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Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire, illustrations by Bill Sanderson, New York, ReganBooks, 1999; 368 pages, $24 hardcover. - Review - book review
Art in America, March, 2001 by Gary Schwartz
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.
