What Vermeer's guitar player taught me about the joy of art

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/27/vermeer-guitar-player-art-kenwood-house

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She is back home. I am always suspicious of people who claim to fall in love through a picture. It is a funny sort of love, and was disastrous for Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. But I can see how a picture can become an obsession. Mine is with Vermeer's portrait of a girl The Guitar Player, now gloriously restored to a fit setting in the reopened Kenwood House on London's Hampstead Heath.

I got to know her long ago, after she was stolen from the house and lost for three months. The Guardian, no less, was phoned for a $1m ransom "for food aid to the island of Grenada" in what seemed a publicity stunt. The picture was later found none the worse for wear in St Bartholomew's churchyard, Smithfield. When I saw her she was laid out on a stretcher in a restorer's studio, looking unbelievably poignant. I fantasised that the abductor must have been as obsessed by her as I was, but found her too hot to handle. Or had she been complicit, slipping out of her frame one night and dashing across the heath to seek the bright lights of London?

She was soon back in monastic confinement, hung gloomily in a cold room with a Ferdinand Bol and weary Rembrandt self-portrait as stern chaperones. I hoped she might catch the eye of Van Dyck's dashing Duke of Richmond across the room. Yet her only pleasures were to be occasional trips on loan, as to this summer's lovely Vermeer and Music exhibition at the National Gallery.

Johannes Vermeer's aura of mystery is everlasting. To Proust he is "marked by withdrawal and silence", as if "passion, suffering and sex were banished from his art". To his champion Lawrence Gowing he was "drawn away from his time to express the subtlest and least expressible meanings of humanity". Many of his works seem aloof, his subjects, almost all women, distanced from the viewer, sometimes probably through his use of a camera lens. That especially applies to his favourite theme – music. Most of his music players stand posed and silent at keyboards. The guitarist is quite different. She is animated, seated curiously off-centre and looking away from the light source towards the dark. Her arm is cut off by the frame and her knee drawn up beneath her gown. The gaze is oblique and alluring, as if she is engaged with someone offstage.

Who might she be? Little is known of Vermeer. Scholars have combed the Dutch city of Delft's civic records and found a mere smattering of facts, recently enhanced by the excellent website essentialvermeer.com. Vermeer went into his Protestant father's art business but fell in love with a Catholic girl, Catharina Bolnes, and was duly struck from his family record. He had to move into her mother's house in the Catholic ghetto, where he stayed all his life.

The couple must have been very close. Most Dutch families had just two or three children but the Vermeers had 11, packed into the matrimonial home in genteel poverty. Vermeer tried to earn money from art-dealing and rent-collecting for his mother-in-law. Though trained as a painter, he produced little, possibly no more than 60 works. Only some three dozen survive.

Vermeer had only one kindly patron, and even paid a butcher's bill with a painting. His estate was bankrupt on his death in 1675 at the age of 43. He had no known followers or pupils. The family had just one servant, Tanaka, probably the woman immortalised in a brown dress in The Milkmaid and other works.

It is hard to imagine a man less like the henpecked, sex-starved bohemian of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel (and film adaptation), Girl with a Pearl Earring. He emerges from John Montias's meticulously researched biography as more a loving husband and father, intrigued by science and optics but with little time or money for studios and models.

It would be natural for his models to be his wife and daughters. Their fresh open faces are remarkably alike, and quite unlike the maid. It is easy to see the lovely, ever-pregnant Catharina in some pictures, while the girls would be the eldest daughters, Maria and Elisabeth. Vermeer detectives know that Maria took the much-painted blue gown with her on her marriage, leaving the yellow one (mentioned in the family inventory) to Catharina and Elisabeth.

We know that on Vermeer's death Catharina pleaded with the receivers to leave her three pictures. One was The Art of Painting, believed to show Johannes in medieval costume painting a young girl, her face identical to the pearl earring girl. The other two appear to be of Catharina herself with the maid, and the Kenwood guitar player. Did she want these as mementos of the family?

I choose Elisabeth for the guitarist, possibly painted after her elder sister has left home in marriage. She is a teenager strumming to an unseen friend, alert with enigmatic moves and glances. Her face has none of the artless infancy of the earring girl. She is dressed up and confident in ringlets and pearl necklace, her fingers dancing over the strings.

This is the joy of art. The unknown is more intriguing than the known, the informed guess more enjoyable than the fact. But it needs to be informed. It may be boring to fiction and Hollywood, but I still see in Vermeer's work the brush of a loving husband and father. His clearly adored daughter Elisabeth is back, well hung and well lit where she should be, amid domestic masterpieces in the warmth of a great house on a hill. Kenwood is back to its former richness, a place of public resort – and personal obsession. <em> </em>

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