The Visit to the Tomb

An early history painting by Vermeer, now lost, known only from a single line in a probate document. It is recorded as “Een graft besoeckende van der Meer” (a grave-visitation by Van der Meer) in the death inventory of the Amsterdam art dealer Johannes de Renialme, valued there at 20 guilders. No image or copy of the picture survives, and it has not been traced since.

The Renialme inventory

Johannes de Renialme (c. 1600–1657) was a prosperous dealer who had trained as a goldsmith and jeweller before turning to pictures, joining the Delft Guild of Saint Luke in 1644 and trading works by major masters including Rembrandt. His estate, drawn up after his death in 1657, ran to several hundred paintings, among them more than a dozen by Rembrandt, so the appearance of a Vermeer in such company is itself a measure of the young painter’s early standing. The transcription of the inventory was published by Abraham Bredius.

A disputed subject

The inventory’s single phrase leaves the subject open. Most readings take it as a New Testament scene of the Three Marys visiting Christ’s tomb on Easter morning, a conventional history subject of the kind Vermeer painted at the start of his career. A second proposal reads it instead as a contemporary view of the tomb of William of Orange in Delft’s Nieuwe Kerk, a much-visited local monument that drew many depictions. Nothing in the surviving record settles the question.

Vermeer’s early history paintings

At 20 guilders the picture was modestly but fairly priced for a painter then only about twenty-four. As a history painting it would have belonged beside the surviving Diana and Her Companions and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the ambitious figure subjects of Vermeer’s earliest phase, before he turned to the quiet domestic interiors for which he is now known.