De Hooch and Vermeer both began to refine a type of picture already known, but infusing it with more realistic qualities of light and atmosphere. In their works, visual experience was being incorporated into existing patterns of painting.

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  Besides the milieu in which Vermeer was working, there were also practical reasons for his shift in subject and style. The ability to sell his paintings at a good price began to matter to Vermeer more and more, as his family grew in size, numbering eventually eleven living children. Although his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, helped support this growing brood, it could not have escaped Vermeer’s notice that she would be happier if he were bringing in more money.

  Vermeer’s move to more domestic interiors in the mid-1650s may also have been influenced by a new development in his career: the presence in his life of a patron. Pieter van Ruijven was one of Delft’s wealthiest citizens, who had made shrewd investments with his inheritance from his family’s brewing business. Van Ruijven was a distant cousin of Pieter Jansz. van Ruijven, the history and portrait painter. He is thought to have been Vermeer’s patron because in 1696 twenty-one of Vermeer’s thirty-four known paintings were listed in the estate sale of Van Ruijven’s son-in-law Jacob Dissius, the owner of a printing press on the Market Square; most likely Dissius had inherited them from his father-in-law. Van Ruijven may have kept Vermeer on a kind of retainer, paying him in advance for paintings or the right of first refusal on paintings. This would have been similar to the arrangement Gerrit Dou had with Pieter Spiering, who paid the painter 500 guilders a year for the right of first refusal on all his new works and for the guarantee of one painting a year. Spiering and Van Ruijven were related by marriage, so they knew each other, and could have discussed their strategies in collecting art. In 1657 Van Ruijven lent Vermeer 200 guilders at an extremely low interest rate for the time, 4.5 percent; perhaps it was a partial advance on a group of future paintings. (He did eventually own five works from the late 1650s.) In another indication of the closeness of relationship between the two men, Van Ruijven and his wife included Vermeer in their will, signed in 1665, leaving him a bequest (should he outlive both of them) of 500 guilders. Vermeer did not outlive the couple. But Van Ruijven’s association with Vermeer lasted until the end of the painter’s life; among the paintings his son-in-law inherited from him was one of Vermeer’s final works, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal.

  It was not uncommon for patrons and painters to consult on the subjects of pictures. Van Ruijven, admiring the domestic interiors of Dou collected by his relative Spiering, may have requested a similar subject. Vermeer’s first intimate domestic interior, known as A Maid Asleep, was later owned by Van Ruijven. When it was first sold at auction it was given the title “A Drunken, Sleeping Maid.” This was a familiar theme in Dutch genre paintings around the middle of the seventeenth century. Maidservants were frequently depicted in the genre paintings of the day, in part because they were ubiquitous in Dutch society: around 20 percent of all Dutch households in the middle and late seventeenth century had at least one maidservant. Maids were integrated closely into the family circle; a German observer in 1694 noted that the servant girls in Holland behaved and dressed so much like their mistresses that it was hard to tell which was which. Literature of the time is full of maidservants speaking their minds; and in paintings they are shown in anything but obsequious positions: smirking in the background as their mistresses undergo various trials, frolicking and flirting with fiddlers and soldiers, eavesdropping in the shadows. Maidservants were seen as dangerous women: unmarried but young and away from their parents’ protection, essential to the running of the home but ultimately untrustworthy. And this was not merely a literary and pictorial fantasy—maids were we
ll represented in the court records of petty thieves in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, maidservants were well treated in the Netherlands; it was not acceptable even to slap them, as was common in other nations. Household manuals advised the mistress of a home to speak politely (but without intimacy) to her maids, to pay them modestly (but not stingily, and with a bonus at the end of the year if merited), and to feed them decently (but to avoid coffee and tea, which were thought to breed bad habits in working women).

  Vermeer’s picture fits well into the typical ambivalent view of housemaids. The maid is overly dressed up, as if she had prepared herself for a suitor, and has glued a large, black beauty mark right next to her left eye—fashion of the day run amok in her unsophisticated hands. She has been drinking, and not alone: the overturned roemer, or goblet, in the foreground signals a visitor. X-ray analysis reveals that Vermeer had, in fact, originally painted a man leaving the room, but later edited that figure out. The maid now dozes drunkenly, a quite serious dereliction of duty. Worse, she has left her keys in the door, almost a cardinal sin for a housemaid. It is an image of innocence on the edge of experience, perhaps on the edge of danger. It would have been an inviting picture for the male viewer—Van Ruijven, for instance—who might feel guilty about desiring the mistress of the household, but not the family’s young maid.