“A legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.”– Peter S. Beagle
A painter without an origin story is but a sphinx without a riddle. In the realm of myth, the sphinx’s riddle is the source of her power, the vehicle she uses to send tongue tied travelers to their deaths. If she loses or lacks a riddle, her ferocity is reduced to the level of a declawed housecat mewling for more milk. Therefore, to call someone a riddle-less sphinx is to point at their hollowness without fear. To call out their toothlessness with a full throated and pearly white grin.
“You cannot kill me in any way that matters.”
“You cannot make art in any way that matters.”
Johannes Vermeer, that famous painter of Dutch interiors and Dutch interior life, is one of the most elusive sphinxes of the art world. So much so that he is often known as “the Sphinx of Delft” due to the mysteries shrouding his life and practice. There are no notebooks, no journals, no sketches, no resumes or work histories, no early or in-progress works, and few contemporaneous accounts. His story is but conjectures wrapped in myths wrapped in legends, as all that’s survived are 36 paintings and the scantest of biographical details.
The sphinx sits and paints
Tall as the crooked church leans
Against delft blue skies
Which makes it difficult to infer concrete biographical meaning in his work. Who and why and how Vermeer painted; all this information has been lost to the sands of time. In fact, for two centuries his work also languished in obscurity– attributed to other, more famous artists – only to be plucked from anonymity by Théophile Thoré-Bürger’s scholarly excavations. So without a biographical lens onto Vermeer’s work, how can we answer their riddles and come to understand his origin stories? Through his historical context.
The cut and cloth of a dress, the architecture and decor of a room; we can still interpret Vermeer and his work through the trappings of his era – specifically that of the merchant class during the Dutch Golden Age. And for me, one historical/cultural detail especially catches my eye– the presence of pearls in Vermeer’s work. Of his 36 paintings,18 feature pearls. They adorn ears and necklines and updos. They pour out of boxes and lay scattered on tables. Preposterously large and threaded in great quantity, they speak to an opulence emblematic of Vermeer’s specific era.
Rare and exotic, pearls were brought from Asia via the same trading routes and colonial holdings as the infamous Dutch spice trade. This evolution in capitalism and economics – aided by Dutch independence in 1648 – helped propel the merchant class to prominence in Dutch society. The very same class that Vermeer (nominally) and his collectors belonged to. And capitalism, ever abhorring a vacuum, would require new and expensive class markers to match this new era. Hence pearls became somewhat synonymous with this moment in Dutch empire, going “viral” among an upper class hungry for luxury goods.
Vermeer, by using pearls so consistently in his work, is positioning his figures in this same time period and economic space. For adorning his figures in gold and gemstones would have been too aristocratic and old fashioned. Just a few years out from the 80 Years War, this would have stuck out like a Hapsburg chin in the new Dutch society. And on the flipside, leaving his figures unadorned would have rendered them indistinguishable from the maids who served them. Too earthy and humble to enjoy the class-based leisure that his figures often exude.
So Vermeer's pearls function quite effectively as symbols of a certain class of wealth during the Dutch Golden Age. Was this about capitalizing on the class vanitas of his audience to sell work? About making social commentary in a rapidly changing country? About telling his or his family's biographical stories? The sphinx's lips remain sealed.