Lowlands Baroque
Baroque Overview
Northern Renaissance

Flemish and Netherlands Baroque Art Jan Vermeer The Early Paintings

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Vermeer before he settled into a style of painting must have been trained and recommened for entry by someone who was also a member of the St.Luke's Guild, the painter's union of the time. In Vermeer's time, fine art painting was considered a trade like, pot making, or construction. There were mainly three types of pictures produced: Artists mostly worked for a client who was willing to pay for a portrait of himself, or a member of his family. Or the buyer might be more important: the government, a church, or a guild; these institutions commissioned public art to hang and be seen by the public. The churches in seventeenth century Holland tended not to be big players in the art commissioning field; because after the reformation little art decorated churches, the Dutch Protestants were by-in-large iconoclasts. So the majority of religious art was made to decorate a Dutch home as a moral lesson. The third class of paintings are landscapes, genre pictures, or moral lessons (drawn from mythology or scripture) to be used as decorative art in a person's home.

Vermeer tried all three kinds of painting in his life time:

Most of Vermeer's mature art are genre pictures. His earlier academic work is mostly religious or mythological. There is only one other landscape. As far as anyone knows Vermeer was never commissioned to do a portrait. As far as anyone knows he never sold any of his own pictures. Although as a art dealer he bought and sold pictures and thus must have been in touch with the popular taste. Although he never mimicked this taste in his own pictures.

There are very few early Vermeer pictures known. He "graduated" from his apprenticeship and was accepted into the St. Luke's Guild in 1653. To do this he must have submitted art to be judged. There are four pictures from 1655/56 period, about three years later, and then suddenly a new "photographic" style emerges in 1657. During his early years and his apprenticeship not one of his pictures seems to have survived. Perhaps they didn't survive, but also it may be that they have just not recognized as Vermeer, because his distinctive style was not yet to emerge.

In Germany in the late 1930's some new early Vermeer's came on the Dutch art market. These were denounced by some experts and accepted as real by others.

Some were sold to Dutch Museums and one to Marshall Hermann Göring, in the Nazi leadership. After the war, Christ and the Adulteress was found in Göring's collection. It was traced back to a Dutch art dealer Hans van Meegeren. He was imprisoned and accused of selling Dutch art treasures to the Nazis. He claimed he only defrauded the Nazis by creating fakes. He claimed all of the above pictures as fakes, and indeed more fake Vermeers were found in his studio. He was then charged with art forgery. In his own defense he offered to create a Vermeer under controlled circumstances.

In 1947 he was eventually convicted of art forgery and sentenced to a year in prison. However he died before he could serve any time.

It is often said that his paintings were obvious frauds, but they were cleverly constructed and aged. He achieved brilliant colors using modern methods and found ways of faking the tests for age. For example he used authentic seventeen century canvas scraped off the original painting and then painted his fake over the original ground. The original cracks were later exposed after the painting was dried and soot inserted into the original cracks to simulate age. The lapses in style could excused by the fact that this was supposed to be a time when Vermeer's was still developing his own style.

In describing this episode in art forgery Thomas Hoving (in his book: False Impressions) talks about how inept a painter van Meegeren was and leaves the impression that no one should have been fooled. It really not that simple. The Hoving book is fun to read, despite the egotism of the author and the self-serving confidence of the text -- especially in the von Meegeren case. Hoving doesn't give von Meegeren the credit he is due, but he does give a detailed account of the whole affair.

Even though some critics called Meegeren's Vermeer paintings a fake both before and after the war, if he had not been caught and admitted the fraud, these pictures would probably not have been exposed for many years .... and then only after van Meegeren's death. Eventually scientific testing would have been done on the pictures and modern ingredients in the paint would have been exposed, but unless all the clues were followed by historians, we probably would not know who faked the picture. Had fortune played the usual historical tricks, the evidence would have been destroyed and we would never know the creator of the fakes.

Will authentic early Vermeer pictures be found? One can hope so, but after the van Meegeren episode, convincing anyone that they are real will be difficult.

Lowlands Baroque
Baroque Overview
Northern Renaissance