Jacobus Vrel emerges from Vermeer’s shadow at Fondation Custodia — review

The catalogue introducing the unknown “Van der Meer of Delft” to museum audiences in 1866 carried on its cover a picture which, it turned out later, was not by Vermeer at all: it was the work of a Dutch forerunner sharing his initials, his focus on street scenes and women in interiors, and his qualities of silence and mystery.

Jacobus Vrel, an intriguing, elusive artist, remains as obscure today as Vermeer was then, so his first ever exhibition, launched at the Mauritshuis earlier this year and just transferred — and doubled in size — to Paris’s Fondation Custodia, is very welcome.

With its gracious courtyards, airy galleries and libraries, the Custodia, France’s embassy for Dutch art, is a still point in the screeching city — a perfect setting for Vrel. The Musée d’Orsay is steps away, but calm falls the moment you pass through the Custodia’s gate. For this show, you leave one quiet narrow street and go straight into another: Vrel’s alluringly odd “Street Scene with a Woman Seated on a Bench”.

A mosaic of weathered red brick, white plaster, curlicues of roof tiles, uneven cobbles, all meticulously delineated beneath a glimpse of sky, demonstrate typical Dutch textural materiality. However, everything in this tightly packed composition — tall gabled houses, arrow-thin windows framed in white, tapering chimneys, stele-like slabs marking house boundaries — is so stylised into vertical, up-thrusting forms that you notice, above all, the abstract patterning. It’s demonstrably a piece of artifice, a stage set, as well as an atmospheric depiction.

“They show alleyways lined by red brick houses which reach all the way to the top. And yet air and light circulate between them. It is impossible to imagine more delicate, translucent harmonious colouring,” wrote critic Marius Chaumelin when such paintings began to appear on the French market.

“Street Scene” was bought in 1865 by Theophile Thoré, the writer who rediscovered Vermeer and named him the “Sphinx of Delft”. Thoré was sure that “I had once again got my hands on an alleyway by Vermeer. It was a Vermeer, to the life, even close-up.” Disappointed on finding Vrel’s signature on the canvas, he assumed this other “JV” to be a faithful follower. In fact, he was a precursor, pioneering the Dutch small-town genre picture in the 1630s, 20 years before Vermeer, and depicting not Delft but a fanciful version of Zwolle, in the north-eastern Netherlands.

Zwolle’s encircling medieval wall and walkway are notable in several paintings. In “Houses by the Town Wall and Two Figures Walking down the Street” it looms above lime-washed brick buildings with open shutters — a brown and white chequerboard composition, eerie with its ghostly figure in one slender casement. “Street Scene with a Bakery by the Town Wall” shows the wooden walkway above a shop, where a diagonally hung white cloth displays loaves and buns. The baker himself leans out dreamily from a window, elbows resting on the sill. This pensive baker recurs in Vrel — perhaps an alter ego or self-portrait.

Hamburg’s Kunsthalle acquired “Street Scene with a Bakery” in 1888 as a Vermeer. It seems obvious now that it is more literal, less synthesised into a frieze of light and shadow and time stopped, than Vermeer’s famous “Little Street”. On the other hand, Vrel has a strangeness which allows every age to reimagine him. In the near-fantastical “Street Scene with People Conversing”, irregular facades with ornamental signs, striped poles, windows painted like crosses, awnings and turrets crammed into shallow space call to mind Paul Klee’s and Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s anarchic, flattened montages of houses.

Among Vrel’s destabilising interiors, the Custodia owns the disruptive “Seated Woman Looking at a Child Through a Window”. A plump figure in a bright white headscarf, seen from the back, tilts her chair violently forward; any second it will slip away from under her. Its spindly frame, an open cubed form, becomes the diagonal interrupting the large gridded window, the painting’s geometric foundation. The woman places her hand on a pane — you sense the softness of flesh meeting cold hard glass. On the other side of the window, a child’s blurry face dissolves in darkness, though silvery light blazes above, its source inexplicable. A curled scrap of paper on the floor has Vrel’s signature; otherwise the room, and its stretch of creamy-grey wall, are bare. 

The play of shapes and light varies in Vrel’s interiors, but almost all centre on an ample woman, like this one viewed from behind, wearing a homely dark dress offset by white headgear — a radiant focal point. Many also feature a partly concealed figure, or memory of one, providing the enigmatic narrative charge.

Through double-height leaded windows, light floods “Interior with a Woman and a Boy”, but the drama is in the shadows. A child peers out from a top alcove; a beautifully carved spectral figure, abstracted like a modernist sculpture, seems about to step out of the fireplace; a black cloak, loose imitation of the human form, hovers in a recess. The cloak reappears among the tenebrous forms pressing towards the white-scarfed figure in “Woman Leaning out of an Open Window”, and in “Interior with a Woman Combing a Girl’s Hair”, from Detroit; here it hangs on another vast expanse of empty wall, the thickly textured white plaster contrasting with the warm tones of the floor — renderings of pure painterly surface. 

This blank wall as backdrop for a single figure, also employed here to theatrical effect in “An Old Woman Reading, with a Boy Behind the Window”, is not unique to Vrel — it’s in Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” and “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” — but Vrel’s rooms are unusually sparse and unadorned for Dutch interiors. His palette too is reduced: earthy red-browns, beige, silver, so different from Vermeer’s scintillating lemon and blues. Vrel’s are distinctively lower-middle-class settings and figures, less refined than Vermeer’s and de Hooch’s, and rare at the time.

Who bought them? Three Vrels are recorded in the collection of a Habsburg duke in 1659; then the trail vanishes. Vrel’s birth and death dates are unknown; he falls off the radar until, by accident, his name emerges in the 19th century’s search for Vermeer.

He is, of course, a less significant artist, but his paintings have their own charm of interiority — Karin Leonhard in the excellent catalogue describes them as “empty rooms filled with inner space” — and bold formal simplicity. As with Vermeer, there’s a refreshing absence of the moralising stories conventional in Dutch genre. Rather, Vrel shares with later artists — Hammershøi, Mondrian — that particular northern European sensibility of reticence, confinement, often leading to an interest in abstracting reality. This show is a revelatory delight.

To September 17, fondationcustodia.fr