Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon links Johannes Vermeer, the painter behind Girl with a Pearl Earring, to a radical sect:
He was unique in many ways, not least in having painted virtually all his work for a single husband and wife to hang on the walls of their canalside home in Delft. No other great artist ever worked so exclusively for a single client and for a single place — which explains, among other things, why Vermeer was never famous, and quickly forgotten after he died.
The husband and wife were Pieter Claesz van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt. They lived at a house called the Golden Eagle, filled with Vermeer’s most famous paintings.
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Pieter Claesz van Ruijven was from a family of diehard Remonstrants, his father and grandfather having risked imprisonment by supporting the movement at a time when it was outlawed throughout the Dutch Republic. His wife, Maria de Knuijt, was not only a Remonstrant herself but also participated in the activities of a yet more radical outgrowth of the movement whose followers became known as Collegiants.
Research into Vermeer’s family background shows that he was born and brought up a Remonstrant, and that he too participated in the gatherings of the Collegiants. The same is true of his mother and father, sister and brother-in-law, indeed of almost everyone in his immediate circle. His wife was a Catholic, but she too must have been in sympathy with the Remonstrants, or she could not have married a man so committed to their cause.
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They were pacifists who dared to dream of a Europe in which all nations would live at peace with one another. They were staunch republicans, who regarded even the most supposedly benevolent monarch as a tyrant in waiting. They were egalitarian and extremely charitable, the richest among them giving most of their money away to found orphanages or places of refuge for the old and infirm.
Above all, they believed in, and passionately upheld, the universal freedom of conscience. No one should be constrained to a particular belief, let alone punished or killed for that belief. All should be allowed to practise whatever religion they chose, without fear of persecution. By this they included not only those of every Christian persuasion, but Jews and Muslims too. Tolerance was their golden rule, and it was to be absolute.
Collegiants also believed in the absolute equality of men and women. In fact the majority of Collegiants were women. Many would attend services at the Remonstrant church, where sermons were preached on the virtues of open-mindedness. But they increasingly embraced the ideal of a Christianity without churches of any kind, holding meetings for prayer and Bible reading at home, away from the supervision of priests.
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The assumption behind nearly all writing on Vermeer thus far has been that his works were painted for the open market and should therefore be regarded as genre paintings intended to amuse or entertain. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every single one of his paintings was inspired by the religious beliefs cherished by Maria de Knuijt and those close to her, who included Vermeer himself. Her house was like a church, all of Vermeer’s pictures like a single fresco cycle painted for that church.
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All sorts of things that have until now seemed deeply puzzling about Vermeer’s work — its solemnity of mood, its meditative stillness, its almost exclusively female cast of characters — make perfect sense once we know that it was all created for a group of extremely religious, highly idealistic women who met weekly in the rooms where these pictures once hung.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, made even more famous by Tracy Chevalier’s fictionalised account of the girl in her novel and the film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, is likely to be a portrait of Maria and Pieter’s daughter, Magdalena. She would have been 12 in the autumn of 1667, and assuming that she was a Collegiant like her parents, she would have solemnised her commitment to Christ at that age. The picture shows her marking that by dressing as Mary Magdalene, turning, with such depth of feeling, to Jesus Christ.
Scarlett Johansson was way too slutty for The Girl with the Pearl Earring.