A GREAT UNKNOWN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2860, 6 January 1909, Page 86

A GREAT UNKNOWN.

—The Riddle of Vermeer, the Dutch Artist.— ''Le plus grand de inconnus!" So his latest biographer, M. Gustavo Vanzype, calls thie incomparable painter of the commonplace, this Vermeer of Deift, this unassuming Dutchman, who 6at in a room jand worked miracles with — light. We have no record of any word thai Vermeer of Delft ever spoke; we- buc know from his pictures what he knew : that light — not Turaerian sunshine, not the heat-dazzle of Monet, just the ordinary grey London or Dutch light — can make a picture immortal, provided 1 you make that light, and not your models, the principal subject of your picture. Sit in a room alone — any room, your own room will do quite as well as a 'bare and solemn Velasquez or Hammershoi chamber, and if you are xery patient and very quiet, and can exist for an hour without your favourite pipe or your favourite cat, you may see some of the intricacies and artifices and subtleties of light that Vermeer saw. If you ask me how he painted this light, by what magic he clothed objects in tneir enveiope of atmosphere, what profundity of vision, what interior knowledge enabled him to steal from the grey day and imprison, his theft on a surface ox canvas, I can only answer that, as a great musician can hear melodies mute to the ordinary ear, so a great artist can see things concealed from the ordinary eye, so the hidden tilings of the spirit are revealed to those who walk the spiritual path. Ask Watteau how it happened in an age when painting was as dull as a sweep of brackish sand fiat on the foreshore, how it happened that he, the son of a tiler, flashed into hie paintings effects as brilliant as the sparkle and the glint of waves breaking in. the 6unshine. Vermeer had a knowledge that is not taught in the schools. His pictures show the thing done; they do not teil how it was. done. Nature smiled on thia^ Dutch child and said, "Let there be Jight," and he, without any fuss, proceeded' to obey Nature. If it is in you to do things it does not matter where you are and what materials you use. Hobble a "landscape painter in a field, and he will do great work if he he a great artist. Vermeer did hot rush 4 o Algiers, or Venice, or Palestine, or Tyrol; he just sat in his room at Delft and painted his wife or his servant and his belongings — a picture, a spinnet, a tablecloth, a. map, a mirror,— and since he loved light so passionately and devotedly,^ it followed that colour was also obedient to his hand. One's first sight of the Vermeer blue is a tiling to remember, like the memory of the first feel of spring after winter. He was born in Delft in 1632. Ho died in Delft in. 1675, age 43. Between whiles he married, had 10 children, was one of the six heads of the Guild of St. Luke, and painted pictures. That is all. For nearly 200 years Vermeer was treated like ono of the horde of seventeenth-cen-tury Dutch painters, often forgotten, now and then dimlyl remembered — by Sir Joshua for one, who, in 1781, noted his "Woman Pouring Milk," that has lately been bought by, the Dutch Government from the Six collection for — let me regain my breath — for nearly £40,000. It changed hands in 1701 for £26. Is there some mystery about Vermeer of Delft — "le plus grand dcs inconnus"? Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals painted themselves scores of times. Why did Vermeer refrain? Had he some fine. Quixotic feeling that the. work is the life, that the worker must hide? Had this humble Dutchman a rare quality of soul? Did he consider all else well lost to that he might pursue all his life — light? — C. Lewis Hind, in the Chronicle.