The Woman Whose Money the Vermeers Lived On

Three pictures in this archive were painted inside one household

The Concert, Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Astronomer were all painted in the years when Vermeer lived and worked in the household Maria Thins headed on the Oude Langendijk in Delft.

The window is documented at both ends. The first record placing Vermeer at that address is the burial of one of his children on 27 December 1660, and he died there in December 1675. The Gardner's Concert is dated by the catalogue literature to about 1663 to 1666, the Mauritshuis gives about 1665 for the Girl, and The Astronomer is signed and dated 1668. All three sit inside the window. Neither the Mauritshuis nor the Louvre says anything about the house in its own entry, so for those two the connection is chronological inference, and we mark it as that rather than dressing it as a document.

What follows is not an argument that a woman secretly painted these pictures, or that she chose their subjects. It is narrower and better evidenced than that. Vermeer left no letters and no personal writing. Maria Thins generated legal paper for forty years, and a great deal of what we know about how these paintings came to exist we know because she was in court, before a notary or on a tax roll.

The tax register assesses her at 26,000 guilders and does not list him

In the Delft wealth register for 1674 and 1675, Maria Thins is entered on a personal capital of 26,000 guilders and Johannes Vermeer is not entered at all.

The register is the Groot Familiegeld, and the entry reads Maria Tins, wife of Rijnier Bolnes. She stands at number 186 on the Delft list, inside the richest five per cent of the town, on a capital that would ordinarily have yielded something like 1,300 guilders a year. Frans Grijzenhout, working from Kees van der Wiel's identification of the entry, is careful about what the painter's absence means: Vermeer is not mentioned at that address because he was not taxed, and he was not taxed because he and his wife did not own more than a thousand guilders, which was equally true of about seventy per cent of Delft.

That is the asymmetry in one line of a tax roll, and it beats any anecdote. The household had money and the painter did not have it. He was also not idle with hers: in May 1667 she gave him a power of attorney to collect 3,400 guilders and interest secured on a brickworks she had sold, together with 250 guilders owed to her as her sister's heir, a thousand guilders from the regents of Moordrecht and 289 guilders and 10 stuivers from the sale of osier land, and she empowered him to reinvest it according to his own judgement and discretion. In March 1675, nine months before he died, she authorised him again, as Johannes Vermeer constryck schilder, to act for her in the division of her late husband's estate.

She would not sign, and the register still shows the refusal

Maria Thins refused to sign the consent to her daughter's marriage, and the Delft betrothal register carries the refusal as a physical fact.

On the evening of 4 April 1653 the notary Johannes Ranck went to her house with two acquaintances of Vermeer, Captain Bartholomeus Melling, about fifty-nine years old, and the painter Leonaert Bramer, about fifty-eight. They asked her to sign an act permitting the banns. She would not. What she would do, in the standard reading of the deed, is undertake not to obstruct the publication of the banns and to tolerate it, and she said so more than once. The betrothal was entered on 5 April, and the Delft city archive describes what the book looks like: the entry was first struck through and later entered again, because the bride's mother had not agreed with her daughter's choice, and after two of Vermeer's acquaintances had spoken with her she dropped her resistance. The marriage was blessed on 20 April at Schipluiden.

The consequence is not sentimental. Paul Begheyn points out that Vermeer was not yet twenty-five and was therefore legally a minor, and that marriage made him at a stroke competent to act, to run the family art dealing and to be a breadwinner. Her signature, or her withholding of it, sat on the gate of his legal capacity to trade. Why she refused is argued: the popular accounts say religion, a recent study using old Dutch law argues difference of rank and finds no sign of a personal quarrel between mother and daughter, and there is no archival evidence at all for the conversion that is usually attached to the story. We record the dispute and do not settle it.

The house was rented, and from whom is the interesting part

The Thins and Vermeer household did not own the house on the Oude Langendijk. It rented.

This corrects a thing often said loosely, including in the shorthand that Vermeer lived in his mother-in-law's house. The quarter was the Papenhoek, and the houses in it had been bought by wealthy Delft Catholics, among them Machtelt van Beest and Pieter van der Dussen, to support a Catholic community that was legally suppressed, and were let out mostly to unmarried or widowed women of that community. Maria Thins, separated from her husband, was one of those tenants. The house Jan Geensz Thins bought in 1641 for 2,400 guilders, whom Grijzenhout calls her cousin and Montias her presumed brother, and which older accounts treat as the family house, is agreed by both sides of the current argument not to be the family house. Which building held the hidden Jesuit church is itself disputed: Grijzenhout places it there, while Slager reads the documents as putting the church in the fourth and fifth houses along, and several authors have followed him.

Which of the two corner houses the family occupied is unresolved and both cases are in print. Grijzenhout argues for Groot Serpent on the east corner, owned by Pieter van der Dussen, reading the order in which the tax collector of 1674 walked the street and wrote the names down. Slager, and Pieter Roelofs in the Rijksmuseum's 2023 catalogue, argue for Trapmolen on the west corner, owned by Machtelt van Beest, from the fit between the 1676 inventory and the surviving building. One rich Catholic woman and one rich Catholic man are the landlords in the running, and the painter is a tenant's son-in-law in every version.

The picture on the back wall is an identification, not a fact

The brothel scene hanging behind the musicians in The Concert has been identified with a painting listed among Maria Thins's goods in 1641, and an identification is not a title deed.

The document is the division of the marital property of Maria Thins and Reynier Bolnes, dated 27 November 1641, which lists a painting of a procuress pointing with her hand. Albert Blankert identified that entry with Dirck van Baburen's Procuress of 1622, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the identification has been repeated ever since. Wayne Franits, in the Baburen catalogue raisonne of 2013, has argued instead that the family owned a replica of the Boston picture. The three museums with an interest do not agree with each other: Boston says the painting or a copy of it was owned by Vermeer's family and hedges its own provenance line with the word possibly; the Gardner says the Procuress was in fact owned by Vermeer's family; the National Gallery in London says flatly that a copy of the painting was owned by Vermeer's mother-in-law. None of the three says that Maria Thins owned the Boston canvas.

So the honest version is narrower and still remarkable. A picture answering that description was in the family's goods, and Vermeer put a picture answering that description into two of his own interiors, The Concert and the National Gallery's A Young Woman seated at a Virginal. The same caution kills a neater claim we would have liked to make. No document makes the painting on the back wall of The Astronomer hers: the Louvre reads it as a Finding of Moses attributed to Peter Lely and suggests it may have come from Vermeer's own collection. One household property in one picture is what the documents support.

Her capital was entailed before Vermeer was born

The money that kept this household was tied up by a testament of 27 November 1603, and Maria Thins held only a life interest in part of it.

That testament was made by her mother's sister, Diewertge van Hensbeeck. It stipulated that the assets divided among the three principal heirs were to remain intact, that only the income was to be consumed and that the capital was to pass in freehold to those heirs' children's children. In plain terms, after Maria Thins and her mother had taken the income, the capital belonged to Catharina Bolnes and her children. Vermeer's children were the beneficiaries of an instrument drawn up nearly thirty years before Vermeer was born, and he knew it: in September 1673 he appeared before the magistrates of Gouda, set out the arrangement and asked in his wife's name and with his mother-in-law's approval for half the capital, 5,183 guilders, promising to hand the interest to her. They allotted him about 2,500 guilders in obligations, and in January 1674 he sold two of them worth 800 guilders.

Her own testaments run the same way. In the first we know of, made at Gouda on 18 June 1657, the clothing, jewellery and silver go to Catharina and 200 guilders to her goddaughter Maria Vermeer, her son Willem gets a bed and bedding, and everything else goes to the children of Willem and Catharina, with the parents taking only the usufruct for their lives. In the testament of 27 September 1667 she leaves Catharina five sixths and offers Willem income in place of his legitimate share on the express condition that he is given no power of disposal over the capital, which is vested in Catharina and after her in her children. She made six wills in all. Every one of them treats the capital as something to be passed through the generation in front of her rather than handed to it.

The inventory everybody reads cannot show what was hers

The estate inventory taken after Vermeer's death is in two parts, and neither of them is a list of Maria Thins's property.

The act was drawn up by the notary Johannes van Veen on the last day of February 1676, at the widow's own request, and Catharina Bolnes signed it. The first part records the effects in the house that belonged to Catharina, including what Vermeer had owned until his death. The second is headed as a specification of household goods of which one half belonged to Maria Thins and one half to her daughter. There is no third part. Anything that was Maria Thins's alone is invisible in the document by design, which is why the absence of any procuress from its rooms settles nothing about the Baburen.

It is also why the inventory reads poorer than the household was, and the people closest to the document have said so. Montias thought some of her best things had been put away, or the clerk had been told they were hers outright, and noted that Vermeer's Art of Painting had been formally transferred from daughter to mother days before the inventory was taken, with an eye to the petition for relief from her debts that Catharina was about to make. The Delft city archive puts the same reading in its own voice, saying that real luxury is absent and that many researchers suspect the more expensive things had been moved to Maria Thins. What the inventory does place in the great hall, among the goods held half and half, is ten portraits of the Thins lineage in plain black frames. Her ancestors were on the wall of the room a client would have waited in.

What the documents actually establish, instrument by instrument

Set the instruments in order and the household resolves into a series of acts by one woman.

Read down that column and the pattern is not patronage in the usual sense. She commissioned nothing, and no document has her choosing a subject or paying for a canvas. What she did was carry the household's legal weight for twenty-two years, and then carry its debts.

Even the grave was hers

Vermeer was buried on 15 December 1675 in a grave that belonged to his mother-in-law, with the coffin of one of his dead children placed on top of his.

The parish could collect nothing from him. Against his name in the register of the poor-relief levy on the best cloak stands the phrase niet te halen, nothing to collect. His widow petitioned for relief from his debts on 30 April 1676; Antony van Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in the same year as Vermeer, was appointed curator of the estate that September. Maria Thins then spent four years in and around court. In November 1676 she settled her dead son's affairs by taking on his debts and paying 500 guilders and 60 guilders of costs. In March 1677 she served a formal notice on Leeuwenhoek to stop him selling The Art of Painting, which her daughter had transferred to her against what was owed; he answered the next day that he had only got the picture back by litigation and by paying 342 guilders for it, and that he intended to sell it anyway. The estate sale was set for 15 March 1677 at the guild chamber. No record of that sale survives, and whether the picture was sold in it is unknown; Erik de Visser reads her manoeuvres as having bought enough time to keep it. In July 1679 a court awarded her the status of preferential creditor, and in October she swore that the money spent on Vermeer's death debts had been her own and that she had never been repaid.

Two readings of that record are in print and both are by people who have read the documents. Montias wrote that there was little doubt in his mind that she was a contentious, domineering and vindictive woman. Erik de Visser reads the same acts as a matriarch acting solely to secure the future of her grandchildren. We are not going to adjudicate a character from probate filings. What the filings establish is narrower and is not in dispute: the money in that household was hers, the legal machinery was hers, the grave was hers, and eight under-age children whose father died insolvent were provided for out of an estate she spent her last years defending.

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