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Sunrise near Delft in Holland, | 0:00:16 | 0:00:18 | |
homeland of Johannes Vermeer. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
He's one of the great painters of light, | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
but until recently, he himself has been obscured, | 0:00:25 | 0:00:29 | |
lost in the darkness of the past. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
I've come here to try to tell his story, | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
to shed light on a life that's remained secret | 0:00:39 | 0:00:42 | |
for more than 300 years. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:44 | |
'It's a tale of love and death, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:49 | |
'about a man who dreamed of a perfect world | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
'but who ended up drowning. | 0:00:52 | 0:00:54 | |
'It's a story about a real flood - the flood of 1672. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
'"The year of disaster" to the Dutch, when the dykes were broken | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
'and the country was inundated. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
'But it's also a story about rising tides of debt, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
'about the market forces that can swamp and destroy a life.' | 0:01:13 | 0:01:18 | |
17th-century Holland was a balancing act - | 0:01:19 | 0:01:23 | |
a nation poised between land and sea, debit and credit. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:27 | |
At the centre of it all, there was the windmill. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:31 | |
Thousands of them covered the landscape, | 0:01:31 | 0:01:34 | |
busily pumping water from one level to another, | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
making Dutch life, and Dutch prosperity, possible. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
But what's this got to do with the secret life of one of Holland's greatest painters? | 0:01:41 | 0:01:47 | |
Well, I think Vermeer's life was a balancing act too, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:51 | |
a constant struggle to keep flood-water at bay, | 0:01:51 | 0:01:55 | |
which, in the end, seems to have gone horribly wrong. | 0:01:55 | 0:02:00 | |
He painted stillness, but died, they say, in a frenzy - | 0:02:02 | 0:02:06 | |
- a fit of madness at the age of just 43. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:10 | |
I wanted to find out why. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
Madness is the last thing associated with Vermeer's work, | 0:02:24 | 0:02:28 | |
but I'm interested in the passions beneath the calm waters of his art. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:33 | |
'So I went to Delft, the city he lived and worked in all his life, | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
'in the hope of building a psychological profile of the artist. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
'In recent years, a mass of new evidence | 0:02:45 | 0:02:48 | |
'has been unearthed about his family - | 0:02:48 | 0:02:51 | |
'stories of manslaughter, | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
'counterfeiting, lottery fraud and domestic violence. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
'These discoveries haven't made the headlines, | 0:03:00 | 0:03:04 | |
'but they may be the key to a quite new way of looking at Vermeer | 0:03:04 | 0:03:09 | |
'and making sense of some of the greatest paintings ever created. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:14 | |
'To begin to understand him, we need to understand his city. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
'Vermeer's Delft was a sink-or-swim world, a merchant town | 0:03:23 | 0:03:28 | |
'where fortunes could be made or lost. Canals were arteries. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:32 | |
'Water was power, hence the in-your-face splendour of the water board. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:38 | |
'Vermeer lived in the so-called Golden Age. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
'Trade in the East Indies brought vast wealth, | 0:03:43 | 0:03:47 | |
'and with it an expanding market for art. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:50 | |
'But Delft was also scarred by conflict. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
'It had been at the centre of the war with Catholic Spain, | 0:03:56 | 0:04:00 | |
'and after bitter strife, | 0:04:00 | 0:04:02 | |
'the Protestants were in the ascendant.' | 0:04:02 | 0:04:05 | |
Then, in 1652, | 0:04:10 | 0:04:12 | |
when Vermeer turned 20, it was a city in trauma. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
A freak explosion in the gunpowder stores | 0:04:16 | 0:04:20 | |
destroyed the town centre and killed hundreds of its citizens. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
Yet there's not a hint of disturbance in Vermeer's Delft interiors. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:31 | |
Scenes of women playing music, | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
thinking, dreaming. And what could be more peaceful | 0:04:34 | 0:04:38 | |
than his panorama of the city? | 0:04:38 | 0:04:41 | |
The novelist Proust thought Vermeer's View Of Delft the greatest painting there is. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:51 | |
One of his characters breathes his last | 0:04:51 | 0:04:54 | |
thinking of a patch of yellow paint glowing in the sun. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
It's SO becalmed, and for me, that's its mystery, | 0:04:58 | 0:05:03 | |
The mystery of Vermeer himself. He took a turbulent reality | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
and made it look like heaven on earth. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
Was there a pattern to his perfectionism? | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
One which could also explain | 0:05:20 | 0:05:22 | |
his eventual breakdown and madness? | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
'I was hoping to find some answers inside the city walls, | 0:05:26 | 0:05:30 | |
'and in a cunning attempt to blend in with the locals, | 0:05:30 | 0:05:34 | |
'I'd rented an exceptionally orange bicycle. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:37 | |
'Vermeer grew up in the centre of town, | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
'on the great market square where the rich lived, | 0:05:42 | 0:05:46 | |
'although he and his family were not very well off. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:50 | |
'His father, Reynier, who in his youth | 0:05:50 | 0:05:52 | |
'committed manslaughter in a canalside brawl, owned an inn on the square | 0:05:52 | 0:05:57 | |
'and ran an art-dealing business on the side. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:01 | |
'Vermeer grew up among paintings | 0:06:01 | 0:06:03 | |
'and pints of beer. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
'None of the buildings where he actually lived survives, | 0:06:09 | 0:06:13 | |
'and it's not always easy to follow in his footsteps.' | 0:06:13 | 0:06:17 | |
The plaque says that Vermeer was born in this house, in October 1632. | 0:06:18 | 0:06:23 | |
But it's wrong... He wasn't. X does not mark the spot. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
'The house was around the corner, where today we have the Jan Vermeer | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
'Nursery School. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
'He's elusive, too. We don't really know what he looked like.' | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
It's thought he included a self-portrait | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
as the figure on the left in this painting, | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
the first he ever dated, from 1656. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:49 | |
It's called The Procuress, | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
and seems to attempt to depict the world of tavern and brothel, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:56 | |
the world he'd grown up in. But it's a subject he never returns to. | 0:06:56 | 0:07:01 | |
The character on the left, itself a quotation from another painting, | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
may be Vermeer's own face in the shadows. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
He looks out at us...and leers. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:14 | |
'For hard evidence, I went to the Delft Archives, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:30 | |
'where many of the pieces of the Vermeer puzzle are to be found. | 0:07:30 | 0:07:35 | |
'Although they're only isolated forensic traces, | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
'we can start to build a mental picture | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
'both of the artist and of the nature of his tragedy.' | 0:07:41 | 0:07:45 | |
Right. Vermeer's life. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:47 | |
When we talk about the documents that make up a 17th-century life, | 0:07:47 | 0:07:52 | |
what kind of documents are we looking at? | 0:07:52 | 0:07:55 | |
We're looking at registers of baptism, of matrimony, of burial. | 0:07:56 | 0:08:02 | |
We're looking at testaments, erm... business documents, transactions, | 0:08:02 | 0:08:08 | |
-that sort of things. -But quite impersonal. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
-We're not talking about personal letters, personal accounts. -None whatsoever. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:16 | |
So we need to do a bit of reading in between the lines. | 0:08:16 | 0:08:20 | |
Show me some of the things you have here. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:23 | |
To start with, here is the register of baptism in the New Church. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:28 | |
'It's interesting that Vermeer was christened Johannes, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:32 | |
'rather than plain old Jan - a posh, Latinate name | 0:08:32 | 0:08:36 | |
'with social aspiration written all over it. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:39 | |
'His parents clearly had plans for him - | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
'ambitions he'd live up to, | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
'until his sudden descent into poverty and madness. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:48 | |
'There's evidence for that in the register of his death | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
'from the Delft Charity Chamber, the local social services. When a man died, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:57 | |
'they'd send for his finest piece of clothing | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
'to be sold to raise money for the poor. The best outer garment tax, | 0:09:00 | 0:09:05 | |
it was called. But when Vermeer died...' | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
So this means "Nothing to get"? Then he writes "Nothing" again. | 0:09:08 | 0:09:12 | |
-Nothing to get. Nothing. -Double nothing. Big fat zero. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
Poor Vermeer. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:18 | |
'But not the first poor Vermeer. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
'The archives' latest revelation is that fear of financial ruin | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
'had haunted the previous generation of his family. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
'Meet the ancestors. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:32 | |
'His paternal grandmother, | 0:09:42 | 0:09:44 | |
'Neeltge Goris, or Little Nell, had a job clearing houses of jumble | 0:09:44 | 0:09:49 | |
'and selling it off for a song. She was an uitdrager - | 0:09:49 | 0:09:54 | |
'someone who drags things out. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:56 | |
'Unofficially she was a small-time con artist | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
'who ran semi-legal lotteries and raffles | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
'and was often in trouble with the law. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:06 | |
'Vermeer's maternal grandfather, Balthasar, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
'claimed to be an engineer and clockmaker, | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
'but when the police arrested him in April 1619, | 0:10:15 | 0:10:18 | |
'he was running a counterfeit coin operation with his son. | 0:10:18 | 0:10:23 | |
'Counterfeiting was serious stuff - | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
'a crime against the state. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
'Was there no end, I wondered, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:33 | |
'to the lengths Vermeer's family would go to | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
'to keep their heads above water? | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
'I went to see an expert on coin forgery, Cor de Graaf, | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
'who said he had something to show me to prove not everything was as it seemed.' | 0:10:43 | 0:10:49 | |
What do you know | 0:10:50 | 0:10:51 | |
about Vermeer's rather dodgy grandfather, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
-Balthasar Gerrits? -HE CORRECTS THE DUTCH G -Gerrits. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
Well, Balthasar Gerrits was a kind of strange person. | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
He tried to make a lot of money by all kinds of means. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
He was a broker for a while. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:08 | |
He tried to sell shares... of the East India Company. | 0:11:08 | 0:11:13 | |
He tried to buy and sell houses. | 0:11:14 | 0:11:16 | |
And he also made false coins. So coin forgery, yes. | 0:11:16 | 0:11:19 | |
-He literally made some money. -Literally, yes. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:23 | |
-I assume we know about it because he got caught. -Yes, indeed he was caught. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:28 | |
But... Yeah, that's also the strange thing. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
He managed to survive, which is very unusual for coin forgers. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:36 | |
'Like most counterfeiters, two co-conspirators were tortured and beheaded. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:43 | |
'But not Balthasar. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:46 | |
'Cor had records of meetings | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
'which showed that in his case, it was hushed up at the highest level of government. | 0:11:48 | 0:11:54 | |
'Balthasar was allowed to go free.' | 0:11:54 | 0:11:56 | |
-When Balthasar came back to Delft... -Yeah. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
..when it was all swept under the carpet, do you think people here | 0:12:01 | 0:12:06 | |
-would have known? -Oh, yeah... Definitely. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:10 | |
The people in a city like this, yeah, they would have known. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:14 | |
'Whatever the word on the street was, the whole family was involved. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:20 | |
'Vermeer's uncle was imprisoned as a co-conspirator, | 0:12:20 | 0:12:24 | |
'and both sides of the family, including Neeltge the uitdrager, rallied round to have him bailed. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:31 | |
'Whether we consider Balthasar an informer, | 0:12:31 | 0:12:34 | |
'a common criminal or even a secret agent, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:37 | |
'this would have been a grim moment in the family history. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:41 | |
'Prison and torture is the dark side of the 17thC Dutch free market, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:50 | |
'the other side of the coin. And it's sure as hell a far cry | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
'from Vermeer's serene interiors.' | 0:12:54 | 0:12:56 | |
I wondered if I could make sense of Vermeer | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
as a man desperate to escape from the prison of his own dubious past. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
Art was to be his way out and up. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
He became a respectable counterfeiter. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:12 | |
A forger, not of false coins, but of reality. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
There may have been darkness in his family background | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
but he painted light. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:25 | |
More often than not, the light is falling upon a young woman. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:31 | |
CHURCH BELLS PEAL | 0:13:36 | 0:13:38 | |
In 1653, | 0:13:40 | 0:13:42 | |
at the age of 21, he proposed to Catharina Bolnes, a Catholic girl | 0:13:42 | 0:13:47 | |
from a wealthy family several rungs higher up the social ladder. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:51 | |
It was the most important decision of his life. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:56 | |
We know Vermeer was baptised in the New Church on October 31, 1632. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:03 | |
And we know that in the Town Hall, | 0:14:03 | 0:14:06 | |
he declared his intention to marry Catharina Bolnes on April 5th, 1653. | 0:14:06 | 0:14:12 | |
But for those intervening 21 years, | 0:14:12 | 0:14:15 | |
more or less everything about his life is a mystery. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:19 | |
Archivally speaking, a void - not a single document. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
We don't know where he went to school or who taught him to paint, | 0:14:23 | 0:14:27 | |
but the biggest mystery is how come this Protestant man, | 0:14:27 | 0:14:31 | |
this son of a publican, with a grandfather with a criminal past | 0:14:31 | 0:14:36 | |
managed to seduce, and even to marry | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
a woman from a highborn Catholic family. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:42 | |
CHURCH ORGAN PLAYS | 0:14:43 | 0:14:45 | |
'To be a Catholic was to live part of your life in secret. It meant worship in hidden churches, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:54 | |
'town houses which were not allowed to advertise their purpose to the outside world. | 0:14:54 | 0:15:00 | |
'The Amstelkring Museum in Amsterdam is a rare surviving hidden church. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:05 | |
'The truth is we don't know how Vermeer and Catharina Bolnes met, let alone where. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:16 | |
'Perhaps through a Catholic artist who was Vermeer's master. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
'But it must have been a love match, | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
'as we know Catharina's devoutly Catholic mother | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
'initially opposed the marriage. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
'We don't know what happened, | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
'but it's likely that in the end she struck a bargain - | 0:15:31 | 0:15:35 | |
'convert, and Catharina can be yours. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:38 | |
'And she was. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
'After the secular ceremony in the Town Hall, | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
'the couple got married in the village of Schipluiden outside Delft, | 0:15:46 | 0:15:51 | |
'an enclave of Catholics practising the old faith away from the eyes of authority | 0:15:51 | 0:15:57 | |
'in what was probably a converted barn. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:00 | |
'So Vermeer had a new wife, and a new religion.' | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
Among his earliest surviving works is Diana And Her Companions, | 0:16:07 | 0:16:12 | |
Vermeer's only mythological scene. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
But a very quiet, contained moment | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
in a story which often ends in violence | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
against an intrusive male presence. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
It has clear religious overtones - the foot-washing, the bowl, | 0:16:24 | 0:16:28 | |
even the napkin, which suggests the shape of a dove - | 0:16:28 | 0:16:32 | |
have strong Catholic and sacramental associations. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:36 | |
It's a picture by a man who loved women, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
who loved to look at women and to paint them. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:43 | |
There's a familiar Vermeer feel here, | 0:16:43 | 0:16:46 | |
of a moment of beauty which also has a certain fragility: | 0:16:46 | 0:16:50 | |
peace about to be disturbed. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:52 | |
In the winter of the same year as his marriage, | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
Vermeer registered as a master of the Guild of St Luke in Delft. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:11 | |
He was going up in the world. | 0:17:11 | 0:17:13 | |
For most of the rest of his career, Vermeer would paint calm interiors, | 0:17:16 | 0:17:21 | |
an idealised everyday life of a leisured class. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
But what was his own household like? | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
'I think his marriage, his domestic life, | 0:17:28 | 0:17:31 | |
'was every bit as much a creation as his paintings. | 0:17:31 | 0:17:35 | |
'As far as we can tell, | 0:17:35 | 0:17:37 | |
'he and his wife's family moved to the Papen hoek - Papist's corner - | 0:17:37 | 0:17:41 | |
'and he seems to have left his own close-knit family behind.' | 0:17:41 | 0:17:45 | |
We know that by about 1660 | 0:17:49 | 0:17:51 | |
Vermeer was living in a house here on the Oude Langendyk. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
We know because he had to bury one of his children, | 0:17:55 | 0:17:59 | |
and give his address in the register. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:02 | |
It wasn't a house a poor young artist | 0:18:02 | 0:18:04 | |
starting out his career could have afforded. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
It was his mother-in-law's house, | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
and Vermeer, Catharina, and their increasingly large family | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
lived, for his entire working life, | 0:18:15 | 0:18:17 | |
in Maria Thins', the mother-in-law's, house. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:21 | |
It's an unusual setup, and if we want to build up a psychological profile of Vermeer | 0:18:21 | 0:18:27 | |
it's important to understand the nature of his household. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:31 | |
'Here's what it wasn't. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:34 | |
'This portrait of the patrician van der Dussen family | 0:18:34 | 0:18:38 | |
'shows a wealthy Catholic household. Everything speaks of opulence. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:43 | |
'- note the paintings on the wall - and harmony, | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
'hence the music-making. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
'But the home which Vermeer shared | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
'with Catharina and her mother, Maria Thins, didn't fit | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
'a 17thC cornflake-box ideal. Apart from its potential | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
'for mother-in-law jokes, it had its own skeletons in the closet. | 0:18:59 | 0:19:05 | |
'Unlike this little girl, Vermeer's wife Catharina | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
'had grown up in a house in which she was regularly woken | 0:19:08 | 0:19:12 | |
'not by music, but by her parents fighting. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
'A world in which she sometimes feared for her life. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:20 | |
'She'd been raised in the nearby town of Gouda. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
'Its archives hold an extraordinary paper trail of angry witness statements | 0:19:26 | 0:19:31 | |
'from relatives, charting the disintegration of Maria Thins' marriage | 0:19:31 | 0:19:36 | |
'to the violent and abusive Reynier Bolnes, | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
'a wealthy brickmaker whose business was on the slide.' | 0:19:40 | 0:19:44 | |
What I'm looking for is the deposition which concerns | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
Vermeer's mother-in-law | 0:19:50 | 0:19:52 | |
being beaten up and insulted | 0:19:53 | 0:19:55 | |
-by her husband, Reynier Bolnes. -Mm-hm. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:59 | |
I think it's that. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:01 | |
Yes, it is. Yes. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:03 | |
He doesn't have very good handwriting. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:07 | |
No. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:09 | |
Even I can see that. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:11 | |
-Lots of crossings out. -Yes. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:13 | |
-Is that because he's writing down what people say as they say it? -Yes. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:18 | |
When they make mistakes, he has to, er... | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
-It's a fantastically vivid piece of history. -Yes. | 0:20:21 | 0:20:24 | |
What do they say Reynier Bolnes did to Maria Thins? | 0:20:24 | 0:20:28 | |
'According to the witnesses, | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
'Bolnes used to beat her black and blue until she ran out screaming into the street. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:37 | |
'He turned her only son against her, | 0:20:37 | 0:20:40 | |
'and whenever Maria annoyed him he had a nasty habit of taking it out on Catharina. | 0:20:40 | 0:20:45 | |
'Nobody knows the secrets of a household, | 0:20:48 | 0:20:51 | |
'but it's a pretty damning dossier of domestic abuse. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
'I wonder what Vermeer made of these tales of Catharina's childhood? | 0:20:56 | 0:21:01 | |
'Rich Catholics who turn out to be | 0:21:01 | 0:21:04 | |
'dysfunctional neighbours from hell. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
'After the separation, Maria Thins moved to Delft with Catharina, | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
'and Reynier kept custody of their son, Willem. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:16 | |
'His parting shot was to pull down his breeches | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
'and bare his arse to his mother in the street. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
'She shared one thing with Vermeer in the house on the Oude Langendyk - | 0:21:22 | 0:21:27 | |
'a past she'd rather forget. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
'It's only relatively recently that anyone | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
'has wanted to guess Vermeer's mental landscape, | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
'but now the process seems unstoppable. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
'I'd come to a film set in Luxembourg to meet Tracy Chevalier, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:57 | |
'whose novel about the Vermeer household, Girl With A Pearl Earring, | 0:21:57 | 0:22:02 | |
'has sold more than two million copies. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
'Yet 100 years ago, | 0:22:06 | 0:22:07 | |
'the painting that inspired her wasn't even recognised as a Vermeer. | 0:22:07 | 0:22:12 | |
'The Girl With The Pearl was bought at auction for 2 guilders 40 cents. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:18 | |
'Nowadays she's priceless, known as "the Mona Lisa of the North", and starring in her own movie.' | 0:22:18 | 0:22:25 | |
It's such a seemingly simple painting, | 0:22:30 | 0:22:33 | |
but I found that, actually underneath it all, | 0:22:33 | 0:22:37 | |
it's very hard to tell the narrative of it. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:40 | |
I think what attracts me about Vermeer's paintings is that he takes away the narrative. | 0:22:40 | 0:22:46 | |
Typical Dutch paintings of that time tell you what to think. He doesn't. | 0:22:46 | 0:22:52 | |
He removes the symbols so you're just left with a girl's face | 0:22:52 | 0:22:56 | |
and you make of it what you will. | 0:22:56 | 0:22:58 | |
When you look at a Vermeer, you slow down and get quiet. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:03 | |
And it's like a little gift you get from the painting. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
You can't appreciate a Vermeer quickly. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
You look at it and it's like, "Whoa!" And you stop. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
And you feel like you're becoming the calm person in the painting. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:18 | |
I always thought of him as a quiet man. The calm appeals to him. There is an intensity | 0:23:19 | 0:23:25 | |
that he can focus on that corner, and put everything into it. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:30 | |
He's not painting a huge market scene, a huge world - | 0:23:30 | 0:23:34 | |
he finds the world in a corner instead. | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
Your master's a fine painter, Griet. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
The finest in Delft. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:42 | |
'In Chevalier's book, the girl with the pearl is Vermeer's servant, | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
'who becomes an object of desire for a character who is also Vermeer's patron.' | 0:23:47 | 0:23:53 | |
He's painted me. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:55 | |
Perhaps that will be my epitaph. | 0:23:55 | 0:23:58 | |
'His existence in real life | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
'was unknown till recently. His discovery helps explain | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
'one of the great mysteries about Vermeer - why he produced so few paintings. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:09 | |
'The detective here was a man who doggedly combed the Delft archives for over 20 years. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:16 | |
'Yale professor John Michael Montias.' | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
I suddenly realised that various documents relating to a man | 0:24:22 | 0:24:27 | |
named Pieter Claesz van Ruijven | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
actually had to do with a patron of Vermeer, | 0:24:30 | 0:24:34 | |
which nobody had realised before. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:37 | |
I sort of put two and two together and it hit me - | 0:24:37 | 0:24:40 | |
this must have been Vermeer's patron. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:44 | |
Look at that dress! You can almost stroke the satin. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:49 | |
Well, we think that he may have painted | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
maybe 45 to 55 pictures. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
And we think that... | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
he may have sold to his patron | 0:24:57 | 0:25:03 | |
close to half of his output. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:07 | |
Can you imagine yourself in such finery, Griet? | 0:25:07 | 0:25:11 | |
She loved it, you know. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:14 | |
Men...looking at her. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:17 | |
Cut and check that, please. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:24 | |
'Knowing Vermeer had a patron makes a lot of sense, and helps explain why he seems so modern to us. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:34 | |
'A patron who'd accept whatever he painted | 0:25:34 | 0:25:38 | |
'gave him freedom to be himself, explore his own vision, | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
'rather than play to the market. | 0:25:42 | 0:25:44 | |
'In New York they have one of the earliest paintings for van Ruijven, | 0:25:44 | 0:25:49 | |
'where we can see the master manipulator of light and space | 0:25:49 | 0:25:53 | |
'coming into his own.' | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
It's an absolutely wonderful little picture. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:00 | |
It draws you towards it. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:01 | |
The girl's face, that beautiful face, flooded with light. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:06 | |
It's like a beacon. You have to stand here. | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
You realise Vermeer has choreographed you. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
He's made you an eavesdropper, a voyeur on a 17thC scene. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:16 | |
But what is it that you're actually looking at? | 0:26:16 | 0:26:20 | |
'There's a tremblingly immediate quality to the light, | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
how it strikes the young woman's face, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
'giving an electric sense of the contact between a man and a woman, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:32 | |
'erotic, but also, I think, full of tenderness. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
'As so often in Vermeer, interpretations vary wildly. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
'The man's a soldier, and some say the girl's a prostitute, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:44 | |
'the map behind her signifying her worldly, and therefore corrupt, nature. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:49 | |
'I don't buy that. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:51 | |
'I think it's a picture about the look of love, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:54 | |
'the instant two people fall for each other. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
'Maybe Vermeer drew on his own memories | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
'of falling in love with his beloved Catharina, | 0:27:00 | 0:27:03 | |
'the light striking her like this? I think painting was his way | 0:27:03 | 0:27:08 | |
'of preserving those rare moments in life | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
'that have real value, real meaning. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
'Nowadays Vermeer's work's in cities all over the world, | 0:27:16 | 0:27:21 | |
'but in his lifetime | 0:27:21 | 0:27:22 | |
'he was a stay-at-home. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:24 | |
'Unlike commercial, self-proclaiming genius | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
'Rembrandt, | 0:27:27 | 0:27:29 | |
'Vermeer was loyal | 0:27:29 | 0:27:31 | |
'to his patrons and his city.' | 0:27:31 | 0:27:33 | |
It's fascinating to see a great Rembrandt next to a great Vermeer. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
Rembrandt thrusts himself at you - this rugged paint-handling, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:45 | |
this presentation of himself, warts and all. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
Vermeer presents this | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
mysterious, mirror-like world, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:54 | |
that leaves you wondering, "Where is he? Where IS Vermeer?" | 0:27:54 | 0:27:58 | |
You've got a sense he's in there somewhere, | 0:27:58 | 0:28:01 | |
that somehow his compulsion has shaped the nature of this | 0:28:01 | 0:28:06 | |
strange, psychological mystery of a picture. What IS going on? | 0:28:06 | 0:28:10 | |
The mistress looks at a letter the maid holds, | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
which catches the light. You sense that | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
it will change this woman's life, she's at a crossroads. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:21 | |
But you don't know how the story ends - Vermeer leaves us guessing. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:26 | |
He ALWAYS leaves us guessing. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:28 | |
Some people say it's nothing to do with compulsion, | 0:28:31 | 0:28:35 | |
it's all down to technique - | 0:28:35 | 0:28:37 | |
that the mysterious quality of Vermeer's art | 0:28:37 | 0:28:41 | |
is thanks to his use of lenses. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:43 | |
And you do meet the most unlikely people in the strange world of Vermeer-vision. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:48 | |
You'll know better than to take our word for anything by now. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:53 | |
This is an exact reconstruction of The Music Lesson, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
and the room which Vermeer used as his studio. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:00 | |
'It's the first time this room has been reconstructed, and...' | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
-HE FAST-FORWARDS -'What do Vermeer's working methods tell us about his mind? | 0:29:04 | 0:29:10 | |
'I watched footage from BBC archives. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:13 | |
'Going to great lengths to prove Vermeer used lenses is Dr Phillip Steadman.' | 0:29:13 | 0:29:18 | |
'That's right, and it's not just me who thinks that.' | 0:29:18 | 0:29:22 | |
Most writers on Vermeer think he used an instrument like this - a camera obscura. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:28 | |
-'This is one...' -HE FAST-FORWARDS | 0:29:28 | 0:29:31 | |
'There's no real evidence to back up these theories, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:35 | |
'but I do like the idea that Vermeer might have seen | 0:29:35 | 0:29:39 | |
'a world transfigured from the confines of a darkened box.' | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
'Will Vermeer be there working? | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
'We'll see where he's working. This cubicle | 0:29:45 | 0:29:49 | |
'is his camera obscura.' | 0:29:49 | 0:29:51 | |
'And it is a working method suited to a man with an obsession.' | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
'We can see what Vermeer would actually have seen. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
'He might have worked in stages.' | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
'Whether or not Vermeer actually had a walk-in cupboard in his studio, | 0:30:01 | 0:30:06 | |
'it fits our profile that he should have been attracted by the camera's sealed-off world. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:13 | |
'I think he fell in love with its silent images formed | 0:30:13 | 0:30:17 | |
'from rays of light, and tried to give his paintings the same quality.' | 0:30:17 | 0:30:23 | |
That's why there's almost no trace of drawing in Vermeer, | 0:30:29 | 0:30:34 | |
as he showed us in his own depiction of The Artist's Studio. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:38 | |
No painter before him had eliminated line to this extent, | 0:30:40 | 0:30:45 | |
expressing everything in terms of fluctuating light impressions. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:50 | |
'It's as if his pictures are actually MADE of light, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
'which is why The Girl With The Pearl still shines so brightly. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
'But technique is only a means to an end. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
'What drives Vermeer is the desire | 0:31:04 | 0:31:07 | |
'to preserve this look of love. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:09 | |
'It's a signal. It says, "Yes, there's a spark between us." | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
'It's that transient moment when eyes meet, and the world seems to stop. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:20 | |
'Vermeer knows that it can't last for ever, | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
'but he can make it seem as if it can. That's his magic, | 0:31:24 | 0:31:28 | |
'whether he's back there in his box or not. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:32 | |
'Lenses helped Vermeer master space, | 0:31:33 | 0:31:35 | |
'but like every great painter he also wanted to conquer time. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:40 | |
'He was too much of a control freak to simply paint what was in front of him.' | 0:31:40 | 0:31:45 | |
We have analysed so many paintings | 0:31:45 | 0:31:47 | |
with x-ray radiography or infrared photography | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
where we can see that he very often starts the building up and eliminates. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:57 | |
He focuses and changes, and ponders, apparently. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
He might spend time on another painting, then come back and change things. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:06 | |
A woman in the foreground with a black skirt is not seen in the x-ray | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
because the black has not been exposed here, | 0:32:11 | 0:32:15 | |
but that black dress has got grey stripes painted over it. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:20 | |
The grey stripes were added when the black paint wrinkled so much that we would say it's cracking. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:26 | |
That would have been more than six months, nearly a year, after, that he painted that in. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:33 | |
He moves around the buildings and towers, that are not necessarily | 0:32:33 | 0:32:38 | |
in this position really. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
It's not a photographic image. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:42 | |
Sometimes you change things so they look real, | 0:32:42 | 0:32:46 | |
because reality is not as good as an artist likes it to be. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:50 | |
You translate. That's the fascinating thing about artists. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:55 | |
They see what we see, but they are able to translate it | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
into a new image that looks real without being it. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:02 | |
Can we look at The Girl With The Pearl? | 0:33:03 | 0:33:06 | |
It's a much smaller canvas, and... | 0:33:08 | 0:33:10 | |
What is this? Is this damage? | 0:33:11 | 0:33:13 | |
That's damage. All the black spots show where the original paint has been lost, unfortunately. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:20 | |
The painting has apparently had a very tough life. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:24 | |
Don't forget, this is almost 400 years old, this girl. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:28 | |
Who wouldn't have damage in the course of time? | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
After our most recent restoration in 1994, | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
I had the pleasure of cleaning the painting, | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
which means removing the very yellow varnish. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:41 | |
Not only yellow, but with an additive of black pigment to it. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:46 | |
Apparently, after the previous treatment in 1952, | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
the general opinion in this museum was that the painting was too bright in colour. | 0:33:51 | 0:33:57 | |
So in order to subdue the brightness of the entire painting, | 0:33:57 | 0:34:02 | |
this yellow, but also pigmented, varnish was smeared | 0:34:02 | 0:34:06 | |
over the whole image. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
We had to remove this, and out came the brilliant colours you see today, | 0:34:08 | 0:34:13 | |
plus a number of details, | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
the small reflections of moisture in the corners of her mouth. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
The surface there is so delicately applied. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:22 | |
You never forget that look. One of the most popular paintings in the Dutch School. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:28 | |
It is a figure looking out at you. | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
You are being drawn in. | 0:34:31 | 0:34:32 | |
By not explaining what is going on, the fascination will be there for ever. The Mona Lisa | 0:34:32 | 0:34:39 | |
of the North, you could say. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:41 | |
I suppose Vermeer understood that if you make a picture that people | 0:34:41 | 0:34:46 | |
-still wonder about, and WE still wonder about... -400 years later. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:51 | |
..then it's a picture people won't pass. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
They were paintings that really worked, in a sense. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:58 | |
He attained the highest level that a history painter could attain. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
They really captured you. They tell a story, but it's a never-ending story. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:09 | |
'Another city, another bike. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
'I was trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:26 | |
'I'd come to Amsterdam to try to find out more about the daily life of the artist. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:34 | |
'Looking for Vermeer as a pastime, bordering on an obsession, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:40 | |
'has been made easier by the Internet. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:42 | |
'I went to see Kees Kaldenbach, | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
'who's working on a virtual Vermeer house | 0:35:45 | 0:35:48 | |
'and has a website dedicated to the artist.' | 0:35:48 | 0:35:51 | |
Kees, I gather you've been painstakingly attempting | 0:35:51 | 0:35:55 | |
to reconstruct the house on the Oude Langendyk where Vermeer spent most of his career. | 0:35:55 | 0:36:01 | |
-Indeed, yes. -Can you just show me what you've done? What have you got here? | 0:36:01 | 0:36:06 | |
What we see here is the website which contains the full inventory. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:13 | |
The inventory made after his death? | 0:36:13 | 0:36:16 | |
Yes. Just a couple of months after he died. By law, an inventory needed to be made. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:22 | |
It shows us both the objects and the room they were in, | 0:36:22 | 0:36:26 | |
the name of the room. When we visit the Great Hall, we notice that we have his iron armour and helmet, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:34 | |
we have a pike, and we have a lead hat. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
A pike? Oh, because he was in the militia? | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
He was part of the militia. This was a fact which was only discovered ten years ago. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:47 | |
So, do you think the world of Vermeer's pictures is grander | 0:36:47 | 0:36:51 | |
than the actual world he inhabited? | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
Absolutely. He lived in a rather large house, | 0:36:54 | 0:36:59 | |
but he had to share it with loads of people. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:02 | |
At least four adults, including himself. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
11 children in the year '75. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:07 | |
The hustle and bustle of birth, pregnancy, midwives, neighbours running in and out - | 0:37:07 | 0:37:14 | |
because matters of birth and death were very much a neighbourhood event. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:21 | |
So the picture I'm getting from you | 0:37:21 | 0:37:23 | |
is very interesting. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:25 | |
It suggests Vermeer could almost be painting an ideal. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:30 | |
That may well be right. But what I respond to, visually, | 0:37:30 | 0:37:37 | |
is not the interior with a certain type of wealth. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:42 | |
It's the luminosity, the light, the...incredible atmosphere. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:48 | |
That's what he made. He didn't make a wealthy interior. | 0:37:48 | 0:37:52 | |
He made something far beyond that, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:55 | |
and I am gripped to the depths of my soul | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
when being face to face by such a painting. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:03 | |
Vermeer's paintings of women at home alone with their thoughts | 0:38:04 | 0:38:09 | |
do have a strong spiritual quality. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:11 | |
In this picture of a pregnant woman holding a balance, | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
the painting on the wall is a Last Judgement, | 0:38:15 | 0:38:19 | |
showing the souls of the damned and the saved. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
It's a moment of solemn contemplation. | 0:38:22 | 0:38:25 | |
She's thinking that the soul of her unborn child, too, lies in the balance. | 0:38:25 | 0:38:31 | |
Here, a woman holds a letter in both hands, as if to steady her trembling heart. | 0:38:33 | 0:38:40 | |
Good news or bad, it's another of Vermeer's moments of suspense, a pregnant pause. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:47 | |
The faded Delft blue of her dress makes her look like | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
a contemporary Madonna in a secular annunciation. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
Vermeer's images of pregnant women are unusual. | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
No other Dutch artist painted the subject. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
They seem so perfectly, poignantly tranquil. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
But what lies behind this obsessively recurring dream of domestic peace and harmony? | 0:39:06 | 0:39:13 | |
I think the answer to that is the key to Vermeer's secret life. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:17 | |
'In 1662, at the age of 30, Vermeer was elected head man of the Guild of St Luke in Delft. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:31 | |
'He was at the height of his profession. There's a record of a visit | 0:39:31 | 0:39:35 | |
'to his studio by a French gentleman diarist the year after. | 0:39:35 | 0:39:40 | |
'The artist said he had no paintings to show, so they went to a baker | 0:39:40 | 0:39:45 | |
'who owned a Vermeer which had cost him 600 guilders. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:49 | |
'The Frenchman thought it overpriced. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:52 | |
'The fact that Vermeer had no stock may be because he worked to commission. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:57 | |
'Or perhaps he wanted him out of the house quickly. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:01 | |
'Because the evidence we have today suggests it wasn't necessarily a happy place. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:06 | |
'That year Maria Thins' past caught up with her in the form of her unruly son, Willem, | 0:40:06 | 0:40:13 | |
'the boy who bared his arse at her in Gouda, | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
'who now bursts back into the household. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
'The year is 1663. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:29 | |
'We don't know where Vermeer was, | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
'but Catharina was at home with their three girls, pregnant again.' | 0:40:32 | 0:40:37 | |
-Is this another notary's book? -This is a notary's book, yes. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:41 | |
This is a testament of people who were there when Willem Bolnes | 0:40:43 | 0:40:49 | |
misbehaved in the house of his mother. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
He said very ugly words as well, | 0:40:52 | 0:40:55 | |
which could not be repeated. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:57 | |
'"Old Popish swine" and "she-devil" were two of the phrases they permitted themselves to record. | 0:40:57 | 0:41:05 | |
'Bolnes was in a rage.' | 0:41:05 | 0:41:07 | |
The violence of the father seems to have been repeated in the violence of the son. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:14 | |
Willem Bolnes thrust at his highly pregnant sister, Catharina. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:22 | |
And he thrust at her with a stick at the end of which there was an iron pin. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:28 | |
'According to witnesses, Tanneke Everpoel, the kitchen maid, | 0:41:32 | 0:41:36 | |
'put herself between the pregnant Catharina | 0:41:36 | 0:41:40 | |
'and the stick-wielding Willem.' | 0:41:40 | 0:41:43 | |
What happened to him? | 0:41:45 | 0:41:46 | |
Is this an attempt to get him sectioned? | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
-Yes. He was put away on these sort of testimonies. -I'm not surprised, really. | 0:41:49 | 0:41:55 | |
'Willem was in fact committed to a private house of correction, run by a man called Hermanus Taerling.' | 0:41:55 | 0:42:03 | |
The fact that Vermeer isn't in this document and doesn't sign it | 0:42:04 | 0:42:08 | |
doesn't mean he doesn't care, he just wasn't present, | 0:42:08 | 0:42:12 | |
-so he can't witness the things Willem did. -Right. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:16 | |
I think a few months after this happens we have a record | 0:42:16 | 0:42:20 | |
-I read in another document that Willem has a wound or injury. -Yes. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:24 | |
And he has to go to hospital. | 0:42:24 | 0:42:27 | |
Do you think that could have been Vermeer who gives him a clout? | 0:42:27 | 0:42:31 | |
Well, it is a nice thought. | 0:42:31 | 0:42:33 | |
But I think Bolnes was hit in the house of Taerling, where he was confined. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:41 | |
-No, Vermeer went and got him, didn't he? He gave him a bop, eh? -It's nice to think so. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:47 | |
BOTH CHUCKLE | 0:42:47 | 0:42:49 | |
'Willem Bolnes, violent son of a violent father, | 0:42:51 | 0:42:55 | |
'repeating the patterns of the past, spent the rest of his life in the house of correction. | 0:42:55 | 0:43:01 | |
'I went to see the paintings in the Rijksmuseum to test a theory | 0:43:02 | 0:43:07 | |
'that Vermeer painted away the pain of reality.' | 0:43:07 | 0:43:11 | |
They're luminous, compared to the others. The painted light is so extraordinary. | 0:43:11 | 0:43:17 | |
It's a very beautiful, diffuse light. You see the way it reflects | 0:43:17 | 0:43:23 | |
and how he depicts the textures, with the little dots in the bread. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:28 | |
It feels as if the bread is crumbling. On the other hand, | 0:43:28 | 0:43:32 | |
you also see the little dots of reflection in the cloth. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:36 | |
My own theory about this picture is straightforward. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
Isn't it possible that it was painted just after | 0:43:40 | 0:43:43 | |
Willem Bolnes attacked Vermeer's wife and mother-in-law, | 0:43:43 | 0:43:47 | |
and a maid called Tanneke Everpoel, perhaps this woman, stepped in? | 0:43:47 | 0:43:52 | |
-And he would have painted it as a kind of homage to the valiant maid? -Yeah, why not? | 0:43:52 | 0:43:58 | |
Well, I think that's a slightly 19th-century view, as well, | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
that the personal life of an artist would have a direct influence on what he would paint. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:10 | |
Don't you think it's interesting that a man with such a tempestuous personal life | 0:44:10 | 0:44:16 | |
should paint such fantastic images of calm? | 0:44:16 | 0:44:19 | |
It's fascinating. You walk around | 0:44:19 | 0:44:22 | |
and you suddenly see a small Vermeer and it gives a sense of relief and tranquillity. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:28 | |
But in the background, a mad brother-in-law with an iron pin, attacking women. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:34 | |
And we know he had 11 children. Actually, probably 13, but we know there were 11. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:42 | |
So it must have been quite a busy house. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
Children hardly ever appear in his work. They do appear in this picture. Is this...? | 0:44:45 | 0:44:52 | |
Is this the only painting in which we see children in Vermeer's art? | 0:44:52 | 0:44:57 | |
Yeah. They are probably playing on the street. We don't know exactly | 0:44:57 | 0:45:02 | |
because they're so intent on their own action. | 0:45:02 | 0:45:06 | |
That's something which is typical for Vermeer. His characters are nearly always unaware of us | 0:45:06 | 0:45:14 | |
as spectators. It's an amazingly, I think, intimate view of a... yeah, a portrait of a street. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:21 | |
It's nearly voyeurism. We're looking onto a scene and they don't know we're there. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:27 | |
He creates all these little accidents, | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
they're almost like snags, rough edges in the texture, and they catch your eye. | 0:45:31 | 0:45:36 | |
-Like that fantastic bit of paint. -That makes you accept it as reality. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:41 | |
Because you recognise it in its imperfection. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:45 | |
It gives it more mystery because he doesn't give you information bang in your face. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:52 | |
-And the woman doesn't have a face. -No, he didn't really need to paint it, because it's not about her. | 0:45:52 | 0:46:00 | |
This is fantastic. Different kinds of stains. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
This is amazing, because here you have, as I interpret it, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:08 | |
so many people have sat on this bench | 0:46:08 | 0:46:11 | |
that you have the dirt and the discolouring on the wall behind the bench. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:17 | |
Like grease on an antimacassar. Accumulated human presence. Fantastic. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:22 | |
"What a fine piece of work is a home," Vermeer seems to say, | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
dwelling on every detail of bricks and mortar. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
By the mid-1660s, with his troublesome brother-in-law locked up | 0:46:33 | 0:46:38 | |
and the scandals of his own family safely in the past, | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
Vermeer was at the peak of his fortunes. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:45 | |
Thanks to the wealth of his mother-in-law | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
and his patron, he could paint what he wanted. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
Perhaps his own life seemed nearly as perfect | 0:46:51 | 0:46:55 | |
as the dream world of his art. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
But then came the fall. | 0:46:58 | 0:47:00 | |
In 1672, the French army of Louis XIV invaded, | 0:47:03 | 0:47:08 | |
and, crucially for Vermeer, the Dutch art market collapsed. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:13 | |
'Vermeer can now be traced in the archives | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
'because he seems to be conducting more business for mother-in-law Maria Thins. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:22 | |
'She now wanted to claim a legacy that her great-grandfather had left to the Charity Chamber in Gouda. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:30 | |
'She sent her son-in-law to get it. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
'The young man who hadn't been good enough for her daughter now enjoyed her complete trust.' | 0:47:32 | 0:47:39 | |
I'm the verger, not to be confused with "virgin". | 0:47:39 | 0:47:42 | |
'Even though Maria Thins now lived in Delft, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:46 | |
the family still had wealth and influence here in Gouda.' | 0:47:46 | 0:47:50 | |
Here, in window No.9, in the lower part, | 0:47:50 | 0:47:54 | |
is Mr van Hensbeek, great-great-grandfather | 0:47:54 | 0:47:58 | |
of Catharina Bolnes, the wife of Jan Vermeer. You see him with his wife, | 0:47:58 | 0:48:03 | |
his coat of arms, his four children, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
and the other little children are the orphans of the orphanage next door. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:13 | |
-Which he paid for? -Yeah. -He was a rich guy. -He also sponsored the orphanage. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:18 | |
Can you explain to me this Dutch policy | 0:48:18 | 0:48:21 | |
of flooding the land when invaders come? | 0:48:21 | 0:48:24 | |
What's the process, how does this work? | 0:48:24 | 0:48:27 | |
It's very simple. It's our national trick. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:31 | |
In times of danger, we just open the gates of the dykes and let the water come in. | 0:48:31 | 0:48:36 | |
Mind you, we are living two metres below sea level. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:40 | |
That's why Dutchmen have wooden shoes. They walk on water. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:44 | |
We did it when the Spanish were here, when the French came, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
and tried it with the Germans, but it didn't work as they came with planes. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:54 | |
In the Second World War. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:55 | |
We have a window, window No.25, called The Relief Of Leiden. | 0:48:55 | 0:49:01 | |
This is during the Spanish occupation, | 0:49:01 | 0:49:04 | |
and half the window is full of water, with inundation. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:10 | |
And there you can see in very detailed scenes, how we did the trick. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:15 | |
If you look in one particular panel in the window, you see some big wheels. | 0:49:15 | 0:49:20 | |
That's how we opened the heavy doors | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
of the gates in the dykes. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:25 | |
When the Dutch decided to flood their own land in 1672 | 0:49:34 | 0:49:39 | |
it had a disastrous effect | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
on the Vermeer family because, as luck had it, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
the land owned by Maria Thins in Schoonhoven | 0:49:44 | 0:49:48 | |
was right in the middle of the area worst affected. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
She lost almost all the revenues, | 0:49:51 | 0:49:54 | |
and the Vermeer family fortune went from bad to worse. | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
One might ask why Vermeer didn't leave Delft and go to Amsterdam, | 0:50:03 | 0:50:08 | |
which was richer. The answer may be his patron. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
He had no reason to leave. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:14 | |
And that is why the death of this patron in 1673, | 0:50:14 | 0:50:18 | |
two years before his own death, | 0:50:18 | 0:50:20 | |
must have been such a catastrophe for Vermeer. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:23 | |
No market, no patron. | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
But even that wasn't the end of it. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
Travelling on business for Maria Thins, | 0:50:32 | 0:50:34 | |
he's guilty of a final, uncharacteristic | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
act of betrayal. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
In Amsterdam | 0:50:41 | 0:50:43 | |
he apparently collected a debt that was due to his mother-in-law, | 0:50:43 | 0:50:49 | |
and may have pocketed the money. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:54 | |
For a man who had always been submissive, compliant, modest, | 0:50:56 | 0:51:01 | |
perhaps woman-worshipping and admiring, | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
this must have been a terrible thing for him to do. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
What was Vermeer thinking of? And what was he planning to do | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
with the money he'd filched? Invest it in some speculative scheme? | 0:51:12 | 0:51:18 | |
Cover his debts with one lucky punt? | 0:51:18 | 0:51:21 | |
We'll never know. | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
What we do know is that his plans went awry. He was discovered, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:27 | |
and five months later he would be dead. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
I wonder if it was the guilt that finished him off? | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
'By chance we do have an eyewitness account of Vermeer's death, | 0:51:36 | 0:51:40 | |
'told by his beloved Catharina to a Gouda notary, | 0:51:40 | 0:51:45 | |
'written down and still preserved after all these centuries.' | 0:51:45 | 0:51:50 | |
-Is this the one? -Yes. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:51 | |
"Catharina Bolnes, widow of the late Johannes Vermeer..." | 0:51:51 | 0:51:55 | |
'In these pages of spidery handwriting, the last act | 0:51:55 | 0:51:59 | |
'of Vermeer's personal tragedy unfolds. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:03 | |
'Catharina says that, | 0:52:03 | 0:52:04 | |
'"Owing to the burden of his children, | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
'having nothing, he lapsed into decay | 0:52:07 | 0:52:10 | |
'and decadence, which he so took to heart that, as if fallen into a frenzy..."' | 0:52:10 | 0:52:16 | |
-And then what happened? -And then in a day-and-a-half, he dies. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:21 | |
That's that. Poor Vermeer. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
'So at the end, Vermeer, who had kept the world at bay so effectively, | 0:52:33 | 0:52:38 | |
'so obsessively, even, found it crowding in on him. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:42 | |
'And I wonder if he hadn't painted himself into a corner. | 0:52:42 | 0:52:46 | |
'His marriage to Catharina, the household of Maria Thins, | 0:52:46 | 0:52:50 | |
'the patronage of van Ruijven - all gave him his freedom as an artist, | 0:52:50 | 0:52:55 | |
'to keep the everyday world of children, | 0:52:55 | 0:52:58 | |
'noise, dirt and even violence at bay. | 0:52:58 | 0:53:01 | |
'But these things became a prison in the end, | 0:53:01 | 0:53:04 | |
'and when the lack of income threatened his wife and children, | 0:53:04 | 0:53:08 | |
'and he betrayed the trust his mother-in-law | 0:53:08 | 0:53:12 | |
'had placed in him, when he saw no way out, he was devastated. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:16 | |
'THAT was the madness of Vermeer.' | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
They brought Vermeer's body to the Old Church on 15th December, 1675, | 0:53:29 | 0:53:34 | |
and they laid it to rest in the family grave the next day. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
The grave, like many things in his life, had been paid for by his mother-in-law. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:43 | |
The Vermeers had buried three of their children there. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:48 | |
The youngest was removed, the body put on top of the painter's coffin | 0:53:48 | 0:53:53 | |
before being replaced and covered with earth. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
'After his death came a reckoning. The inventory was made, and an executor appointed by the city. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:12 | |
'His widow paid off the family's bread bill, about two years' worth, with two paintings. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:18 | |
'Maria Thins tried to hold on to Vermeer's favourite work by saying it was hers. | 0:54:18 | 0:54:24 | |
'But the executor was implacable, and the picture was sold at auction. | 0:54:24 | 0:54:29 | |
'His fears for his family were justified. The Vermeers' social climbing was over. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:35 | |
'One of the only grandchildren we can trace was an illiterate weaver. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:40 | |
'Which leaves us with his art, | 0:54:41 | 0:54:44 | |
'these precious few paintings that seem to bestow a sacramental quality on the everyday. | 0:54:44 | 0:54:50 | |
'I needed to go back to The Hague for one last look.' | 0:54:50 | 0:54:54 | |
I've only just realised what's happening in this picture. | 0:54:56 | 0:55:01 | |
I've looked at it many, many times, and I've never understood | 0:55:01 | 0:55:06 | |
why the roofscape is painted with this extraordinary, granular | 0:55:06 | 0:55:10 | |
textured pigment that seems to glitter, especially under a raking light. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:16 | |
Almost like the texture of sandpaper. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
Well, I suddenly realised today that - duh! - it's been raining. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:24 | |
The storm has passed, but it's BEEN raining. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:27 | |
So what we get is sunlight shining onto | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
this beautiful, glittering city. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
I think it's also perhaps the key to what Vermeer may have meant by it. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:41 | |
I think that the picture could be | 0:55:41 | 0:55:45 | |
a kind of celebration of the moment, in a bigger sense, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:51 | |
when the storm has passed. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:54 | |
It's this window onto a peaceful world. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:58 | |
When I think about what the documents tell us about Vermeer's life | 0:55:59 | 0:56:05 | |
and his family background, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
I think of this culture in struggle - | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
a kind of rat race where everyone's trying to get on, trying to make good. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
Grandpa Vermeer with his counterfeiting scheme, | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
Grandma Vermeer, the "out-dragger", running lotteries, | 0:56:20 | 0:56:24 | |
trying to make a buck, trying to climb up the ladder of social success. | 0:56:24 | 0:56:29 | |
There's war, there are floods. I can't think of a more turbulent world | 0:56:29 | 0:56:35 | |
than the one which produced this picture. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:38 | |
What could be LESS turbulent than this picture? | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
There are no floods here, no dykes being broken, | 0:56:41 | 0:56:45 | |
no soldiers invading, no hucksters trying to fool you, no... | 0:56:45 | 0:56:50 | |
It's a picture of... | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
perfect, perfect tranquillity. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:59 | |
A radiant vision of peace. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
Something which, | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
in Vermeer's world, | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
was fantastically precious. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
To him personally, | 0:57:12 | 0:57:14 | |
but to the culture as a whole. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:16 | |
And that's why I think this is such a great painting, because it does what art does - | 0:57:16 | 0:57:22 | |
it gives you what you can't actually have. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:26 | |
And in the end... | 0:57:30 | 0:57:32 | |
..for Vermeer... | 0:57:34 | 0:57:36 | |
the flood-waters would rise | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
and he would sink... | 0:57:40 | 0:57:42 | |
..but he left us this, and that's what counts. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:45 | |
MUSIC: "Mad World" by Gary Jules and the Group Rules | 0:57:51 | 0:57:55 | |
# All around me are familiar faces | 0:58:00 | 0:58:04 | |
# Worn-out places, worn-out faces | 0:58:04 | 0:58:10 | |
# Bright and early for the daily races | 0:58:10 | 0:58:15 | |
# Going nowhere, going nowhere | 0:58:15 | 0:58:22 | |
# And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad | 0:58:22 | 0:58:27 | |
# The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had | 0:58:29 | 0:58:33 | |
# I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take | 0:58:33 | 0:58:39 | |
# When people run in circles | 0:58:39 | 0:58:41 | |
# It's a very, very | 0:58:41 | 0:58:45 | |
# Mad world | 0:58:45 | 0:58:47 | |
# A mad world | 0:58:50 | 0:58:52 | |
# Mad world. # | 0:58:56 | 0:58:58 | |
Subtitles by ITFC Ltd for BBC Broadcast - 2003 | 0:59:00 | 0:59:03 | |
E-mail us at [email protected] | 0:59:03 | 0:59:07 |