Catharina and Johannes: Did Vermeer Ever Paint his Wife Catharina?

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Did Vermeer ever paint his wife, Catharina Bolnes? Were his sitters professional models, friends or relatives?

Although no historical evidence has survived that connects any of Vermeer's sitters to known individuals, the artist's working habits and style of living suggests he may have employed his wife, daughters and perhaps even a family maid^{John Michael Montias, Vermeer's principal biographer, suggests Vermeer's servant, Tanneke Everpoel, may have been the model for the early Milkmaid.} to pose for some of his interior scenes. Gerrit ter Borch, a fellow Dutch artist whose discreet genre interiors inspired some of Vermeer's own compositions, frequently employed members of his family as models, in particular his beloved step-sister Gesina ter Borch (1631–1690). From a practical point of view, not having to pay models for long hours of posing may have represented a significant economic advantage.

Art historians have dedicated only passing comments in regards to the eventual identity of Vermeer's sitters. The scarcity of inquiry may be due to the fact that Vermeer's interiors were not conceived not biographical statements: that is, they do not represent real life situations but carefully composed mise-en-scène. The individual likenesses of his sitters was therefore subordinate to the role they played in the overall picture. Consequently, the identity of those who posed is of scarce importance to our understanding of Vermeer's art.

In any case, some critics have seen Catharina's likeness in one painting or another. The most frequent candidates are the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and Woman Holding a Balance (see detail images below). This young woman has the same high brow, straight nose and wide-spaced eyes, and she also appears to be pregnant in two of the pictures.

In less than two decades, Catharina is know to have borne Johannes 15 children, four of which did not survive infancy.² However, modern scholarship has not come to agreement to the fact that these, or any other women in Vermeer's paintings, were portrayed while they were carrying children (see "Were Some of the Women in Vermeer's Paintings Pregnant?"). Pregnant women were probably not considered attractive from an aesthetic point of view: they are portrayed only rarely in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. Would Vermeer, who seemed content to work within the established artistic framework of his age, have addressed such an unconventional theme as that of a pregnant women?

Another candidate for Catharina is the young woman dressed in the characteristic lemon yellow morning jacket who looks out directly at the viewer in A Lady Writing. One critic noted that the painting, more than others, "possesses a singularity and mood that points to it being a portrait."³ Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Johannes Vermeer catalogue) wrote: "The problem of identifying the sitter, however, seems insurmountable. The most likely candidate is that she is his wife, Catharina Bolnes, who, having been born in 1631, would have been in her early-to-mid thirties when Vermeer painted the work. While it is difficult to judge the age of models in painting, such an age does seem appropriate for this figure. Little else, however, confirms this hypothesis."

Catharina Bolnes and Johannes Vermeer

Even though we know nothing of Catharina's character, we do know some facts about her childhood, her family life and her marriage with Vermeer which have been gathered from documents drawn up by contemporary notaries. Catharina was the daughter of Maria Thins, who came from a well-to-do patrician family in Gouda, a Catholic stronghold, and Reynier Bolnes, a prosperous but irascible brickmaker. "Catharina's childhood memories were full of violence, fits of temper and tears. Her father, after 13 years of marriage, had become an ogre. Maria's relatives and neighbors were to testify that they saw him insulting his wife, kicking her, pulling her naked from her bed by her hair when she was sick, attacking her with a stick when she was pregnant, and chasing her out of the house. She was forced to eat her meals by herself. On one occasion, Catharina, aged nine, ran to her neighbors in fright, yelling that her father was about to kill her sister Cornelia. Maria received the support of her sister and brother, who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier's brother while Reynier was bolstered by his son Willem."^{Anthony Bailey, Vermeer: A View of Delft (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2001), 37-38.}

Years later, after the unhappy couple had been legally separated, Catharina and her mother moved into the quiet Catholic enclave, called the "Papists Corner," in Delft, perhaps, seeking solace from their traumatic life in Gouda. Willem, Catharina's brother, who had sided with his father, later moved in with them when Vermeer was living—and probably painting—there as well. Willem's behavior was no less reprehensible than his father's. He called his mother an "old Papist sow" and a "she devil" and, as his father had done before, forced her to have her meals taken up to her. Willem also attacked his sister threatening on a number of occasions to beat her with a stick with a metal point, although she was in the last stages of pregnancy. Maria was eventually able to commit her son Willem to a private house of correction although he continued to intimidate his mother by threatening to marry a servant of dubious reputation who was employed in the house of correction.

Like the almost totality of Dutch seventeenth-century women, Catharina remains anonymous. Her only surviving words are those of a plea to her creditors after the premature death of her husband describing her disastrous financial state: "…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."

Catharina's Legacy

The best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (and the eponymous film adapted from the novel) portrayed Catharina in an unpleasant light. She is characterized as jealous, selfish, vain, and superficial: a completely spoiled young woman. Worse perhaps, she is incapable of understanding her husband's art, and in a fit of envy she even attempts to destroy one of his finest paintings.

Notwithstanding the novelist made no claim to historical accuracy, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (curator of Northern Baroque Painting of the National Gallery, organizer of the historic 1995-1996 Vermeer exhibition and author of important publications on the Delft master) declared in an interview that "The film was quite beautiful, but I had a hard time with the characterization of Mrs. Vermeer. She was portrayed as a very unpleasant individual. And there's nothing at all remotely to suggest that in what we know about her. She was a model for a lot of his work. I don't think the picture is fair to her memory."^{James Auer, "Vermeer's work becomes part of viewer's soul," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 21, 2004, no longer available online.}

Writer and London Times columnist Simon Jenkins has also taken a stand in Catharina's defense in an article, entitled "Vermeer was No Sex-Mad Garret Artist. The Scribblers have got the Wrong Girl,"^{Simon Jenkins, "Vermeer was no sex-mad garret artist. The scribblers have got the wrong girl," The Guardian, October 3, 2008, accessed October 19, 2023.} which is strongly critical of David Joss Buckley's stage play based on Chevalier's novel. J enkins believes that the novel's story is "wholly at odds with all that scholars have gleaned of Vermeer's home life…" and that "there is not a shred of evidence that Johannes and Catharina were unhappily married.

He writes:

Vermeer's marriage to Catharina in 1653 was manifestly one of love, a Protestant to a Catholic and against both families' wishes. He had to leave his neighborhood and was erased from the civic records, moving into the house of his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, in what was known as Delft's "Papists' Corner." There he ran an art dealership and acted as family rentier.

There is every sign that the family was happy. Catharina was to be pregnant throughout their 22-year marriage, with 11 of their 15 children surviving. Vermeer named them after his mother-in-law, Maria, and her favourite saints (including Ignatius and Franciscus). She made him her heir in preference to her own son. When he died bankrupt at the age of 43, Maria referred to him as "the sainted Vermeer." Catharina pleaded with the executors to let her keep three of her favourite paintings, one almost certainly of her and the others, I believe, of their girls. None of this suggests a frigid, jilted canvas-slasher.

Archival research has uncovered enough about Vermeer's household to indicate a close-knit home, full of children and music.

Jenkins is "unnerved by fiction's relentless abuse of history, as if 'real' invention is no longer up to the job of packing a literary punch," and that there "must be a difference between intelligent deduction and pure make-believe."

In a previous article^{Simon Jenkins, "Johannes Vermeer, you've been framed," The Times, October 28, 2003, 12:00 a.m.,} which appeared in The Times ("Johannes Vermeer, you've been framed"), Jenkins had already expressed deep dissatisfaction with both the portrayal of Vermeer and his wife and the idea that Griet, the author's fictitious young maid, had posed for Vermeer's masterwork Girl with a Pearl Earring. Moreover, he lamented that the negative images of Catharina and Johannes Vermeer "are doomed to be forever fixed in the public imagination as the 'true' Vermeer."

In effect, even though there is no historical evidence that speaks directly of the nature of Vermeer's relationship with his wife, surviving archival documents seem to suggest that Johannes and Catharina had been a reasonably good, if not well-matched couple. They had many children, a rare occurrence in seventeenth-century Netherlands where most couples had only two or three children and birth control was actively practiced. While the burden of so many children may have certainly made itself felt, their choice to have an unusually large family must have been taken mutually since other couples who desired so evidently managed to keep their families within limits. Simon Schama^{Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Vintage, 1987).} has shown family planning was practiced by the seventeenth-century Dutch, Catholics included.

When questioning himself on the singularity of Vermeer's marriage to Catharina, John Michael Montias, in his seminal study of Vermeer's extended family Vermeer and His Milieu, suggests that it was love which attracted the two and goes on to note that "'romantic love' was not unknown in mid-seventeenth-century Holland. Indeed, it was thought to be a source of artistic aspiration."

Although no one can definitively say who Catharina Bolnes was or if she was happily married to the great painter, perhaps she merits at least the benefit of doubt. If the general public were to come to believe that she was an antagonist to her husband and his work without a shred of historical foundation of either fact, a deep injustice will have been dealt to both of their memories. In a sense, Catharina would be condemned to death not once like her husband, but twice.

Conclusion

Catharina's presence in Vermeer's compositions hinges largely on the presumed but unproven pregnancy of some of the artist's sitters and the subjective interpretation of their expressions. Even under the best circumstances, the task of identifying anonymous sitters in an artist's work is complicated by the cultural gap of 300 years that separates us from them

For more information on the ramifications of Vermeer's marriage to his Catholic wife, Catharina Bolnes, see Gregor Weber's Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection (2023),^{Gregor J.M. Weber, Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection (Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2023).} or click here.