Undiscovered Link?

Hard-core Vermeer devotees, including myself, dream nothing more than to making a new connection, no matter how insignificant. Unless someone else has beaten me to the mark, which is not particularly difficult to imagine, here is one more attempt.

You must admit, Conrad van der Brugghen’s tapestry does bear a certain resemblance to Vermeer’s spicy Procuress (1656). The draping Turkish carpet right in front of the figure is spot on. And the fashionable, lute-strumming gentleman — who also sports the latest in broad-rimmed hats — does make a few more bells wring. The left-hand figure in Vermeer’s composition projects something of the same I-know-something-more-than-the-other-people in-this-scene-do attitude, and he does hold a stringed instrument, a cittern, even though you can only see the neck.

Did Vermeer see Van der Brugghen’s tapestry? Did he have to? The fact is that similar compositional devices were common stock in Dutch genre painting, and Vermeer could have been inspired by any number of them. In order to keep pace with the art market market, which gobbled up literally millions of art objects during the Golden Age, painters both high and low exploited successful motifs ad nauseam, whether their own or somebody else’s (plagiarism was not the big thing it is today…it was called “emulation”). Being a window-shopper par excellence himself, I would wager that the Vermeer copied and pasted different components drawn from different sources and create his early and rather ambitious The Procuress.

But two things he refused to copy from his colleagues, both of which were the genre’s two main selling points: cleavage and and outlandish feathered hats. To get an idea check out this wildly popular genre here.

Moral of the story: It’s not so much what you copy, but how you paste it.

In any case, the tapestry in question — it’s not a bordello scene — is by Conrad van der Brugghen after a design by Jacob Jordaens, Brussels, 2nd quarter of the 17th century (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).