Vermeer: The Man and the Painter

Of the few surviving archival documents that regard Vermeer's civic and professional life, only one refers directly to what might be considered Vermeer "the man." Vermeer's wife, Catharina Bolnes, describes her husband's premature death as follows: "...as a result and owing to the great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had 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 or day and a half had gone from being healthy to being dead."

Thus, it would seem that Vermeer was at least a caring father whose difficulty in providing for his family's welfare (due to the disastrous war with France), had become so painful that he fell into a state of depression from which he would never recover. All other considerations about Vermeer's character is speculative. Even a presumed self-portrait in the background of The Procuress (fig. xx) cannot be supported by any objective evidence.

If we wish to imagine Vermeer as a man, we must rely uniquely on the interpretation his 35 (?) paintings. But can we really know something of a man from his painting? The belief that an artist makes himself know through his work has ancient roots. In seventeenth-century Netherlands, the notion that one's art was a reflection of one's character is neatly summed up in the popular saying, "zoo de man was, was zyn werk" (so the man, so the work). However, at times a painter's work reflects fairly accurately what we know of his character, as in the cases of Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalì; in others there seems to be no relation whatsoever. In many cases, an artist's ability to delve into the depths of his being seems to exist independently of his outward character..

Various factors that may condition our point of view should be considered. Firstly, our modern paramount notion of artistic "self-expression" finds no correspondent with the mindset during Vermeer's time. Then, it would have been unthought of for a mother to encourage her son to take up the painter's trade simply because the youngster wished to express himself artistically. The idea about the relationship between an artist and his work stem from the Romanticist belief that truth could be sought and found in the feeling and emotion of private experience more so than in political or religious doctrine or rules of reason. Romanticists held that reality is defined within the self and not in the external man-made environment. Instead, the vast majority of Dutch painters were content to view themselves as mere artisans.

Psychoanalysis

A significant part of modern art-writing is guided by the tacit assumption that a painter's work is intimately related to his inner self, his psyche. Sigmund Freud was the first to have made a systematic correlation between artistic creation and psychoanalysis: "The poets and the philosophers have discovered the unconscious before me, all that I have discovered it is the scientific method that allows the study of the unconscious." The artist, therefore, would express in intuitive form the unconscious processes studied by psychoanalysis in a scientific way. Psychoanalysis not only became a major interpretive tool for the art historian, but it also inspired Surrealism, one of the most bizarre art movements of the twentieth century.

One of the earliest to integrate psychoanalysis with art history was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), a Swiss art critic and historian who attempted to show that architecture could be understood from a purely psychological (as opposed to a historical-progressivist) point of view. Another important figure in the development of art psychology was Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), who provided some of the earliest theoretical justifications for expressionist art. Numerous artists in the twentieth century were influenced by the psychological argument, including Paul Klee(1879–1940), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Josef Albers (1888–1976).

Some art historians who apply psychoanalysis to art have come to the point where a higher value is placed on the unconscious over the intentional in the creation of art. Psychoanalysis sees the work of art as a compromise solution between impulses and defense, in most cases, ignoring the context in which the artwork is produced. But it can be argued that since no artist is able to exert anything near close to a complete control over his medium, the result of his labor can hardly be interpreted as an unadulterated expression of the self. Rather than a mold of an artist's psyche, a painting may be a compromise of the maker's innate character, certain abilities, certain intelligence, the difficulties of the stubborn paint medium and a myriad of external forces including chance and the pressing dictates of commerce, for which painters are never truly immune—on the contrary. Nonetheless, some art historians who apply psychoanalysis to art accord greater value to the unconscious than the intentional in the creation of art.

In any case, the great danger of adopting psychoanalysis as the principal tool for understanding a work of art is that there exist no verifiable criteria whereby psychoanalytic concepts can be judicially used to analyze works of art.^{James Elkins, "The Failed and the Inadvertent: Art History and the Concept of the Unconscious," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, no. 1 (Feb 1994): 119–132, revised article online, http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/elkins.htm.} And obviously, one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, projection, warns that the interpreter may be governed by his own subconscious drives, as well as his personal understanding of psychoanalysis.

Vermeer on the Couch: Lawrence Gowing and Edward Snow

Willing or not, by the mid-twentieth century, a discreet number of the great artists of the past had spent time on physiologists' virtual couches, obviously without consent. Initially, Vermeer managed to escape scrutiny, perhaps, because it seemed logical for most observers to imagine the creator of such perfect images as a man unscathed by the passions and sensuality which instead, clearly mark the works of great artists such as Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. Certainly, Vermeer's interior settings did not at the time seem unusual, even though it was later discovered later that they are not at all snapshots of daily life but carefully contrived mise-en-scène, skilfull weaves of visual fact and painterly fiction. Moreover, aside from the shady characters of his early bordello scene (The Procuress), the artist's protagonists stand among the most well-behaved in Dutch painting.

In 1950, the art critic and painter Lawrence Gowing published a monograph of Vermeer which had both a long-lasting impact on the collective image of both Vermeer's art and of Vermeer the man.^{Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Although Gowing seldom receives credit, he was the first to bring into relation Vermeer's painting and the painting of his time, furnishing sensible comparative models demonstrating that the artist systematically drew on the works of others for his compositional layouts and thematic contents.} Despite the quietude of his scenes and the levigated surfaces of his canvases, for Gowing something was amiss. He assumed that the invisible movements of the painter's psyche were crucial in determining the outer form of Vermeer's art and that it is the art historian's duty to recover them. The psychoanalytical tone set in Gowing's text can be sensed even reading these few citations.

• There is in his thought, the paradoxical accompaniment of its clarity, a deep character of evasiveness, a perpetual withdrawal.
• However much more elusive Vermeer's emotional preoccupations may seem than those of other artists that were certainly not less compelling than those of other artists, his style developed under an unremitting internal pressure.
• The delicacy of Vermeer's approach to figure painting, his cautious advance upon humanity down the measured, fortified field of his perspective, suggests an element in his attitude of something like fear.
• An element of concealment, of deception…is never entirely absent in Vermeer's thought.
• Some painting, that of Renoir perhaps, gives us the illusion that we can construe it with equal facility on every level. Others of the masters hold their secrets more tightly. All should be well. Such might be the constitution of the simplest of painters. Yet something keeps one wondering. Perhaps it is the unvarying adequacy, the uniform success of the method…
• What kind of man was Vermeer? Here is the ambiguity. We may examine the pictures corner to corner and still be uncertain. It seems as if he was of a god-like detachment, more balanced, more civilized, more accomplished, and more immune from the infection of his time than any other painter before or since. Or else was he of a naivety beyond all belief, all eye and nothing else, a deaf-mute painter perhaps, almost an idiot in the lack of any of the kind of the mental furniture which normally clutters the passage between eye and hand, a walking retina drilled like a machine.
• His nature excludes directness; a condition of the investigation for him was that the angle should be oblique.
• He is reticent, even secretive.

In short, Gowing reveals a hitherto unknown Vermeer; an artist who rejects descriptive facility and the quintessential warmth of the Dutch, both defining characteristics of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. We find ourselves confronted no longer with a supreme naturalist but an out-of-the-ordinary painter whose approach to art excludes directness. He takes refuge in an impersonal optical transcription of natural phenomena subtracting himself from the obligations of dealing with the real world. He constructs pictorial barriers between himself and his motifs, one of the most threatening being the "bell-shaped" woman. Gowing's most cited revelations are Vermeer's distaste for personal disclosure and what he describes as "reticence" in dealing with human issues.^{E. H. Gombrich, review of Vermeer, by Lawrence Gowing, The Observer, London, September 7, 1952, http://gombricharchive.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/showrev39.pdf.}

Even though the author's suggestive fifty-five-page introduction is written so eloquently and contains such a wealth of insights that few readers can resist being mesmerized, questions regarding his interpretive mode have been raised. Among those who saw cracks in Gowing's poetic/psychoanalytical approach was the influential art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), who wrote:

Gowing's main concern was not the psychology of vision so much as the psychology of the artist. It is his ambition to penetrate the "impeccable armour" of Vermeer's style and explore the depth of his elusive personality. To him "it seems as if the very efficacy of his still-life method were a symptom in itself, as if the quality of surface observation sought to compensate for some deep impediment." The perils of this type of interpretation are obvious. For whether we accept the popular prejudice that a "detached" style must reflect a "detached" personality or prefer the more sophisticated view that a show of detachment must hide a deep involvement, we are always assuming a rather trivial connection between art and life.^{E. H. Gombrich, review of Vermeer, by Lawrence Gowing, The Observer, London, September 7, 1952, http://gombricharchive.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/showrev39.pdf.}

Some years later, Ivan Gaskell would write:

Gowing would take us intothe innermost intimacies of Vermeer's character by means of his art. I contend this is not rationally possible because of the very nature of the material being used. I would argue that a reliance on a general human understanding of represented gestures and facial expressions and the association of states of mind with technical or stylistic features of the artifact, results in a frail, ambiguous and uncertain deduction. In the case of Vermeer, certainly, I do not believe that such knowledge is reliably obtainable by means of scrutinizing art alone. In so far as I might claim to know Rubens as a person, it is through his letters, not his painting and drawings. ^{Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer's Wager (Essays in Art and Culture) (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 28.}

As to Gowing's assertion of Vermeer's "lack of facility" in dealing with "humanity" corresponds to "his depth of feeling,"; Gaskell responds that "inferring a quality from an absence is perilous reasoning" although it can produce "good fiction…"

Notwithstanding Gombrich's and Gaskell's doubts on Gowing's methodological approach, his point of view gained considerable traction in art history circles and is readily brandied even by the most no-nonsense art writers, such as Walter Liedtke. Liedtke wrote that even though the reader must be "prepared to give [Gowing's] book ten or more minutes per page" or risk missing what has been expressed, he nonetheless maintains that aside from some "fine words" by Thoré and Proust, serious writing on Vermeer began with...Gowing's monograph."^{Walter Liedtke, The Complete Works (London: Abrams, 2008), 7.}

However refined Gowing's intuitions may be, he and other art historians who employ psychoanalytical concepts generally do not directly address the question of how conscious content can be distinguished from unconscious content.. Why, for example, should the tables and chairs which Vermeer habitually places in front of his female figures be interpreted as physiological "barriers" or "fortresses," as Gowing saw them, rather than straightforward repoussoir devices employed ubiquitously by Dutch interior painters to enhance the sense of spatial depth, an obsessive concern of both Vermeer and many seventeenth-century Dutch artists? Must we assume that to one degree or another the endless number of Dutch repoussoir devices somehow double as physiological barriers or only those of Vermeer? If one holds that the velvet chair on right-hand side of Frans van Mieris' Duet (fig. 2) does not possess the same physiological content as the similarly placed blue chair in Vermeer's late A Lady Standing at a Virginal, why is this so?

Equally eloquent but less successful in art history circles was Edward Snow, an American poet and translator, with his A Study of Vermeer.^{Edward Snow, A Study of Vermeer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).} In it, the author works from the conviction that viewing pictures is a reciprocal act between the artist and the viewer. For example, in the introductory paragraph, Snow describes the experience of the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

For to look at it is to be implicated in a relationship so urgent that to take an instinctive step backward into aesthetic appreciation would seem in this case a defensive measure, an act of betrayal and bad faith. It is me at whom she gazes, with real, unguarded human emotions, and with an erotic intensity that demands something just as real and human in return. The relationship may only be with an image, yet it involves all that art is supposed to keep at bay.^{Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979), 3.}

The reader soon discovers that Snow makes no efforts to conceal what he believes gives the distinctive shape to the painter's work. After the prologue "Head of a Young Woman," the body of the book is titled "Art and Sexuality Art" and its first chapter is "Painterly Inhibitions."

Snow writes that the lion-head finials of the Spanish chair stare angrily at the man and the woman of the Berlin The Glass of Wine, while the two reflected gleams on the glass from which the woman drinks stab violently at her eyes (fig. 3). Regarding the same work, he states: "The flattening of the woman's bodice practically to the point of concavity similarly gives the impression of being an act of aggression, rooted in the painter's own sexual inhibitions, on woman and what she represents for man."^{Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979), 43.}

Lawrence Welscher and Brian J. Wolf

The psychoanalytic vein opened by Gowing continued to be mined well into the last decades of the twentieth century even though the psychoanalytical approach began to lose some of its hold on the art-history writers. In Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings, Lawrence Welscher hypothesized that Vermeer's quietist compositions constitute as sort of utopian peace, a pictorial bulwark, as it were, against the calamities of an era aboil with religious persecution, torture, mass rape, or, in the author's words, when "all of Europe was a Bosnia" (in reference to the atrocities of the Bosnia conflict in the early 1990s).^{Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2005).} Like Gowing and Snow, Welscher sought in the minor details of Vermeer's compositions signs of the painter's mental activity. Again, the "roaring lion heads carved into the chair posts" signal potential violence. The wall maps, instead, signify the incessant shifting of national boundaries achieved at the cost of many lives.

On the other hand, Bryan J. Wolf (Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing) links Vermeer's presumed psychological closure not to the broader violence of the continent, but to the violence that was rife in his immediate family circle.^{Brian J. Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).} Based on archival documents, Wolf sums up the artist's unstable family situation as such:

Vermeer's private life was filled with violence. His maternal grandfather, who worked at one point as an engraver in a counterfeiting ring, later turned state's witness and provided testimony that led to the beheading of the scheme's two leaders, Vermeer's father, as a young man, had twice been involved in public brawls, both times with knives, one leading to the death of a soldier garrisoned in Delft. Catharina's Bolnes, Vermeer's wife, came from a family traumatized by domestic abuse. Her father, Reynier Bolnes, once attacked his wife, Maria Thins, who was then pregnant, with a "Stick." Reynier Bolnes verbally assaulted Maria Thins and forced her to eat her meals alone. She, in turn, sent several petitions to the magistrates at Gouda in an effort to secure a judicial separation.. The sparring between husband and wife divided the Bolnes family into partisan camps: Maria received the support of her sister and brother (who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier Bolne's brothers), while Reynier enlisted the assistance not only of his son, Willem, who consistently sided with his father.

Years later, after the warring couple had separated, Willem came to live with his mother in Delft—at the same time that Vermeer and his wife shared her home in the catholic quarter of the city. Willem's violent behavior toward his mother so frightened he—he called her, among other things, an "old papist sow" and a "she-devil"—that she retreated to her room, where, in a sad repetition of history, she had her meals brought up to her. According to subsequent depositions, Willem also attacked his sister Catharina (Vermeer's wife), "threatening on a number of occasions to beat her with a stick, although she was in the last stages of pregnancy." Willem had previously beaten her with a "steel-tipped stick." Maria Thins eventually petitioned the Court of Delft to commit her son to a private house of corrections. She won her suit: Willem however, would later taunt the family with threats of marriage to a servant of questionable reputation who was employed by the house of correction.

According to Wolf, the "outcroppings of violence in Vermeer's life only reinforces our desire to interpret his paintings as zones of safety, aesthetic safe havens where...peace exists."

Did Vermeer, then, take refuge in his painting from the turbulence of social or daily life? Or did he transmute his "inner rumblings" into perfectly balanced compositions by means of a "reaction formation"—a psychological defense mechanism whereby an unconscious and unacceptable impulse or feeling is converted into its opposite so it can become conscious and be expressed? The late economist and Vermeer biographer John Michael Montias did not believe so. He posits that the artist's "subjects and the way he handled them are rooted in much earlier experiences and were invariant to the things that happened to him in his adult life. His style and the contents of his paintings did evolve in the years of his maturity, but not necessarily in response to changes in his environment. With the exception of the money troubles and the difficulty he had bringing up his children in the 1670s, I cannot be persuaded that Vermeer had such a wretched life." ^{John M. Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 199.}

Moreover, it should be remembered that Vermeer was hardly alone in his portrayals of domestic peace. Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684) and Gerrit ter Borch (1617–1681)—both imitated by scores of Dutch painters of lesser talent—had specialized in the field. Just like Vermeer, they presumably aimed at securing fame and making a good livelihood, rather than building bastions against the atrocities of their times.. And likewise, the number of lion-head finials and flat-chested damsels—it could easily be argued that they were flattened by current fashions rather than the painter's psyche—that appear in Dutch paintings cannot be counted. Whether Vermeer's paintings should be understood as conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious constructs meant to sublimate the pressures of internal or external violence, or as a response to the growing demand for quietist pictures, or merely as the painter's personal quest for perfection, remains a question that's not easily resolved.

In any case, in the 1960s and 1970s, the overall influence of psychology in art began to wane, although art historical writing, which is clearly psychoanalytic without using the Freudian lexicon or openly declaring allegiance to any psychoanalytical school, remains widespread. Except for passing remarks, principally drawn from Gowing's monograph, the issue of Vermeer's mental furniture was by and large jettisoned and became fodder for popular literary speculation, principally in the form of "faction," a literary genre in which real historical figures and actual events are woven together with fictitious allegations. Two such novels, The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland became best sellers and very likely outstripped the combined sales of Vermeer-related art historical literature of the latter half of the twentieth century.^{The former furnishes a historicized psychodrama in which a poor but sensitive young maid comes to comprehend the painter more than his virago wife who, instead, was interested only in making children and making life hard for her maid. The latter traces the history of a fictional painting by Vermeer through various owners. Each chapter is a short story focusing on how the painting impacts the life of its current owner, while also exploring themes like the ethical implications of art ownership and the power of art to influence human experience.}

According to the American art historian and art critic James Elkins, one of the dangers of adopting psychoanalysis to understand works of art without clearly defined criteria is that it helps "art historians take away artists' control and awareness of their own work, replacing it with the model of artists as workers largely unaware of what they do."^{James Elkins, "The Failed and the Inadvertent: Art History and the Concept of the Unconscious," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, no. 1 (Feb. 1994).} Another is that the unconscious is valued "over the intentional. In short, they propose...that what is important about artistic creation is precisely what is unconscious." Moreover, as Elkins pointed out, it simply may not be interesting to know about an artist's unconscious, even admitting that it is possible. Does the knowledge that Vermeer faced, "deep personal impediments" make The Music Lesson any less or any more appreciable or even understandable than it already is to the untrained eye?

Vermeer and Feminist Critique^{Wayne Franits, https://amzn.to/3QkUHfw (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 260, note 6. Franits cites an "excellent essay on the historiography of feminist interventions in modernist art history" as Tickner, Lisa's. "Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference." Genders 3 (Fall 1988): 93-128. He also notes the influence of Svetlana's Alpers 1982 essay (The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Revised ed.), which, although not "precisely about gender," has encouraged scholars to consider the "perhaps less 'masculine' nature of Dutch painting."}

In the last decades, Vermeer's forty-two women have received an extraordinary amount of critical attention. For many art historians today, the interest that he bestowed on them is near or equal to his interest in light and composition, both traditionally regarded as the artist's highest achievements.. In short, nothing seems so antiquated as the formalist idea that the artist looked upon women as he looked upon a split peach of a still life or the luminous edge of a window sill. In 2011, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge staged an exhibition of Dutch painting with four works by Vermeer entitled Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence.^{Wieseman, Marjorie E., Wayne Franits, and H. Perry Chapman. Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence. 1st ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.}

In this new vein, Lisa Vergara wrote "Reviewing his cast of female characters, we can easily see how often Vermeer suggests through them the workings of the mind and the cultivation of the spirit that come together in the course of commonplace yet highly civilized activities. Not surprisingly, his women express habits of mind, hand and heart akin to those we imagine the artist himself exercising as he planned and painted his pictures."^{Lisa Vergara, "Perspectives on Women in the Art of Vermeer," in The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer (Cambridge Companions to the History of Art), ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 62.} Vergara also notes that it was Pieter van Ruijven's wife, De Knuijt—not her husband—who bequeathed 500 florins to Vermeer. Made to a painter who was not a family member, it was possibly unique. Vergara surmises that although De Knuijt "might have been acting on behalf of her husband, her taste must have been taken into account [De Knuijt had brought considerable wealth their marriage]. Indeed, Dutch domestic scenes, as well as many other subjects, were designed to appeal to a woman's gaze at least as much as to a man's." Recent research has, in effect, confirmed that De Knuijt may have played an important, if not predominant, role in the making of the Van Ruijven collection. Judith Noorman has recently uncovered a document in which she is referred to as an art connoisseur. As the lady of the house, De Knuijt likely took the lead in decorating their home and buying paintings. A recently published memoir from the same era confirms that paintings were seen as household items and part of domestic consumption. Moreover, a notebook mentioned in the couple's 1665 joint will, titled 'Disposal of my Paintings and other matters, suggests that Maria de Knuijt was the one who managed the painting collection, although the exact contents of the notebook are unknown. This evidence suggests De Knuijt was the primary collector and organizer of the painting collection.

For Mariët Westermann, the link between Vermeer's "self-aware interiors,"^{Mariët Westermann, "Vermeer and the Interior Imagination," in exh. cat. Vermeer and the Dutch Interior, ed. Alejandro Vergara (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Prado, 2003), 229.} inhabited to a great extent by these only apparently coquettish creatures, and Descartes' philosophical thundering, "I think, therefore I am," is only one step away (fig. 4). According to Westermann, it is women's capacity to think, rather than to obey religious or social canons, that brought Vermeer to paint them so often and with such deferential regard.

It might not be coincidental that the growing interest in and idealization of Vermeer's women coincided with the surge of feminist art theory in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Vermeer's women have not escaped another type of attention.

In the exhibition catalogue of the Vermeer's Masterpiece: The Milkmaid, curator Walter Liedtke^{Walter A. Liedtke, "The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer," in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 9-November 29, 2009,.} dared to point out that for "at least two centuries before Vermeer's time, milkmaids and kitchen maids had (or were assigned) a reputation for amorous predispositions. Netherlandish artists adopted this theme in works ranging in tone from coarsely erotic to slyly suggestive…" Presumably, Vermeer and male his viewers would have been aware of and enjoyed that something else was going on besides cooking bread pudding. In Liedtke's eyes, the maid's dubious social reputation, her "generous proportions," and her "warmth, softness and approachability are qualities not found in Vermeer's more refined young ladies." In addition, the maid's naked arm, the footwarmer (whose smoldering coals would have not only warmed the maid's feet but another part of her anatomy beneath her skirt) and a tiny Cupid floor tile are so many signposts that point to a direction most can imagine.

Despite Liedtke's warning to journalists to "not say that the curator says the painting is about sex," but about "attraction and restraint, and a subtle form of voyeurism," his hypothesis was greeted bitterly in some camps even though a reasonable amount of historical evidence backs up the veiled milkmaid-eroticism tie.

Whatever kind of man Vermeer might have been, it seems befitting to his indecipherable nature that his tomb marker, now in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, is no longer in the position where he is buried, but the barest facts: his name, date of birth and date of death. What remains of Vermeer is a handful of small, unobtrusive paintings which are, in contrast to what we know of Vermeer the man, more than enough.