The Story of Dutch PaintingCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
History
The Story of Dutch Painting
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Painting, Dutch
Equally distinguished is Terborch’s use of color. His gamut of local hue
is larger than Vermeer’s, and his treatment of values scarcely less
subtle; while his feeling for color is, I believe, superior. He has the
faculty of raising a local color to its highest power of esthetic
suggestion; witness the lady’s jacket in _The Concert_ of the Berlin
Gallery, a gallery, by the way, exceptionally rich in examples of this
artist’s work. To specify its color we may call it salmon, but this only
vaguely suggests its place on the palette; the precise register of its
hue and, still more, its quality are indescribable. Similarly evasive
and yet profoundly suggestive is his treatment of blue, yellow, red,
black, and the hues of gray from drab to pearly white. These are
enveloped in tonality. For in this respect particularly Terborch differs
from Vermeer. The latter in his most characteristic pictures shows
himself a student of daylight. But in Terborch’s pictures, so far as I
recall them, there appears no window; the interior is dim, and the light
has no pretensions to being natural. It is a studio invention,
distributed or concentrated to suit the imagined scheme of harmony,
Vermeer is, in the modern phrase, a _plein-airist_, while Terborch, true
to the traditions of the Dutch School, is a tonalist. It is in the
invention and realization of his tonal scheme that he is the superior
of the other genre tonalists, and the reason in the final analysis is
that to taste and technique he brought the refining discretion of a
superior quality of mind.
JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER OF DELFT
JOHANNES or JAN VERMEER, who is also called Johannes van der Meer of
Delft, was born at Delft in 1632. His life was spent continuously in
this city until his death in 1675. There are records to show that he
studied with one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Carel Fabritius, and that he was
not only a high official in the local Guild of St. Luke, but highly
esteemed in his community. After his death, however, his very existence
as a painter of the Dutch School was forgotten, and his pictures, very
few of which bear signatures, were attributed to a Vermeer of Haarlem
and to another painter of the same name in Utrecht, and to De Hooch and
others. The reason for this seems to have been the unaccountable
omission of the artist’s name in Houbraken’s book of Dutch painters.
Anyhow, the silence of more than a century and a half was not broken,
until the French connoisseur Thoré, who wrote under the _nom de plume_
of “W. Bürger,” attracted by the beauty of some of the signed pictures,
set on foot an investigation which resulted in the rehabilitation of
Vermeer. Since then criticism has disproved some of Bürger’s
ascriptions, but included other pictures, until now there are thirty
assigned with certainty to Vermeer’s brush. A few others, shown
[Illustration: GIRL AT THE WINDOW JOHANNES (JAN) VERMEER
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK]
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