Maria Thins

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Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress, 1622, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting was owned by Maria Thins, mother-in-law of Johannes Vermeer, who reproduced it within two of his own paintings.[1]
Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress, 1622, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The painting was owned by Maria Thins, mother-in-law of Johannes Vermeer, who reproduced it within two of his own paintings.[1]

Maria Thins (ca. 1593-Delft, December 27, 1680) was a member of the Gouda Thins' family .[1] In 1622 she married to Reynier Bolnes, a prominent and prosperous brickmaker. In 1635 the marriage deteriorated; her sister found her crying in bed after her husband had beaten her. The couple moved to another house, where previously Wouter Crabeth had lived. There Bolnes had his dinner in the frontroom, together with his son, while he refused to talk to her and slept in a room upstairs. At one time her daughter Cornelia was locked up by her father and in 1641 Maria Thins decided to move to Delft, where her brother lived. Her husband refused to divorce her, but in 1649 she received a considerable som of money from him.

In 1653 her daughter Catharina married Johannes Vermeer in Schipluiden and at some time the couple moved in the rather spacious house on Oude Langendijk. Vermeer had his atelier on the front side of the second floor. The domineering mother-in-law apparently played an important role in their life. Maria Thins was a devotee of the Jesuit order in the nearby Catholic Church, and this seems to have influenced Johannes and Catherina too. Their third son was called Ignatius, after the founder of the Jesuit Order.[2] It is not known if the children were baptized in the Catholic Church, because the baptize books from that period did not survive.

In 1663 her son Willem, a jobless bachelor, was locked up in an institution after an argument with his mother, and attacking his pregnant sister Catharina with a stick. In 1665 Maria Thins was entrusted with her son's property. She was not required by law to limit his share to legal minimum, but she told he had been calling her names since his youth.[3]

In 1672 Maria Thins got into financial difficulties: her land near Schoonhoven was flooded to prevent the French army crossing the Dutch Water Line. In 1675, when Vermeer went on several business trips for his mother-in-law, first to Gouda, when her husband had died, and then to Amsterdam. There he cheated her and borrowed money on her name.[4] Vermeer got into a frenzy, as his wife wrote because of all the financial difficulties, and within a day or and he had fallen from being healthy to dead. After Vermeers death Maria Thins stated that she used her income to help support the struggling painter and his growing family. In 1676 she lived in the Hague but moved back to Delft, where she was buried in the Old Church, next to Vermeer. Catharina moved to Breda.

[edit] References

  1. ^ In the Great or Saint John Church in Gouda there is a stained glass window, paid by and with her ancestors.
  2. ^ Bailey, Anthony, Vermeer: A View of Delft, p. 63. Macmillan, 2002. ISBN 0805069305.
  3. ^ J.M. Montias (1989) Vermeer and his milieu, p. 160-169.
  4. ^ J.M. Montias, p. 210-212.

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