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

by Laura J. Snyder

  Huygens enjoyed the company of this lively Muiderkring, especially, no doubt, the women who were part of it. Huygens always did have a weakness for attractive, intelligent women. During his visit to London in 1622, he had enjoyed the hospitality of Sir Robert Killigrew, an English politician who served as the ambassador to the United Provinces. It was through Killigrew that Huygens met Cornelis Drebbel, the natural philosopher and diplomat Sir Francis Bacon (whom Huygens praised extravagantly in his autobiography), the poet John Donne, and possibly the playwright Ben Jonson. It has been suggested that during this visit, Huygens developed a serious flirtation, if not more, with Lady Mary Killigrew (the former Mary Woodhouse), who was also the niece of Bacon. This romance, if it was that, was not unique. Huygens had intellectual—sometimes highly flirtatious—friendships with Visscher and Tesselschade, the artist Anna Maria van Schurman, and the English poet and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne, who was living in Antwerp during the English Commonwealth period.

  Before her marriage to a British nobleman, Cavendish had served as an attendant of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I, and fled into exile with her queen when the monarchy was abolished. Cavendish went on to write perhaps the first book of science fiction, The Blazing World, and to publish extensively in natural philosophy, eventually becoming the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London, in 1667. Virginia Woolf would later criticize Cavendish as a “crazy Duchess” who “shut herself up at Welbeck [the Newcastle estate] alone,” where she “frittered her time away scribbling nonsense.” Many men of Cavendish’s day no doubt shared this view of a woman interested in scientific pursuits. Huygens, however, did not consider Cavendish’s scientific avocation a “disease”; rather, he found her intellectual interests stimulating. They carried on a spirited correspondence on the topic of Prince Rupert’s drops, a mysterious phenomenon of interest to many natural philosophers at the time: these were glass teardrops formed by dripping molten glass in cold water, which hardened the glass. The head runs on into a crooked tail, and the drops have a peculiar combination of fragility and strength. The head can resist even the blow of a hammer. But once a piece of the tail is broken off, the drop explodes and is reduced to powder. Puzzling over Prince Rupert’s drops exercised the fellows of the Royal Society of London for years, taking up many pages of their Philosophical Transactions. Even today an explanation for this phenomenon is hard to find. The correspondence between Huygens and Cavendish shows Huygens treating Cavendish—whom he teasingly described as “ruining many a white petticoat” by her experiments—as an intellectual at his level.

  In his autobiography Huygens made clear his passion not only for intelligent women but also for science, especially the observational sciences of the day. He told Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society of London that he always carried a small microscope in his pocket to be at the ready for any observations he could make of the tiniest parts of nature. He took a close interest in the education of his sons, emphasizing natural philosophy. His son Christiaan became one of the most important astronomers of his day, the first to describe accurately the rings of Saturn and to see one of its moons. Christiaan Huygens ground and polished his own lenses, patented the first pendulum clock, which greatly improved accuracy in timekeeping, and derived the law of centrifugal motion, and from this an inverse square law of gravitation (however, he would later reject Newton’s inverse square law of universal gravitation, ridiculing its claim that two distant masses could attract each other across empty space).

  Constantijn Huygens was a major player in the newly developing art market, acting as a go-between arranging commissions for artists with the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik—who hoped to put together an art collection of international renown—and other members of his family. In 1625 Amalia van Solms, Frederik Hendrik’s wife, sought to purchase a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, the famous Flemish artist; she wanted his Alexander Crowning Roxane, a large-scale work depicting the marriage of Alexander the Great and his wife, who had not been born into royalty. Van Solms hoped to own the work as a tribute to her new husband, who had similarly raised her to the equivalent of Dutch royalty by their marriage. Huygens negotiated with Rubens on behalf of his royal patron for the painting, which finally hung in her private quarters in 1632.

  Huygens had a keen eye, and he recognized, earlier than most men of his time, the potential of the young Rembrandt van Rijn. He had visited the shared studio of Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in Leiden in 1628. In his autobiography, written the following year, Huygens commented on the state of contemporary Dutch art. He praised the school of Dutch landscape painters, especially Cornelis van Poelenburg, Moses van Uyttenbroeck, Jan van Goyen, Jan Wildens, Paul Bril, and Esias van de Velde, as being able to paint truly “natural pictures,” which could show “the warmth of the sun and the movement caused by cool breezes.” He approved of the history painters, chief among them Rubens, but also Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrik ter Brugghen, Antony van Dyck, and Abraham Janssens. Yet the future of Dutch fine art, he predicted, would lie with the two young stars he had just met: Lievens and Rembrandt. Lievens is better at depicting “that which is magnificent and lofty,” Huygens noted, while Rembrandt “loves to devote himself to a small painting and present an effect of concentration.” Rembrandt, he believed, was possessed of a finer hand and could communicate emotions more strongly in his pictures. In 1629—when the painter was only twenty-three—Huygens brought Rembrandt to the attention of the stadtholder, arranging a commission for Rembrandt: a series of depictions of Christ’s passion. In 1633 Rembrandt painted two large religious canvases for the stadtholder, the Raising of the Cross and Descent from the Cross. After delivering these, Rembrandt was commissioned to paint three more religious canvases. He also painted a portrait of Amalia van Solms. History has preserved the close tie between the two men: only seven letters written by Rembrandt are extant, and all of them are letters to Huygens.

  Huygens’s interest in the art of his day was inextricably tied to his enthusiasm for the new optical technologies, the new ways of seeing and gaining knowledge. In his Daghwerck (Day’s work), his verse tribute (with prose commentary) to life with Suzanna, Huygens deployed the notion of the camera obscura as a metaphor of knowledge acquisition: “I have agreeable tidings which I shall bring you inside the house. Just as in a darkened room one can see by the action of the sun through a glass everything (though inverted) which goes on outside.” Elsewhere in this work, he praised the knowledge gained with the new optical devices—telescopes and microscopes. “From little Flowers, Midges, Ants, and Mites shall I draw my lessons. With the aid of the microscope, parts of these smallest of Creatures till now invisible have at this time become known.” Celebrating the fact that much that was previously unseen was now visible, Huygens remarked, “And discerning everything with our eyes as if we were touching it with our hands; we wander through a world of tiny creatures till now unknown, as if it were a newly discovered continent of our globe.” Throughout the piece, Huygens expressed the idea that knowledge is pictorial and optical; all knowledge is like the image projected in the camera obscura, or the drawings of little beings seen through microscopes. Huygens explicitly compared Dutch art to the empirical outlook of the science of the day. Images were linked inextricably to the advancement of learning. Recalling his experience of looking through Drebbel’s microscope, Huygens mourned his recently deceased friend Jacob de Gheyn II, wishing he were around to record the tiny denizens of the “new world” seen under the lenses.

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  As a man steeped so deeply in the worlds of art and science, Huygens was well placed to know both Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer. We know that Huygens and Leeuwenhoek were friends. Huygens’s interest in microscopy, dating back to the 1620s, certainly led him to Leeuwenhoek by the 1660s, when the former cloth salesman was becoming known in Delft (only about six miles from The Hague) for his scientific pursuits. Huygens later recommended his fellow countryman to the Roya
l Society of London. By the early 1670s the two were corresponding and visiting frequently, with Huygens eventually signing his letters your “bysondere goede” (specially good) friend. The trip between The Hague and Delft could be traveled by coach in as little as thirty or forty minutes, or by trekschuit in one to one and a half hours (barges ran twice hourly in both directions). While Leeuwenhoek was in The Hague on business related to Vermeer’s estate, as well as at other times, he visited Huygens; when Huygens was in Delft on business for the republic, he called on Leeuwenhoek. In the correspondence between the two men, we can see Huygens exhorting Leeuwenhoek to persevere and assuring him of the importance and uniqueness of his efforts. When Verkolje painted Leeuwenhoek’s portrait, Huygens wrote a celebratory verse that was published with the mezzotint:

  To the picture of Ant. Leeuwenhoeck.

  There lives a charming Man, a skilful Man and smart,

  Who bringth forth miracles, and presseth Nature hard,

  Espieth her secrets all, her ev’ry lock he’s opening:

  His little Keys of Glass t’escape there is no hoping,

  Nor can there be. This ain’t that fearless Man, but there:

  If seeking him, look sharp, ’tis like him as tho’ ’t were.

  In an expression of the close relation between art and science, Huygens remarks upon the painting’s success at “fooling the eye” into thinking that the natural philosopher was really present.

  Huygens’s connection to Vermeer is not as well documented, but he almost certainly knew him. We know that Huygens sought out and maintained contact with Rembrandt, Lievens, Van Dyck, and Rubens; it seems beyond question that he would have wanted to meet Vermeer, an artist with a growing reputation in nearby Delft and elsewhere. Indeed, Huygens appears to have visited Vermeer in the company of a young regent named Pieter Teding van Berckhout, whose sister would later marry Huygens’s son Lodwijk. On May 14, 1669, Van Berckhout recorded in his diary that he went to Delft from The Hague to visit Vermeer. Van Berckhout was met at the city gate by Ewert van der Horst (a member of the parliament), Willem Nieuwport (Dutch ambassador to London), and Huygens. Most likely, they all went together to Vermeer’s studio, Huygens providing the introduction of the others to the painter.

  Van Berckhout returned for another visit to Vermeer’s studio less than a month later, recording his assessment that in the painter’s work “the most extraordinary and most curious aspect consists in the perspective.” These visits to artists’ studios were typical of men of a certain class, who had been brought up to believe that an understanding and appreciation of the visual arts was a sign of a gentleman’s taste and stature. Such men would read manuals such as Pierre Le Brun’s “Essays on the Wonders of Painting” (1635), which taught them that in order “to discourse on this noble profession, you must have frequented the studio and disputed with the masters, have seen the magic effects of the brush, and the unerring judgment with which the details are worked out.”

  Huygens may also have arranged another visit to Vermeer’s studio. The French diplomat Balthasar de Monconys (1611–65), a native of Lyon who had studied mathematics and physics, made a number of tours throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, eventually visiting Portugal, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, England, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. During his travels he routinely called on both artists and natural philosophers; when he was in Florence, for instance, Monconys sought out Evangelista Torricelli, successor to Galileo as professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa and inventor of the barometer. While in London in 1663, Monconys visited the Royal Society, introduced to the group by Sir Robert Moray; he attended several meetings that summer, and described experiments he had witnessed there. On that visit Monconys also went to see a “M. Rives”—Richard Reeves, an instrument maker known for his microscopes and telescopes. Monconys kept a journal during his travels, recounting his attendance at experiments by Boyle and his conversations and correspondence with Thomas Hobbes, Henry Oldenburg, Christopher Wren, and others. He was also in contact with Pierre Gassendi, Blaise Pascal, and Kircher. The first volume of his Voyages testifies to his special interest in optics, including letters and discussions dealing with the construction of spectacles, microscopes, and telescopes.

  Monconys traveled to Delft in the summer of 1663. He visited the Huygens family in The Hague, comparing their telescopes with his own, admiring the sharpness and brightness of their lenses. He went to see Isaac Vossius in The Hague and Johan Hudde in Amsterdam to examine their microscopes, which were mainly single-lens types. On his way to Amsterdam he called at Van Mieris’s studio.

  While he was visiting with Huygens, Monconys admired his extensive art collection. He admitted that he had not seen Vermeer when he was in Delft. Huygens must have been surprised that a visitor so interested in art had not visited Vermeer and encouraged Monconys to do so, because not long afterward, on August 11, 1663, Monconys did meet with the Delft painter. In his published account of his travels, Monconys reported on his visit to Vermeer:

  In Delft I saw the painter Verme[e]r who did not have any of his works: but we did see one at a baker’s, for which six hundred livres [600 guilders] had been paid, although it contained but a single figure, for which six pistoles [50 guilders] would have been too high a price.

  Monconys seemed to believe that the painting he saw was worth less than a tenth of what had been paid for it. The baker was most likely Hendrick van Buyten, headman of the bakers’ guild and a prominent Delft citizen who owned four paintings by Vermeer at one time or another—including, later, two paintings given to him by Catharina after Vermeer’s death to settle the bill for three years’ worth of bread. The price Monconys was quoted was considerable: six hundred guilders (over $7,846 today) was the annual salary of a skilled craftsman, and the price of a small house.

  Monconys, less of a connoisseur than Huygens, appeared to judge a painting by the number of subjects appearing in it. He balked two days after his visit to Vermeer when Gerrit Dou asked Monconys for the same price for his painting of a Woman at a Window (also a work with only one figure). Apparently, even at this fairly early stage in Vermeer’s career, his paintings had the same market price as those by Gerrit Dou, who had already been invited by Charles II of England to become his court painter.

  It seems likely that Monconys would also have visited Leeuwenhoek on one of his trips to Delft, either because of Leeuwenhoek’s growing reputation, in Delft at least, as a natural philosopher interested in lenses, or because he was told of Leeuwenhoek—perhaps by Huygens. But Monconys does not record any such visit in his journal.

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  By the time Vermeer painted The Geographer, when he was thirty-seven, he and Catharina had been living with her mother, Maria Thins, in her spacious house on the Oude Langendijck for some years, at least since 1660, when that residence was listed on the burial notice of one of their infants. In this house, which no longer stands, the “great hall” held portraits of Vermeer’s father and mother, as well as Vermeer’s coat of arms in a black frame, in addition to religious paintings, two tronien by Fabritius, and other pictures. The hall was furnished with a “cabinet of joinery work and inlaid ebony,” a table with a green tablecloth, nine red-leather chairs, a mirror with an ebony frame, and an ebony crucifix. A pair of green silk curtains with a valance in front of the bedstead marked out a built-in bed where Johannes and Catharina slept. A small room adjoining the great hall held a simple bed, an oak table, a child’s bed, and two chairs for small children. The voorhuis (front room) held a less ornate cabinet, four green chairs, a bench, and an oak chest, and a number of paintings.

  At the back of the house were four rooms called kitchens, only one of which was actually used for cooking; the others held beds and chairs. The cooking kitchen also contained a bed and basic furniture, as well as a cupboard, a wooden rack, twenty-one shell-shaped dishes, and pewter and tin vessels. Downstairs there was a cellar room and a “washing kitchen.” There were two rooms upstairs, a front one wher
e Maria Thins slept, and a back room, facing north, where Vermeer painted, and which contained two easels, three palettes, canvases and wood panels, bundles of prints, a desk and two chairs, a stone table on which to grind colors, a muller and a maulstick—a cane-like stick used to steady the hand of the painter (one can be seen in use in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting). On the top floor there was also a room referred to in documents after Vermeer’s death as a “place”—the privies, perhaps—a little room where clothing and the laundry was hung, and an attic. There was probably another room or two reserved for the use of Maria Thins and containing her furniture and belongings.