Maria de Knuijt

Maria Simonsdr de Knuijt (buried 26 February 1681) was a patron of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. She provided support and financial assistance to Vermeer throughout his career. De Knuijt was married to Pieter van Ruijven, a wealthy citizen of Delft, Netherlands. Pieter had been identified as Vermeer's main patron, owning more than half of Vermeer's oeuvre. Scholarship in 2023 identified de Knuijt as the main patron, as she had known him for some time and was more directly involved with the artist. After van Ruijven and de Knuijt died, their estate was inherited by their daughter Magdalena. She died about one year after her mother, and the estate was then inherited by her husband Jacob Dissius and his father Abraham Dissius.

Biography
Maria Simonsdr de Knuijt married Pieter Claesz van Ruijven in August 1653. Pieter was born in December 1624, the son of Niclaes Pietersz and Maria Graswinckel. His father was master of the Camer van Charitate (municipal charitable department) in Delft from 1623 to 1624 and the brewer at Ox Brewery. The brewery failed about 1650 when Niclaes Pietersz died. De Knuijt brought most of the wealth into the marriage.

Pieter was not known to have a profession, but de Knuijt and van Ruijven were well-off and had two homes in Delft. From 1668 to 1674, Pieter was master of the Camer van Charitate. His fortune was made through wise investments of the riches they inherited. The van Ruijven family, who lived off the Oude Canal in Delft, were members of the Arminian party in the Dutch Reformed Church.

They had a daughter, Magdalena van Ruijven, baptized at the Old Church of Delft on 12 October 1655. She married Jacob Dissius on 14 April 1680, and was generally known after that by her husband's surname. Baptism records at the Old Church identify two additional children of Maria and Pieter, Maria baptized in 1657 and Simon in 1662. They are believed to have died young, since they were not identified as heirs to de Knuijt and Pieter's fortune.

Pieter died and was buried on 7 August 1674. De Knuijt died by 26 February 1681 when she was buried in Delft next to her husband at the Old Church. Their daughter Magdalena died on 16 June 1682 at the age of 27. She and her husband had no children. The van Ruijven estate was inherited by Jacob Dissius and his father Abraham Dissius. As stipulated in Magdalena's will, Abraham was to inherit half of the estate if her mother had died before her and Magdalena and Jacob did not have any children. This may have been because Jacob, of no means himself, married Magdalena, who was an heiress. Jacob may have been given the printing press his father Abraham owned to use as a dowry, and Abraham was compensated by receiving half of his son's inheritance. Besides the paintings, Magdalena's estate included her legacy of a house in Voorstraet, the domain of Spalant, and interest-bearing obligations.

Patron of the arts
De Knuijt and her husband Pieter patronized the arts and were buyers of the works of Johannes Vermeer. According to curators of a retrospective (10 February 2023 – 4 June 2023) of Vermeer's work at the national museum, Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, de Knuijt was his main patron. She was a close neighbor when Vermeer was a child, and was more involved in supporting Vermeer's career than her husband. De Knuijt began collecting his works around the time that Vermeer started painting portraits of young women. Before that, he painted mythological and religious-themed works. The de Knuijts owned more than half of Vermeer's entire oeuvre of 37 pieces, and they purchased their first painting that was painted in 1657. Between 1657 and 1659, Vermeer painted Girl Asleep at a Table and Officer and the Laughing Girl.

Aside from the evidence that it was de Knuijt who was the patron, some additional observations stated in "Perspectives on Women in the Art of Vermeer" make it most likely that de Knuijt was the main patron. Vermeer changed his focus to domestic scenes of wealthy women's lives, within de Knuijt's purview.

"Vermeer's early predilection for the female figure; the growing market for pleasing images of youthful femininity; the identification of high-class burgher households with women in Dutch paintings of domestic life, and the aesthetic appeal to Vermeer of ordered, sunlit spaces associated with such households; the likely attraction of those subjects to women such as Maria de Knuijt, whose husband set out to build a choice collection of modern subjects painted by living masters associated with Delft: this combination of factors makes Vermeer's attention to women in his art easier to understand."

De Knuijt communicated her care and consideration for Vermeer when she bequeathed 500 guilders, then equal to about an annual salary for a craftsman, to him in a testament of 1665. He was the only non-family member mentioned in her will.

The series of twenty-one paintings owned by de Knuijt, many now-famous, included Girl with a Pearl Earring. The collection was inherited by their daughter and her husband, Magdalena and Jacob Dissius. De Knuijt and her husband collected works of other artists, like Simon de Vlieger and Emanuel de Witte.

Paintings by Vermeer
From the cited sources, the paintings numbered by the 1696 auction catalogue (numbers 1 through 12, 31 to 33, and 35 to 40) based upon Binstock's association of the catalogue — as well as Broos & Wheelock's association from their 1996 catalogue — to the Vermeer paintings:

Several additional paintings have been identified at some point as potential 1696 auction paintings. One is the Girl with a Flute, which is believed to have been made by a studio associate of Vermeer. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is another, the museum states that the earliest known owner of the painting was the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, August III who acquired the painting in 1742. The Concert, which was stolen in 1990, does not have a provenance that ties it to the 1696 auction.

Provenance
Determining the provenance of paintings owned by Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, Maria de Knuijt, their daughter Magdalena, and her husband Jacob begins with the list of Vermeer's paintings sold at an auction in 1696, one year after the death of Jacob Dissius and two years after his father's death. Another list of paintings held by Magdalena and Jacob Dissius was made in 1683, one year after Magdalena's death, but that list just stated the number of Vermeer paintings within the rooms of Magdalena and Jacob's residence.

In the late 1980s the art historian John Michael Montias proposed that Pieter Claesz van Ruijven was Vermeer's patron beginning in 1657 when van Ruijven made a loan to Vermeer of 200 guilders, which coincided with a significant change in subjects and themes for Vermeer's works. Montias concluded that the majority of the 21 Vermeer paintings in the 1696 auction following Jacob Dissius's death had initially been purchased by Pieter Claesz van Ruijven. However Broos & Wheelock note that there is no documentary evidence that Pieter van Ruijven bought or owned works by Vermeer and argue that some of the paintings could have been acquired by Dissius, his wife Magdalena, or his father Abraham.

The 16 May 1696 auction in Amsterdam offered 21 Vermeer paintings made between 1657 and 1673, two years before Vermeer's death. After the auction, Vermeer paintings were held privately for many years, sometimes centuries. When some of Vermeer's works resurfaced, they were incorrectly attributed to other Dutch artists, such as Pieter de Hooch and Rembrandt.