‘What might a picture of a kitchen scene in seventeenth-century Delft have to say about our spiritual life today?’ Photo: The Milkmaid by Jan Vermeer van Delft
Art and soul: Clive Ashwin looks to painting for the bigger picture
‘Vermeer’s work speaks to two of the central testaments of Quakerism.’
At the time of its origins, in the second half of the seventeenth century, Quakerism must have seemed very remote from other Christian traditions. Most of those had, in varying degrees, become highly dependent upon the arts in their broadest sense, including painting, sculpture, architectural symbolism, costume, devotional literature, and liturgical music. Early Quaker Meeting houses would have been bare of these embellishments, as indeed most of them still are. The spartan simplicity of the Meeting house was reflected in the dress, domestic life, and language of the early Quakers.
Over the years this disengagement from the arts has, for many Quakers, mellowed into an attitude of acceptance. There is now a recognition that the arts can serve an important role in our spiritual welfare. This is a relatively recent development, however. When some Friends presented a concert at the Meeting house I attended in 1960, an elder remarked that it was the first time music had ever been heard there, and there was still a certain amount of apprehension as to how it might be received by some of the older members.
The conduct of most Quaker worship in Britain has maintained this sense of independence from the arts. We do not have devotional poetry, pictorial icons or religious ornament as part of our worship. Elsewhere in the world, however, Quakers have, in varying degrees, diverged, adopting such things as music, bells, singing, and symbolic ornament as part of their worship.
Art represents such an important and inescapable part of our daily life that we cannot discount it as a force for good or ill in our spiritual condition and development. Consider the films we see, the novels we read, the pictures we admire, and so on. How might they enhance our spiritual wellbeing?
Conversely, should we recognise that, like food, not all art is good for us? Most readers can probably remember an occasion when they have regretted seeing a picture, reading a book, or sitting through a film, and wish they had not done so. On one occasion I found a book so disturbing and distasteful that I could not imagine anyone benefitting from reading it. I take most of my books to the charity shop, but this one I threw in the bin.
Plato was the first philosopher to examine the role of the arts in our moral and spiritual development. The world of ancient Greece was, of course, very different from our own, with institutionalised slavery, gender stereotyping, and a celebration of military conquest. But rather than simply rejecting the answers he gave, perhaps we should ask ourselves the question he posed: what is there in the arts which might help us to find the spiritual and moral guidance we seek?
This question is easiest to answer in relation to the narrative arts, such as drama, film, novels, poetry and anecdotal painting. These can hold up examples of behaviour that we might admire or condemn. The narrative can serve as a model for our own moral mindset. But how can a simple representation of visual experience serve as a moral or spiritual guide?
Jan Vermeer van Delft lived and worked in Holland during the period when Britain was passing through the existential turmoil of the civil war. The Netherlands had recently thrown off the yoke of Catholic Spain and adopted a variant of Protestantism. Churches were purged of most artistic symbolism, which was replaced by a new simplicity verging on austerity. Artists formerly employed in the religious art industry were forced to adopt new subjects and ways of working: the portrait, the moral anecdote, and the depiction of daily life and domesticity.
Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid epitomises this impulse. What could be simpler? A woman, dressed in domestic clothes, stands at a kitchen table, carefully pouring milk from a jug. A cut loaf lies on the table. Light falls across the scene from a window high on the left. What could be more ordinary – boring, even?
It appears that many of Vermeer’s contemporaries found his paintings of limited interest. Although he was involved in art dealing, he seems to have sold his own paintings to a small group of admirers. He worked slowly, leaving a legacy of just over thirty verified paintings. After his death, his reputation sank into obscurity for two centuries. It was not until the 1880s that interest was rekindled, and even in that decade the remarkable and now priceless Girl with a Pearl Earring was sold at auction for the modern equivalent of £20!
So what might a picture of a kitchen scene in seventeenth-century Delft have to say about our spiritual life today? One answer is that it gives expression to a sense of gratitude for some of God’s greatest gifts, the gift of the material world, with its colours, textures, smells, sights and sounds.
In our imagination we smell the bread and feel it crumble under our fingers. We hear the whisper of the poured milk; we sense the snug tension of the well-fitting bodice. It awakens and excites a parallel gratitude for God’s gift of the material world around us – the sensory world you inhabit as you turn these pages or read them on a screen, the sound of voices and passing traffic, the domestic smells of food and drink.
Vermeer’s genius is not merely the pedantic naturalism that was later sought by so many painters of the nineteenth century, attempting to catalogue every leaf on a tree and every hair on a head. It is the world as perceived through the gift of sight, which is quite different from a plodding inventory of material reality.
This is why, in its apparent innocence, Vermeer’s work has been so incredibly difficult to forge. When Han Van Meegeren, one of the most notorious forgers of the twentieth century, passed his work off as Vermeer’s, he sensibly chose narrative subjects quite remote from the genre tradition, claiming his paintings filled a gap in the artist’s known output.
In its lucid clarity, Vermeer’s work speaks to two of the central testaments of Quakerism: simplicity and truth – the truth not only of what is there, but how we perceive and celebrate what is there.
The sacramental nature of Vermeer’s work is captured in the words of the Quaker thinker George Gorman who, after prolonged contemplation of one of his paintings, observed: ‘There was drawn from me an acknowledgement of the greatness of the artist and his painting and I caught, with awe, the light of his inspiration and creativeness. Further, something was given to me that I can only describe as, literally, a transcending of the normal, everyday world. This quite simple secular act was for a me a truly worshipful experience’ (Quaker faith & practice 21.34).
Comments
Thank you for making me look at that picture again.
By gturner on 8th June 2023 - 9:05
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