Johannes Vermeer is now one of the most famous artists worldwide,
I mean he's definitely and his works definitely have the status of icons.
Think of his tranquil interiors like the girl reading a letter in Dresden,
or even more so, the girl with the pearl earring,
which has become so famous and so popular.
However, young Vermeer set out quite differently.
Vermeer's early production is quite different in subject matter
because he set out as a history painter,
rather than a painter of every day scenes.
But it also differs in size, for example.
His paintings, his early paintings are much bigger than his later production
and also in style. His style is, if you like, a little bit immature;
it's broader and not so sophisticated
and detailed as in his later works.
If we look at this painting, it is full-length, life-size figures,
it's quite a challenging painting
and if you look at the way he depicted light and colour,
especially if you look at the face of Mary and Martha,
he is not working in a linear way, you know,
he's not defining shapes by lines.
But he's basically putting patches of paint next to one-another
and these create the idea, the image, the volume of the figures.
Well the story of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
is taken from the New Testament,
it's taken from the Gospel of Saint Luke,
and Luke relates how Christ travelling came into the house of Martha
and her sister Mary.
And Martha immediately started to serve him,
to busy herself preparing food and so forth.
And at the same time, her sister Mary sat at his feet.
And this is exactly the point that Vermeer has depicted,
this, sort of, complaint and then his reaction.
Because he's pointing towards Mary and telling Martha it's nice
and fine what you are doing and I'm very grateful for this
but Mary has taken the better part, in listening.
And this is, the story is basically about two different ways of leading your life.
The active life, as Martha is performing and the contemplative life,
as Mary is doing and performing in this painting.
If you look at the size of this painting it's highly unlikely that
Vermeer painted it for the open market;
it's just too big, that it's too expensive
he spent too much time and money on materials
to just have something in the shop and wait for someone to come along and buy it.
So in a way, I think, there are two possibilities.
One is that it was a commission for one of the
clandestine catholic churches that at that point
existed in the northern Netherlands.
However, if you look at the subject, this is not really a subject suitable
for an altar.
So it is more likely, I think, that this was a private commission,
again of course, a catholic private commission.
Then basically the idea about this being a Catholic painting
is not confirmed by any documents
and actually we don't know anything for sure
about the early provenance of the painting
and it is only in 1901, when the painting surfaces in the London art market
and it's cleaned, and the signature was discovered,
that it was established as a work by young Vermeer.
The painting was owned by my great grandfather, William Allan Coats
and he left us rather an amusing account of how the picture came into Britain,
so I'll just read from the letter;
'My large Vermeer of Delft, was sold to an old lady,
by a dealer in 1884 for £10 and re-sold for £13.
'Collie' - that's Arthur Leslie Collie, who was a Bond Street dealer -
'bought it from a dealer, who bought it from its owner,
a Bristol man called Abbott.
It was offered to his brother and himself, one after the other by his mother's trustees,
but they all refused it, he himself saying "Take the beastly thing away!"
Well, it's interesting hearing that description of the Vermeer because obviously
it wasn't considered to be an object of great beauty,
but as far as W.A. Coats was concerned,
he was very keen to add it to his collection.
The late 19th century in Scotland saw a huge increase in the art market
and this is partly because there were a large number of rich industrialists
and mercantile collectors like Coats,
who had made their fortunes on the back of the Industrial Revolution.
But they were a different kind of collector from the previous generation of aristocratic collectors,
who could afford to travel to Europe
and acquire pictures on the grand tour.
These were much more kind of rough-and-ready,
kind of new money and they were very much dependant on the dealer
to advise them when it came to buying works of art.
The Coats family was extremely philanthropic and
from the outset, W.A. Coats decided that he'd like to leave the picture
to the National Gallery of Scotland,
it being the most important picture in his collection.
When he died in 1926, his son Thomas got in touch with the gallery
and offered the painting,
but the telegraph that he sent is rather amusingly brief,
and he writes: 'Please consider Vermeer formally offered. Stop. Have written
And it's signed by Thomas Coats.
Anyway, the following day a notice appeared in the newspaper
and the headline read "Art treasure, Vermeer painting for Scotland, Coats gift to National Gallery"
and in this article it actually states the market value of the picture at the time.
It was thought that the picture would have sold for between £30,000 -£35,000 at auction,
which may not seem so much today
but was really a huge amount of money in 1927.