This article is taken from the
Figaro Hors-série Vermeer, painting silence
.
In this special issue, discover the Dutch Golden Age, the life and work of the Delft prodigy, on the occasion of the largest retrospective ever organized on Vermeer, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The political and economic situation of the United Provinces is deteriorating.
On May 27, 1672, the long-planned war with France broke out.
England, for a fallacious motive, enters in its turn into the conflict.
Eighty thousand soldiers commanded by Marshal de Turenne marched on Holland.
They join on the Meuse forty thousand men under the orders of the Prince of Condé.
Louis XIV expects a lightning war.
Official reason: the French monarch wants to sanction a republic of merchants who had the audacity to mount a triple alliance against him with Sweden and England.
He was encouraged in his retaliatory action by Louvois, the new Minister of State, but above all by Colbert, his Comptroller General of Finances, who wrote: "If the king
subjugated all the United Provinces of the Netherlands, their trade would become the commerce of His Majesty's subjects, there would be nothing more to be desired.
»
The French army, with the king at its head, succeeds in crossing the Rhine and advances without encountering resistance.
Facing her, the Prince of Orange has only twenty thousand men at his disposal.
The confrontation ended in a French victory.
Turenne is in Arnhem.
Amsterdam is not far away.
Read alsoMichel de Jaeghere: “Vermeer, deceptive sun”
But the Dutch, against all odds, pull themselves together.
They open the locks of Muyden and flood the flat country to slow down the progress of the French and protect Amsterdam.
Grand Pensionary Johan De Witt, who heads the republic of the United Provinces, makes a peace offer.
Louis XIV rejects it.
The Dutch then resist.
They overthrow De Witt's government, deemed too accommodating, and put William III of Orange at their head.
Peace will not be signed until 1679 in Nijmegen.
A terrible economic crisis falls on the country which will ruin, among other things, the art market.
Not only Vermeer no longer receives orders, but the art dealership he had exercised after the death of his father is in decline.
He is forced to borrow six hundred and seventeen florins from his baker, Hendrick Van Buyten.
On December 15, 1675, Vermeer, ruined, desperate, died, only forty-three years old.
He is buried in the Old Church of Delft and leaves eleven children, eight of whom are minors.
Their guardianship is entrusted to a friend of the family, the naturalist Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek.
For a long time and still today, confusion reigns over the attributions made to Vermeer's work.
One of his paintings, The
Girl in the Red Hat
, kept at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, greatly complicates the work of biographers, deprived of landmarks and infallible proof.
The young girl has the beauty of sculptures brought up from the sea, more beautiful than they were when they were created.
Vermeer focused on the face of the young stranger, blurring everything around her.
Her immense pupils, in velvety tenderness, question, without question.
Then, like flowers of modesty, his lips part, half-smiling, on a word still restrained in this intense silence.
The painter does not seek to reveal to us what the young woman may say, or not say.
On the contrary, he condenses the portrait admirably and punctuates his painting on an alternation between face, mouth, gaze, expression.
The result is a listening experience of unequaled intensity, as if the mute dialogue of the mysterious stranger arose from within the viewer.
Vermeer explores the extraordinary powers of painting as an instrument of listening to the other,
as an acoustic microscope.
It is not the sense of speech that predominates, but the expression of a mute actress, her gaze, the flutter of her eyelids and the slight movement of her lips.
For the first time, a painter, Vermeer, shows the word.
And suddenly, the feather of the hat ignites the painting: coral red!
It's a vision you take with you, forever.
Like a Mozart aria.
The song of the soul.
Vermeer, painting silence
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The Girl Reading a Letter in Front of an Open Window
, by Vermeer, c.1657-1658 Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
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