Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach, New York, Delacorte Press, 1999; 282 pages, $21.95 hardcover. - Review - book review

Gary Schwartz

Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach, New York, Delacorte Press, 1999; 282 pages, $21.95 hardcover.

Five novels and an opera, all recently released, attest to an ongoing popular fascination with--and mistaken view of--Vermeer and his historic Dutch context.

Reading in succession five recent novels that draw on the art world of 17th-century Holland (and seeing an opera set in the same milieu) is an all too revealing experience. Four of the books introduce a female protagonist into the studio of a male artist devoted to painting genre scenes, especially pictures of intriguing women. The women sit for the painters as models, and here is what happens to them:

Behind his easel the painter is watching me. His blue eyes bore into my soul. He is a small, wiry man with wild black hair. His head is cocked to one side. I stare back at him coolly. Then I realize--he is not looking at me. He is looking at an arrangement to be painted. He wipes his brush on a rag and frowns. I am just an object--brown hair, white lace collar and blue, shot-silk dress. (Deborah Moggach, Tulip Fever)

Her chest ached like a dull wound when she realized that her silence did not cause him a moment's reflection or curiosity. When she looked out the corner of her eye at him, she could not tell what she meant to him. Slowly, she came to understand that he looked at her with the same interest he gave to the glass of milk. (Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue)

He pulls the cap off her head. Tears start in her eyes. She is afraid he will undress her wholly. Her poor stick self isn't fit for it. He misunderstands her concern. "The cap: filthy," he says, "and I'm not looking at you anyway, but at the shape of your head." (Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister)

He looked at me as if he were not seeing me, but someone else, or something else--as if he were looking at a painting.

He is looking at the light that falls on my face, I thought, not at my face itself. That is the difference. (Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring)

All four writers have succeeded in concealing from themselves what is apparent to the reader. The insight that comes to their characters as a profound revelation is a commonplace: girl meets artist, girl is fascinated by artist and hopes artist will be fascinated by her, artist looks at girl like thing, girl deals with disappointment by speculating sadly about the impersonal nature of the artistic gaze.

This nearly identical scene adumbrates the plot overlap between the books, in a realm close to the lowest common denominator of fiction: secret love. Deborah Moggach's heroine, Sophia, in the most spirited and readable novel, is the young wife of a much older man. She falls madly in love with that small, wiry painter hired by her husband to paint their portraits and gives herself over to a reckless passion that destroys the life she has led until then.(1) Tracy Chevalier's Griet is much more uptight. She keeps to herself her hopeless adoration for her master, Johannes Vermeer. The first-person Girl with a Pearl Earring is one long sublimation of her longing for him. Susan Vreeland treats us not to one but a series of impossible affairs and sad marriages, as she follows the provenance of a Vermeer painting back from the 20th to the 17th century and the artist's studio. One of the pining parties in Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a man, for a change. Laurens van Luyken, the late 19th-century owner of the painting, likes it because it reminds him of his first love, Tanneke. (This obscure name is also borne by one of the 17th-century women in Girl with a Pearl Earring.) Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, an unpleasant book whose characters speak in wiseguy snarls, exploits the background of 17th-century Haarlem with a laughable premise about the visit of Marie de' Medici to Holland in 1638 which distorts carelessly everything it touches. Enough said about it.

Tulip Fever, Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Girl with a Pearl Earring are romantic fictions, and as such there is no standard of accuracy by which they can be judged. But as evocations of artistic practice and personal life in 17th-century Holland, the books accept certain constraints that do not apply to romantic fiction. They have been praised for their quality as imaginative history, and the authors have not declined this praise. Chevalier is acclaimed on the jacket of her book for having "wonderfully evoked the Delft of the mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands: its canals, markets and churches, the endless, uncomplaining drudgery of a domestic servant's life." In this regard, the books derive part of their worth from their historical accuracy.

That accuracy is considerable. Most of the facts, dates and circumstances described are true to the sources and attest to a lot of hard work on the part of the writers. However, this has not prevented the authors from making egregious mistakes, the kind that a native of the territory would never make. Chevalier's (illiterate) heroine says: "From the front of the house the New Church tower was visible just across the canal. A strange view for a Catholic family, I thought. A church they will never go inside." This thought would never have been formulated by anyone living in the Dutch Republic. The New Church in Delft, like all former Catholic churches, belonged to the township and not the Reformed Church. Except when divine services were in progress, the building was open to, and intensively used by, the entire populace. Moggach's male lead, a painter who gets involved in the tulip trade, buys his bulbs in 1636 in the Sarphatistraat, which every Amsterdamer knows was named for Samuel Sarphati, who laid out this part of the city during his 19th-century lifetime (1813-1866). Susan Vreeland is under the impression that the family name of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau, the builder of the Mauritshuis, was Maurits van Nassau (rather than just van Nassau). This leads to the creation of a personage named Countess Maurits van Nassau, whom Vreeland absurdly calls Countess Maurits. (Chevalier, let it be said, is the most scrupulous of the group as a researcher, Moggach the most easygoing.)

The errors are not all matters of detail. The writers' shallow knowledge leads them to distort entire realms of Dutch life. In Vreeland's Dutch Republic, one person could muse about another who "sits in an empty church like some Catholic," unaware that Catholics always remained the single largest religious group in the country, with house churches that were never big enough to contain the worshipers. Chevalier's Griet worries in chapter after chapter about the tension between the Catholicism of Vermeer's family and her own "Protestantism." The latter term however did not connote a church, and provided no one in Holland with a religious identity. Griet would have belonged to a congregation that called itself "Christian" and that distinguished itself from other Protestant churches even more emphatically than from the Catholics. One of these subscribed to Remonstrantism, the doctrine professed by Vermeer's patron Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven, who plays a supporting role in Girl with a Pearl Earring. In anxious soliloquies about religious affiliation of a real Dutch Griet, this would certainly have come up.

Indeed, many other issues would have come up that are lacking in the three books. The writers' lack of interest in religious denominations is exceeded by their indifference to two other universal Dutch passions: politics and war. The Eighty Years War (1568-1648) and the French invasion of Holland (1672) do not concern any of their characters, nor do they take sides in the issues that divided the country. Supporters of the Prince of Orange and those of the States-General flew at each other's throats during these years, but not in these books. The Holland of Moggach, Vreeland and Chevalier has a nightmarish quality, with obsessive attention to certain conventional concerns (the price of tulip bulbs is irresistible) and an unreal absence of others.

Writing to Vermeer, a 1999 opera by Louis Andriessen, with a libretto by Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke, is a nightmare of another kind. The production, which I saw in its first run at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, overwhelmed the audience with images, historical references, texts and scenic effects. At each performance, I was told, 5,300 gallons of water were poured out on the singers, running off into a pool surrounding the raised stage. Women and children in baggy-sleeved historical costume were constantly falling into the pool and getting soaked to the skin. I have the feeling that Greenaway was captivated by the opening chapter of Simon Schama's Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987). The director apparently decided that the watery "moral geography" of Holland is what the country is all about. Competing with the water for your attention were the texts of letters projected in long lines across the floor and up a vast screen behind the stage, rolling at a rate that kept you reading in order to follow it; images of paintings by Vermeer that appeared and disappeared on screens above the stage; video sequences of the actors onstage taken from different angles (not live, and different from what they were doing at that moment, inviting critical comparison that you had no time to perform); disaster images of war or fire or flood on the back screen, accompanied by explosions and other not-to-be-ignored sounds; a vast translucent screen that would drop in front of the stage, picking up the projected image of one of the singers or of a detail of action, while the rest of the scene continued behind. Andriessen's music, fraught as it is, never had a chance.

Since no letters to Vermeer are known, Greenaway wrote some himself. His right to do this in an opera libretto will be disputed by no one. Unfortunately, the conceit he devised to account for the writing of these letters is so foolish that it undermines the central premise of the opera. Vermeer is said to be away from home for two weeks, during which time three women write letters to him: his wife, his mother-in-law and the housekeeper who poses for his paintings. The reason given for his absence is the following. In May 1672, Vermeer was called to The Hague from Delft to give an opinion concerning 12 Italian paintings whose authenticity was doubted. He was one of more than 50 painters called upon to do the same, between the 12th and 23rd of the month. None of them would have required, or could have been given, more than an hour or two for the job. Greenaway, however, has decided that Vermeer was in The Hague on this piece of business from the 16th to the 28th of May, and that he was too far from home to return even for a weekend; therefore the letters, which constitute the entire libretto. In the program book, he writes, "Delft and The Hague are some forty kilometres apart"--a misstatement which should have been corrected by his Dutch collaborators. The distance is in fact 14 kilometers. Today's train ride from Delft to The Hague takes seven minutes; a coach in Vermeer's time might have taken 70 minutes and a barge two hours. If Vermeer had gotten up early in the morning on May 23, the day of his deposition, he could have been home again for lunch, and no one would have missed him. The more the opera insists on its historical verisimilitude (the program book contains texts by John Michael Montias on Vermeer and Anna Pavord on tulipomania), the more ridiculous it makes itself.

With all the differences between the novels and the opera, Greenaway too, like the novelists, reads 17th-century Holland in terms of the same central concerns: female domesticity and sexuality, representations of the everyday in art.

Why, I ask myself as a student of Dutch art in the 17th century, did these writers choose to locate their fictions in that remote world? Why Vermeer? Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posed the question to the novelists in an article of Sept. 8, 2000, and received the kind of answers one would expect:

"I think Vermeer provides a moment of calm and tranquility in an age that moves too fast," said Susan Vreeland, author of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," one of a growing genre of recently published Vermeer-inspired novels. "He gives us permission ... to be still a moment." ... Chevalier tells the story of 16-year-old Griet, Vermeer's poor maid and reluctant model. The girl becomes the genesis for one of the artist's most beloved works, often called the Dutch "Mona Lisa." Steeping herself in descriptions of 17th-century Dutch culture, Chevalier described the inner workings of Vermeer's home and a romance she imagined could have occurred between Griet and the painter. "I've always loved the picture [Girl with a Pearl Earring]," said Chevalier, who's had a print of it since she was young. "It's seemingly simple. It is just a girl looking at you. But I feel like she mirrors my mood. When I am sad she looks sad, when I am happy she looks happy. I wanted to explain that look on her face."

Schumacher supplements these statements with her own answer to the question "why Vermeer?":

Vermeer frequently painted women alone in quiet interiors, writing letters to unknown recipients or casting glances toward unknown subjects. These psychological moments, with clues that only hint at the full meaning of the paintings, invite interpretation.(2)

The appearance of these book-length daydreams on themes by Vermeer in 1999 and 2000 follows (as effect from cause?) the Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995-96. The crowds drawn by the show are said to have been moved more deeply and directly than by most exhibitions. The artist whom Zbigniew Herbert called the Great Mute did not talk back to visitors, allowing them to leave the exhibition with their own thoughts and emotions flatteringly intertwined with his timeless images.

Reasons other than the Vermeer mystique also come to mind. The books betray a yearning for old-fashioned authenticity. Real love, real honor, real danger, true belief and authentic art. The love affairs in 17th-century Delft and Amsterdam are not, for these writers, like those in trimillennial Westchester or Manhattan. Secret love in Old Holland was not the noncommittal matter it mainly is in modern fiction. Griet and Sophia risk their lives by considering or committing adultery. Griet and Vreeland's Magdalena are consumed with fear of another distinctly pre-2000 destiny: disgrace. Griet is sure that if she ever unfastens her hair she will be taken for a whore for the rest of her life, and Magdalena is "seared" with disgrace when a painting for which she modeled is not bought by van Ruijven.

The authors have convinced themselves that the Dutch Republic was a world in which honor was for real. More to the point--so was art. This was especially the case with genre painting, with its depiction of everyday life and, within genre painting, particularly the household life of women. In another of those passages for which one could find a close equivalent in the other novels as well, Vreeland puts into Vermeer's mouth this speech concerning a glass of milk: "It makes the whole corner sacred with the tenderness of just living." Elsewhere she writes: "What he saw ... was ... stillness from the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home. That stillness today, he thought, might be all he would ever know of the Kingdom of Heaven." Not only do the painters look this way, so do the heroines of the books by the female novelists. They compete with their artist heroes as lookers, demonstrating their visual as well as emotional sensitivity. Vermeer provides an instrument for an intensified experience of present-day reality.

Katharine Weber, in her novel The Music Lesson--which I found much better than the other four, in part because the 1990s action (the stealing of a Vermeer by an Irish terrorist group with the aid of a librarian at the Frick Collection) precludes jarring anachronisms--is unembarrassed about putting this effect into simple words: "There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances.... But there is always intimacy, the intimacy of experience without pretension."

These sentimental explanations take me only so far, and they call for qualification. The direct observations and reactions the writers report no doubt took place, but they did not take place in a conceptual void. The terms they apply to Dutch art are clearly dependent on older appreciations, including critical writing and academic research. Although Vermeer was famously rediscovered by William Thore-Burger in the 1860s, that writer did not claim for him any higher rank in the history of art than a place in "that select company of the Dutch `little masters,' as their equal in every respect." The admiring comparisons that were drawn between Vermeer's work and that of the Impressionists, and their subsequent rise to immortality, elevated him to the first rank. By 1921, in his influential Histoire de l'art, Elie Faure wrote, "Vermeer painted even the shining silence that flows out from friendly things, even the welcome they extend to you.... No one has penetrated further into the intimacy of matter." Two years later, in A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says that his hero Swann's "own life appeared to him in one pan of a heavenly scales, while the other contained the little patch of wall so finely painted in yellow [by Vermeer in the View of Delft]. He felt he had foolishly given the first for the second."

Much writing on Vermeer from then until now, by critics and literary writers as well as art historians, consists of nothing more than rewordings of these exalted judgments and attempts to explain how Vermeer did it. Here, for instance, is Lawrence Gowing, 1960: "What Vermeer depicted was not palpable matter but the ungraspable world of the vision, an entirely autonomous world that surpasses reason." Herbert Read, 1967, in an article titled "The Serene Art of Vermeer," wrote: "It might be asked whether this is merely a coincidence, or whether there are qualities in Vermeer's work that appeal to the modern sensibility, and whether these are the same qualities that led to the previous neglect of his work? I would suggest that possibly there are three such qualities, and that those are precisely the qualities that combine to make Yermeer unique. They concern (1) design, (2) colour, and (3) a spiritual or metaphysical quality which for the moment we might call serenity."(3)

While the novelists swallow these mystical, ahistorical characterizations of Vermeer hook, line and sinker, they also nibble at the bait offered by less effusive scholarly work as well. Although Svetlana Alpers, in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), argues that Dutch artists were really looking at their subjects, as opposed to looking through them as a mere "arrangement to be painted," her focus on sheer visuality in Dutch art and her belittlement of the intellectual and moral values studied by Eddy de Jongh and other researchers helped shape the notion of Dutch art in these novels. In the household situations we find strong echoes of Schama's loving evocations of domesticity in The Embarrassment of Riches. Details about Vermeer's life and times come from John Michael Montias's rich book on the artist, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (Princeton, 1989).(4)

If we take Vermeer off his pedestal for a moment and compare him in more measurable terms with his contemporaries, an anomaly becomes apparent that might have explanatory power. In 1993, with the help of Trudy van den Oosten, I built a database of 3,430 European paintings that were made between 1625 and 1675 by 671 artists. One of the features we measured in these woks from nine museums was the occurrence of men, women and children. The results undermined any notion of demographic accuracy. The overall totals, in which the schools of various countries barely differed from each other, was 16,141 men, 4,257 women and 1,592 children. (The children were not differentiated by sex, since in too many cases this was impossible to determine from the catalogue illustrations with which we worked.) Percentages that should have approximated 45 percent men, 45 percent women and 10 percent children are instead 73.5 percent, 19.5 percent and 7 percent, respectively. The most serious deviance was the underrepresentation of women by more than 50 percent. Only 76 artists painted more women than men, and of these only 20 were painters of genre scenes like Vermeer. The average ratio of men, women and children in these works was 28 percent men, 53 percent women, 19 percent children.

Comparing Vermeer with this sample reveals that he was at the most extreme end even of this deviant scale in one striking respect: while painting about the same percentage of men (24 percent) as this small minority, the ratio of women to children in his interiors is as good as unique in European genre painting. Whereas the other genre painters who put more women in their work typically paint more children as well--more than twice as many as the European average--Vermeer has no children whatsoever in his interiors. None. Only in his two outdoor scenes are there children--an infant being held by a maidservant in the View of Delft, and two older children playing on the stoop in the The Little Street.

The father of Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Geertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, Ignatius and a last child whose name we do not know was not looking at kids at all, at least not with the eye of an artist. That was his own business. What concerns us is the nature of Vermeer's specialty, which now calls for redefinition, and of his appeal to us moderns. Looking once more at his women, we notice that they are all, with the possible exception of the procuress in the early painting of that name in Dresden, of childbearing age--the age of maximum sexual appeal to men, the age to which older and younger women aspire. None of them has a physical defect; they are lovely to look at. They live in luxurious houses adorned with excellent paintings and stained-glass windows, floored with the kind of marble tiles that, in contrast to popular belief, were rare to the point of nonexistence in the living rooms of Dutch burghers.(5) (The male Geographer and Astronomer have common wooden plank floors and everyday furniture.) These women wear haute couture clothes of silk and ermine set off with expensive pearl jewelry. They have household personnel, except for the few who are household personnel. They have no obligations that keep them from playing and singing music and writing letters. The one lady performing a piece of work is weighing gold, apparently her own.

Vermeer's women are in charge of their own lives. They are unattached but do not flaunt their independence; the way they read letters and receive male guests makes them seem open to approaches from the right men. If they have parents, the old folks have been parked out of sight. Perhaps most important of all: Vermeer ladies have no children to interfere with their elegant lives or disturb that magic silence broken only by the strains of a mandolin, a guitar, a clavecin.(6)

Who are these women? Did anyone in the Netherlands live lives like theirs? I cannot imagine who. Not even the richest burghers lived in such luxury. Dutch women had to make at least a show of adhering to standards of thrift, industriousness and piety to which none of Vermeer's ladies makes even the slightest curtsy. Moreover, women with that kind of money of their own were too good a catch to be left husbandless into their twenties. Once married, they bore children, ran busy households, conducted family business, served public charities. At court, where some women were as wealthy as Vermeer ladies, there was even more to be done. From morning to night, the wife of a prince of Orange was probably never alone in a room by herself or with one maid. The closest "reality" to which I can relate these images is that they look like the imaginings of a wealthy man about how his courtesan-mistress spends her time between his visits. Proust may have thought that what captivated Swann in Vermeer was a patch of yellow wall, but wasn't he more likely to have found in Vermeer's heroines an ideal fantasy about how Odette filled her days?(7)

The iconographic descent of Vermeer's ladies as traced by Blankert bears out this reading. He demonstrates that these women are representatives of a type known as the juffer or juffertje, a word that in ordinary language means only young lady, but which as an artistic motif implies a certain Holly Golightly quality. Blankert calls them images of "unattainable ambitions and dubious behavior." In most Dutch paintings of this kind, the juffers are in the company of jonkers or malle jonkers, madcap young men. Such subjects, he writes (with interspersed quotes from a treatise of 1661 by Cornelis de Bie), are "young people ... engaged in `foolishness and riotousness,' `gorging and a great deal of other craziness,' including `teasing and prancing,' bass and viol playing, gambling, courting, dancing, `guzzling.'" They "`swim in evil'" and live above their station, "`without rule, without moderation.'"(8)

Vermeer's jonker-less compositions are cool, stripped-down versions of such scenes. The action is less explicitly frivolous, leaving room for later viewers to read them in the more dignified ways that have become the norm. No such associations were to be expected from his original audience, who saw in paintings of juffers a morally questionable high life. Nothing in Vermeer would have belied those expectations. The replacement of riotousness with seeming respectability would not have reduced the suggestiveness of these images for them.

How could we ever have believed that Vermeer painted "domestic scenes, typical of the customs of the epoch and the country in which he lived" (Thore-Burger, 1866) or that he simply "looks about him and shows us what he sees" (Henri Havard, 1883, and many after him)? How did we let ourselves be seduced into thinking that an artist who made an idol of unencumbered privilege rises above materiality? That our identification with Vermeer's ladies is not self-indulgence but something like mystic self-abnegation? Why do present-day novelists, speaking for a century of art lovers, think that Vermeer saw life as "an arrangement to be painted," that a glass of milk was as important to him as a human being--or a pearl necklace?

These questions may not be unanswerable. As I remarked above, Vermeer came into his own as an artistic immortal with the rise of Impressionism. The image of his art was subsumed from the 1890s into a common conception of what made Impressionism great: color, light, form, pattern, the impersonal gaze of the impassioned painter--"not the landscape," in a definition of 1874, "but the sensation produced by the landscape" (Jules-Antoine Castagnary, quoted in The Dictionary of Art). This is no longer how art historians view Impressionism. Since the ideological and social concommitants of that movement were laid bare by T.J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, New York, 1984) and Robert Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, New Haven and London, 1988), a new, more down-to-earth consensus has taken hold.

The reimmersion of Impressionism into society and psychology is having its inevitable effect on the appreciation of Vermeer as well. Specialists now squirm at the disembodied approach that found its ultimate expression in Andre Malraux's judgment concerning The Love Letter in the Rijksmuseum: "The letter has no importance, any more than the women or the world in which one receives letters. The world has become painting."(9) The catalogue of the 1995-96 exhibition reflects a new orthodoxy, which lends ample significance to the emblematic and erotic meanings that have been found in his works. It cannot be long before they will be judged more acutely for their relation to the world around them.

In the meanwhile, museums and art historians want to drink their milk and have it too. After demonstrating that Vermeer assembled his motifs from a highly selective choice among the inventions of his predecessors, glamorizing an imaginary high-class demimonde, Blankert nonetheless concludes that "he succeeded in capturing the truth that met his eyes with both unequalled verisimilitude and perfection."(10) Arthur Wheelock finds in Vermeer a preoccupation with an assortment of fundamental values that to my eye are notably absent from his work: "the bonds between two individuals, the bounty of God's creations, the transience of life, or the lasting power of artistic creation."(11)

That is still the Vermeer of the literary as well as the popular imagination, the one about whom Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland and Katharine Weber write and the one for whom long lines form when a museum is fortunate enough to be able to put his name up in lights. There is a funnier and funkier Vermeer out there, less sanctimonious and less sincere. He's waiting to be discovered, but if you want to see him, you do have to look. Not only at pictures, but at life as well.

Writing to Vermeer, an opera in one act with music by Louis Andriessen, libretto by Peter Greenaway

Directed by Saskia. Boddeke and Peter Greenaway

Sets and lighting by Michael Simon, costumes by Emi Wada

The opera was seen in New York City in July, 2000, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The production originated with the Netherlands Opera, and first appeared in Amsterdam, December 1999.January 2000. In March 2000, it traveled to the Adelaide Festival.

(1.) Moggach's artist is called Jan van Loos. His surname sounds Dutch but is not. Only the names Loos or de Loos have ever existed in Holland. That is not his only historical problem. He creates genre scenes of women in 1636 of a type that did not enter the repertoire of Netherlandish painting until after 1650. He is included here for his Vermeer-like qualities.

(2.) Schumacher consulted the membership of the Internet discussion list CAAH (Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians) in the preparation of her article, which she made available to the list on Sept. 13, 2000.

(3.) The quotations from Thore-Burger, Havard, Faure and Proust are taken from Philippe Resche-Regon, "Critical Anthology," in Albert Blanket, John Michael Montias and Gilles Aillaud, Vermeer, New York, Rizzoli, 1988, pp. 217-23. The quotations from Herbert Read, cited by Resche-Regon, is from Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society, London, Thames and Hudson, 1967, p. 89. Gowing's line was quoted by Resche-Regon in the Dutch edition of Blankert, Montias and Aillaud (Amersterdam, Meulenhoff, 1987, second partly revised edition, 1992) but is not in the English edition. The version here is my back-translation from the Dutch

(4.) A bit more research might have done the novels a lot of good. A brilliant essay on Dutch women in genre paintings, "Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls," was published in 1997 by the literary historian Richard Helgerson in the journal Representations. It was reprinted in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press in a volume with the telling title Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting. Dealing with exactly the same kind of artistic material as the novelists, Helgerson shows how essential politics and ideology are to the understanding of Dutch paintings of the home and of the women in it. "In the 1650s and 1660s, the Dutch produced a great many paintings of women, almost always without a male householder, engaged in activities of often morally ambiguous significance in domestic or domestic-like interiors. And in a considerable number of these paintings the domestic space is shared by a soldier or other young man of soldierlike appearance.... The nature and survival of Dutch republican government is at stake in these domestic scenes of sexual negotiation.... In their apparent avoidance of politics, these paintings were at their most actively political" (pp. 84-85). Following their romantic instincts, the historical novelists missed out on aspects of their subject that I am sure would have grabbed them.

(5.) C. Willemijn rock, "Werkelijkheid of schijn: Het beeld van het Hollandse interieur in de zeventiende-eeuwse genreschilderkunst" (Reality or Appearance: The Image of the Dutch Interior in Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting), Oud Holland, vol. 112, 1998, pp. 187-246. The author sums up the evidence for the existence of marble floors in domestic interiors, concluding that they were found nearly exclusively in corridors. In the English summary she states: "All this is borne out by one quantitative source: a series of the conditions of sale pertaining to houses in the city of Haarlem over a period of sixty years. Although they concern the second half of the 18th century, a considerable number of 17th-century interior features were still preserved. No fewer than approximately 5000 different houses are described in this source: by then nearly all the larger houses had marble entrance halls and corridors, most of them dating from the 18th century; however, a total of no more than nine living rooms are mentioned as having marble or stone floors!" (p. 244).

(6.) Albert Blankert, "Vermeer's `moderne' onderwerpen," in Johannes Vermeer, exhib, cat., The Hague, Mauritshuis; Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art; and Zwolle, Waanders Publishers, 1995, pp. 34-35.

(7.) See, too, the chapter on Proust and Vermeer in the rich critical potpourri by Christiane Hertel, Vermeer: Reception and Interpretation, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 103-115. Although this book, as the jacket promises, "addresses the critical problem of locating his paintings in history," the 17th-century Netherlands, unfortunately for our purposes, is not one of the historical environments that particularly interests the author.

(8.) Blankert, Johannes Vermeer, p. 33.

(9.) Quoted in French, without source, by A.B. de Vries in In het licht van Vermeer: vijf eeuwen schilderkunst, exhib. cat., The Hague, Mauritshuis, 1966, unpaginated; my translation.

(10.) Blankert, Johannes Vermeer, p. 42.

(11.) Wheelock in Johannes Vermeer, see note 6, p. 27.

Gary Schwartz is an art historian who lives in the Netherlands.

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