Johannes Vermeer: A Private Life

1675, Delft.

I have not lost the work. This has to be said first, before the baker and before the figures and before the household accounts, because once the accounts are allowed to take the front of things they begin to behave as if they explain more than they do, and they do not. I am forty-three years old and the debt is larger than I can manage with ease and the market that broke in the French year has not righted itself and there are eleven children in the house and the baker Hendrick van Buyten holds two of my paintings against six hundred and seventeen guilders, but the north light still enters the front room on the Oude Langendijk with the same patience it had before the French crossed the Rhine, before van Ruijven died, before December pressed the household into this narrower form. It has not altered its terms. It asks what it always asked, which is whether I am exact enough for it.

The difficulty is not that the work has ceased to be possible. The difficulty is that everything surrounding it now arrives first, and because it arrives first it pretends to be prior. I go out into Delft and meet the baker on a street that is too narrow for any useful avoidance, and he has the grave composure of a man who knows that money owed to him remains money owed whether or not the debtor is a painter and whether or not the debtor has children and whether or not the Republic chose to break itself in panic after the invasion. He is not rude, which is worse, because rudeness at least gives a shape to resistance. Patience has no shape. It simply remains. A man can work against anger. He cannot work against patience except by paying it, and paying it now would require the kind of sale the city no longer offers me.

I have painted fewer than fifty paintings in twenty years and there are men in Delft and Amsterdam who produce that number in a fraction of the time and who are praised for industry as if quantity were itself a species of seriousness. I do not dispute their seriousness. I dispute only the confusion. The room and the light do not disclose themselves at a speed that can be arranged to suit a market, and when they are pressed to do so they cease to disclose anything worth keeping. The slowness has been called refinement by the few who understand it and delay by the many who do not, and I have allowed both descriptions to pass because the work remains the answer to either one. Still, the distance between answer and recognition has become inconveniently long in these years, long enough that the household feels it in bread and fuel and in the small exhausted arithmetic by which Catharina and Maria Thins keep the days from running past what the purse can meet.

I write because the front room has gone three weeks without being used as it should be used, which is a circumstance so unnatural to me that the pen becomes, for the moment, the substitute instrument. The woman at the virginal waits on the easel where I left her. The reflection in the instrument’s surface is nearly found, though nearly in painting is a dangerous word because it encourages a man to count as possessed what he has only approached. The light that would have finished it has come and gone each morning while I have attended to the debts and to the children and to the business of the Mechelen, and it would be easy, if one were a man of theatrical temper, to say that these lost mornings have been stolen. They have not been stolen. They have passed unused, which is less dramatic and more exact, and because it is more exact it troubles me more.

Outside Delft my name does not travel far, or not far enough to return in the useful form of payment. This is said as complaint by other men; I do not mean it that way. A painting is not enlarged by distance. It either holds or it does not. Yet there are moments in the present difficulty when I think of the panels that have left this house over twenty years, carried to collectors who understood enough to buy them and perhaps less than that to live with them properly, and I calculate, not bitterly but with the coldness that December encourages, how much of the work’s future has been entrusted to men whose principal qualification was that they could pay at the right hour. Then I correct myself, because this is not quite fair. Van Ruijven saw more than most. A few others saw enough. And seeing is not something that arrives in the same year a painting is purchased. Some things require a slower hour. Delft itself took time to become itself. The light does not hurry. It would be unreasonable to demand from those who look at paintings a pace that the paintings themselves reject.

That, at least, is what I have lived by. Whether it is prudence or merely a more elegant form of delay is the sort of distinction that December likes to put before a man when the fire is expensive and the accounts are open and the children are sleeping beyond the wall. I do not intend to answer it immediately. Immediate answers usually belong to immediate minds, and my work has never been of that kind. There are conditions under which exactness must be allowed to accumulate before it can defend itself, and if the present hour does not yet know what to do with what I have made, that may still be a defect in the hour.