The Vermeer connection

 

When I was a child, among the family legends about a Victorian actress, bankruptcy, a World War One fighter pilot, a grandfather who shot a swan by mistake, unexploded bombs in the Blitz and a scientist who kept a pistol under his pillow, there was a story that one of my ancestors on my mother’s side had written a book. A Catalogue Raisonné of Dutch and Flemish Painting. I tracked it down via Bristol City Library. A multi-volume tome published in the early nineteenth century by my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Smith. That was long before the internet and quite a lot more information about him has seeped into the public domain since then, thanks largely to former National Gallery director Charles Sebag-Montefiore taking an interest in him and publishing a book of his and his descendants’ letters.

Born in Trowbridge towards the end of the eighteenth century, John Smith went up to London to train as a picture framer. He was obviously very good at his craft and, once he’d set himself up in business in New Bond Street, his clients included John Constable and the Prince Regent. This success is presumably how he was able to afford trips to the Hermitage in St Petersburg – without realising, I assume, that one of his first wife’s ancestors, Thomas Smythe, had been in the same city during the early days of Boris Godunov’s reign – and, more importantly in the longer term, visits to the Netherlands where he encountered the work of Rubens and Vermeer. Both artists not being especially valued at that time, John Smith began to buy their paintings and take them back to England where his picture framing business rapidly transformed into an art dealership. He bought and sold paintings for the rest of his life, as did his son and his grandson, before my own great-grandfather blew the profits on various indulgences and had to sell the business after a pleasingly complex series of Edwardian scandals.

On the one hand, it seems that John Smith was instrumental in creating the modern art trade and all its absurdities – it’s perhaps no accident that either Sotheby’s or Christies occupy the premises he once owned in New Bond Streets – while, on the other, he also seems to have played a key role in ‘saving’ Vermeer from oblivion. According to various scholarly sources, it was his inclusion of Vermeer in the Catalogue Raisonné and possible purchase of Vermeer’s works for his illustrious clients that led to the Delft genius being recognised as the important figure in European art he undoubtedly is. It would, of course, be pleasingly spectacular to conclude this story with the revelation that when the last of my ancestors on that side of my family – my mother’s aunt – died last year, we found a long-lost Vermeer in her attic. But we didn’t. It is, however, rather nice to know that my forebear played at least some part in putting Vermeer on the map.