Johannes Vermeer’s influence and inspiration

. . . my work, which I’ve done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (Letter of June 12, 1716)

 

He was a friend of the painter Jan Vermeer (1632-1675), and the microscope may have inspired Dutch artists of the period in their endeavors to reproduce the surface textures of cloth, insects, fur, feathers, glass, and mirrors.

Did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek model for Vermeer’s paintings?

            

The Geographer (detail)

             

The Astronomer (detail) 

Portrait of Leeuwenhoek(detail) by J. Verkolje
1686

Many critics have asked if the young men who appear in The Geographer and The  Astronomer (which seem to be the same man) represent Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. A detail of J. Verkolje’s portrait (above 3rd picture) of the scientist dates 1668 when he was  54 years of age. If  Van Leeuwenhoek did indeed pose in Vermeer’s paintings, he would have done so when he was approximately 32 seeing that the two paintings are generally dated near 1668.

Arthur Wheelock, curator of Northern Painting in the Washington National Gallery and noted Vermeer expert, believes that not only did Van Leeuwenhoek sit for Vermeer’s two paintings but that they may have even been commissioned by the scientist himself. On the other hand, John Michael Montias, noted Vermeer expert and author of Vermeer and his Milieu, sees no particular resemblance between “the elegant, distinguished-looking scholars portrayed in The Astronomer and The Geographer and the course- featured Van Leeuwenhoek.” In Verkolje’s portrait, Van Leeuwenhoek  has a nose similar to Vermeer’s man but his face seems broader although this discrepancy could be explained by the difference in age.

Resource: http://www.essentialvermeer.com

Johannes Vermeer is one of the best known artists from the Dutch Golden Age. His name is inextricably linked with Delft, the city in which he was born in 1632 and where he lived and worked all his life. His paintings found their way all over the world; only seven of his works still remain in Dutch museums.

Famed for his mastery of light, there is more to Vermeer than meets the eye. As a true Delftenaar he made full use of the technology available to him in the form of the camera obscura or so called ‘goggle box’. Fellow Delftenaar Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a friend of Vermeer’s and had a very large influence on him through his knowledge on lenses and their use in this technique. Through the eyes of Vermeer it can be seen an interesting and beautiful picture of the life and history of the city.

Koos de Wilt studied law and history of art. He has worked in law and publicity, and having founded several publishing companies and having written a number of books, he now makes films and publishes in newspapers and periodicals. He is currently the director of the Vermeer Centre in Delft.

resource: http://www.tudelft.nl

In the following website [http://www.answers.com/topic/jan-vermeer?cat=entertainment] I have found a list of events to which Vermeer is related to. Besides the publication of Tracy Chevalier The Girl with a Pear Earring and the film of the same name, Vermeer seems to be related to other painters, writers, enterprises or even singers. From the list provided in the webpage I have extracted the lyrics of a song dedicated to Vermeer. It was composed by Bob Walkenhorst, the guitarist and principal songwriter for The Rainmakers. The album is called The Beginner and it was released in 2003. Here it goes:

Jan Vermeer

I wish I could dance like Jan Vermeer
He sold his soul for a bucket of light I hear
And he's drunk in Delpht, painting the town
He likes to see the world a little upside down
And he laughs at me across three hundred years
I wish I could dance like Jan Vermeer

I wish that you loved me like Jan Vermeer
Down at the Riksmuseum you were all in tears
Touched your love with a sable brush
But at the silent auction think I said too much
Put your heart on the block for the highest bidder
Sold to Jan Vermeer

I'm watching you with Jan Vermeer
I got a private eye and a dying ear
Got a camera obscura, a frosted glass
I got chiarascuro out the ass
And you're betting I'm sweating just sitting here
While you're tearing up the tapestry with Jan Vermeer

I wish I was famous like Jan Vermeer
He went from worthless to priceless in less than a year
I been from worthless to priceless and back again
I crack my back on the rack trying to stretch my skin
I think 2300's going to be my year
I'll be framed and hung like Jan Vermeer

References → http://www.answers.com/topic/jan-vermeer?cat=entertainment & http://www.sundancewebservices.net/rm/beginner.html 

Vermeer was criticized for exaggerating the perspective of his interior settings until eyes accustomed to reality as seen through the camera lens recognized that his perspective was in fact accurate. When the painter is very close to the nearest object in his composition, for example, only 2 feet from it, an object of equal size that is 4 feet from his eye will be depicted, correctly, as half the size of the first. Vermeer arranged his objects to achieve such contrasts. The effect of this practice is to make the voids in a sense tangible. The space is built up along with the objects in a construction of cubic solidity.

It has been suggested that Vermeer used a camera obscura in composing his pictures and that this accounts for both his striking compositions and his peculiarities in handling colors and values. Delft in his time was a center of optical experimentation and lens making, and it would not be surprising if artists there availed themselves of optical devices in their work. However, the unique qualities of Vermeer’s paintings must be attributed to his artistic personality. The figures and objects Vermeer painted belong to their environment in a special way that heightens the impression that what he is depicting is a block of space with all that it contains rather than solids separated by voids. He renounced the contours that in most paintings distinguished between figures and their setting. Instead, the outlines of his objects are insubstantial; they unite the elements of his paintings rather than separate them.

Vermeer’s manner of modeling, too, was exceptional. He built his figures with planes of contrasted values, omitting the graduations of tone that most painters use to model the form. In his mature works he punctuated his subtle patterns of light and shadow with pointillé. 

The figures depicted in the paintings exist in a realm of abstract beauty. The quietness, serenity, order, and immutability of the world of Vermeer’s art provide, for those with a taste for such virtues, intimations of immortality. Perhaps this why this painter has always been felt to be mysterious.

Reference: http://www.answers.com/topic/jan-vermeer?cat=entertainment 

I could never imagine that Dali had painted the Lacemaker in his own original version. Besides, here you can see some kind of experiments with a rhinoceros and the Vermeer’s painting. (A mixture between a funny and ridiculous experiment) See this video:

• Youtube. http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk8wNNL5v9M

It seems that he wanted to represent the ‘fight’ between the rhinoceros and the Vermeer’s painting. At the end of the video, both Vermeer’s painting and Dali’s painting appear.

Henricus van Meegeren was the most famous forger ever known. It seems that his speciality was to falsify Vermeer’s pieces of art. Just with his falsifications of Vermeer he got a great fortune: more than half a billion dollars in today’s currency! One of his best falsifications was the painting ‘Emmaus’, which was the finest Vermeer ever made (in the photograph below we can see Meegeren painting the Vermeer)

It was himself who declared to be the forger of the ‘Emmaus’ as well as of other pictures of Vermeer, and besides, of other great Old Masters’ pictures. For example, ‘The Witch of Haarlem’ of Frans Hals (both shown below, the original and the fake).

His fakes were of a great complexity and very well done. That is maybe the reason why he became the best forger of the history, becoming known overnight as ‘the man who swindled Goering’. Although the museums avoid him, he ha a lot of fans who like to collect his works, fakes, under his own name. Finally, Meergeren died in 1947, after serving a year’s sentence for forgery. “Before his trial Han van Meegeren demonstrated his forgery techniques before an expert panel by painting his last forgery Jesus among the Doctors.” (Wikipedia. Han Van Meergeren. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren), see picture below.

It was a huge work for him to develop these techniques to being able to copy Vermeer’s pictures, precisely he deloped them throughout six years. Some of his fakes of Vermeer were Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Woman with a Lute near a Window which he named Lady Reading Music and Lady Playng Music.

To know more about this fabulous painter and forger see:

• Wikipedia. Han van Meergeren. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren
• The Meegeren website. http://www.meegeren.net/index.php

This has also been the websites used for this article.

I found this video on the internet, more exactly on the ”youtube.com” in which it shows some of the most famous Vermeer´s paintings. The page is the following one: Vermeer´s video.

Music and musical instruments were recurrent themes in mid-seventeenth century pictures. I am going to show you some of these instruments illustrating the examples with details from Vermeer’s paintings.

First of all, the virginal, is a box-shaped keyboard instrument that looks like a piano. The keyboard is often surrounded by decorative block printed papers, as in this example where we can see a sentence with a concrete meaning (Music: companion of joy, balm for sorrow).

This instrument also appears in another painting, A Lady Seated at a Virginal:

There are some other string instruments appearing in Vermeer’s paintings: lutes, citterns, or barooque guitars.

Woman with a Lute.

The Guitar Player.

If we look carefully at this painting, we can see the lady holding a trumpet.

The Art of Painting.

WE can conclude that in Vermeer’s times, music was an accepted entertainment for polite society. It was not only a pleasurable means for escaping everyday cares, but also a popular and widely accepted vehicle for facilitating social contact. Music also promoted respectful contact irregardless of nationality or religion, because it was another kind of art in a very high esteem.

There was, in short, a belief in music as the reflection of a  Divine Harmony.

INformation taken from Essential Vermeer

Vermeer’s paintings are full of musical instruments and people making music. In the case of The Music Lesson, the instrument is the virginal (espineta, in Spanish), an instrument greatly admired by the Dutch upper class during the mid-seventeenth century.

The music written for the virginal was measured in rhythms, and nuances of timing were carefully conceived and executed. The lyrics often accompanying the music were about human and spiritual love and about the comfort (solace) that one can obtain from it. The role the instruments played for their listeners was usually summarized in a sentence. In the case of this virginal appearing in The Music Lesson, the sentence is:

Mvsica letitiae co[me]s medicina dolor[vm] (Music: companion of joy, balm for sorrow).

The instrument on the focus of Vermeer’s painting seems to be an Antwerp, made by the famous intrument maker Andreas Rucker. This particular virginal look like one of Rocker’s best creations. These instruments were usually made for rich families to buy them in order to scale some positions in society by teaching their children how to play this virginal.

This instrument was even considered to reinforce the relations between men and women because it was an excuse for pilite contact between the sexes. Artists of the time used the concept of the music lesson to depict the sensuality as well the social acceptability of a woman playing such an instrument.

We have now the opportunity to see and listen to a different interpretation of this famous painting. The musician and music teacher Ernst Stolz has recorded Dutch and other European baroque and Renaissance music for us to listen to it. Enjoy this choice of music!!

Information from Vermeer&the Art of Painting and Youtube

“Girl With A Pearl Earring” is an intelligent, visually ravishing adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s best-selling novel about the Dutch master Vermeer and the model for one of his most famous paintings. With concision and well-chosen detail, Peter Webber’s exceedingly accomplished first feature beautifully evokes the world the artist inhabited 340 years ago while deftly and discreetly delineating the personal intrigue within his teeming household. With its literary pedigree, artsy period backdrop, refined Euro air and wondrous central performance by emerging star Scarlett Johansson, who is receiving concurrent raves for her work in “Lost in Translation,” pic has all the ingredients to become an international specialized circuit hit.

Little is known about Johannes Vermeer, who lived his entire life (1632-75) in the city of Delft, and certainly nothing of the young woman who modeled for the celebrated portrait he created in about 1665. This gave U.S.-born, British-based novelist Chevalier considerable latitude in fashioning her fictional story of a teenager whose destitute Calvinist parents place her as a maid in the home of the Catholic Vermeer, a meticulous, slow-working artist who also works as an art dealer and whose home overflows with innumerable children, an overwrought wife and a queen bee-like mother-in-law.

Even before Griet (Johansson) arrives to take up her duties, one is struck by the unusual nature of the girl. Porcelain-skinned, with largish nose and lips and wide-set eyes, she seems keenly observant and self-possessed, with an intelligence and integrity that trump her illiteracy and low station. The prevailing hallmark of Johansson’s superb performance, which could be considered worthy of great silent film acting, is that her Griet is always holding something in reserve, an innate intelligence and sense of mystery that eventually intrigue Vermeer and severely threaten the latter’s wife.

Courtesy of Ben van Os’ vibrant production design, which is intersected by canals and is populated as much with livestock as it is with humanity, the thriving mercantilist Holland of the time jumps to life as Griet arrives for work. Under the thumb of fleshy housekeeper Tanneke (Joanna Scanlan) and watched with close suspicion by Vermeer’s neurotic wife Catharina (Essie Davis) and the latter’s stern mother Maria Thins (Judy Parfitt), Griet develops a fascination with the one room in the cramped house that is off-limits to the family in general, Vermeer’s spare, light-drenched studio.

While fulfilling active public and family roles, Vermeer (Colin Firth) puts his art first, often seeming remote and insisting upon privacy to work at his own deliberate pace despite domestic demands and pressure from his wealthy patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson). Soon, however, he notices a nascent sensitivity in Griet to such matters as light, paint materials and composition, which earns her access to the privileged studio; before long, the artist shows her his new acquisition, a camera obscura, which he admits helps him with his work, and invites her to help him grind and mix his paints.

In such a tight household, Griet’s activities do not go unnoticed, and her position there is soon tenuous. The object of mean pranks by one of the painter’s daughters, Griet is politely courted by the nearby butcher’s son (the impossibly handsome Cillian Murphy, who looks like he just stepped out of a Zeffirelli film), just as she is lusted after by the boorish Van Ruijven, who makes a secret deal with Vermeer that looks to bode ill for Griet. 

Amidst all these swirling emotions and intrigues, a highly delicate central drama emerges: While producing a group picture for Van Ruijven, Vermeer embarks upon the secret, simultaneous project, a portrait of Griet. Posing for him in a manner that almost seems illicit, the film builds to sensual highlights that consist of a resistant Griet finally consenting to removing her white cap to reveal her resplendent hair, and Vermeer piercing her ear so she can wear the earring he insists is necessary to complete the painting.

When Catharina discovers that the servant girl has been wearing her earrings and demands to see the picture, she hysterically calls it obscene and tries to rip it to shreds. Griet’s fate hangs in the balance, but her capacity for survival proves resilient in a mixed-mood conclusion that is in proportion to the careful balance achieved throughout the picture.

Script by Olivia Hetreed jettisons the book’s first-person p.o.v., probably wisely in that the approach preserves Griet’s mysteriousness, but is quite faithful in tone and spirit. A former editor and documaker, Webber maintains an admirably restrained hold on the material while still keeping the action lively and intriguing. Drama tips into too-overt melodrama on a couple of occasions, however, notably in Van Ruijven’s one-dimensional lechery and Catharina’s  overweening jealousy.

Arching over everything is the film’s look, which in cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s exceptionally skilled hands is that of a Vermeer painting from beginning to end. The jumbled textures and colors of the home’s family quarters are set off by the austere loveliness of the artist’s soft-hued studio, which was the setting of so many of his works. Hugely evocative, the studied approach of approximating the Vermeer look, with light slanting in from the side, never feels stilted or fussy, and an emotionally climactic zoom in on Griet striking her pose for the picture, earring finally in place, is breathtaking.

While physically and dramatically credible, Firth is reserved as the guarded artist. Davis as his wife conveys the brittleness of a woman living permanently near the breaking point, and Parfitt has her moments as the matriarch who quietly sympathizes with her son-in-law more than with her daughter.

In a film of outstanding craft contributions, noteworthy are Dien van Straalen’s costumes and, particularly, Alexandre Desplat’s supple, beautifully nuanced score.

Apart from Katharine Weber and her book, there is another writer interested in Vermeer’s paintings. This author is Graham Burchell, poet and children’s writer well-known in England. His best tale is Chester and the Green Pig. However, I want to talk you about this author because he was also touched by the enchantment Vermeer reflected on his paintings.

Quoting Burchell:

I bought a small book of Vermeer’s paintings at a bargain price. I actually started reading it, and not just looking at the pictures. I was an art teacher for many years, but I knew very little about Johannes Vermeer. Nor does anyone else it seems. I was fascinated, firstly by the enigmatic nature of the artist and his work and secondly by the stunning beauty of his paintings. Hardly anything is known about Vermeer. He has thirty-five known paintings of which one is stolen, missing from a museum in Boston. Women and more significantly, women wearing pearls is an intriguing aspect of his work that seems to be largely about the place and plight of women in 17th century Holland. I became so absorbed by the artist, his work and his time that I resolved to write a poem about each one of his paintings. In all of the poems the speaker is a character (or in some cases – the character) in the work. This was often the woman or one of the women posing. Sometimes the woman was his wife or his daughter either talking directly to the reader or to Vermeer. Occasionally the speaker is a man. In two of the poems ‘The Procuress’ and ‘The Music Lesson’, the man in question is Vermeer himself.

Vermeer is the pinter of domestic scenes, and what Burchell tries is to paly with these themes, commenting on the details of the paintings that may have served of inspiration for the painter. More than that, in Burchell’s House of Martha and Mary, inspired by Vermeer’s painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the characters are aware of themselves as existing within the confines of a painting. Burchell uses to have is characters comment in an ironic way on the situation they are living inside these paintings.

These poems, like Vermeer’s paintings, seek to capture close, intimate moments in the lives of ordinary people. Burchell’s intention is to create a real world betyond those pictures, a world in which the characters involved express their own real feelings, withouth feeling obligingness for those characters who are part of a masterpiece. The characters in the paintings are aware that they are characters in a painting.

The unique poem available is the one on The Milkmaid. Although this is not the painting I’ve chosen, I think it is interesting for my classmates to read this alternative poem:

MILKMAID
The Milkmaid – c.1658 – 60I was going to do this in an accent
west country English
lots of ooz and arrz as burred
as sharp as blackberry thorns
or night cooled cider from a clay jug
all pickled pronouns and liberties
taken with doing words

dressed like a gert blue tit I be
what d’you wanna be painting I fer
down ‘ere with me serving bits
and pieces etcetera

but anyway I am Dutch and
you said you want to do me
with more dignity
there is grace in that simple
quiet act of pouring milk you said
strength in the straight white fall
and angle of my concentration

that makes me feel special
like a priest preparing communion
milk the wine
sincere food of devout thought
bread in a basket bread broken
rough-chin crusts snagging morning light
like chickens shaking rain

and you made this simple room
with its cool harvest tang
with its basket pail foot-warmer
nail-hooks and holes look special
the wall lit as a gargantuan pearl
I wrote it down somewhere yes
opalescent you called it

even painted a thin milk line
down my head and back said
it gives me monumental grandeur
said I was the embodiment
of the spiritual maid
and for all that sir
whatever it means I thank you.

Information taken from Got Poetry and from FourVolts Press

The Lacemaker , which is the painting that I chose, is another small scale painting, nearly dwarfed by its impressive wooden frame.

Unlike the more contemplative figures in Vermeer’s work, the subject here is very active, intensely focused on a physical activity. As opposed to the full-figure compositions, where furniture and drapery act to facilitate or deflect the viewer’s visual entry, The Lacemaker brings the subject dramatically to the foreground. As a result, the viewer is drawn into a powerful emotional engagement with the work. Although the composition is quite shallow, there are different depths of field that draw the viewer into the canvas. The forms nearest the eye are unfocused, which encourages the viewer to pass on to the more distinctly defined middleground.

The intimacy is accentuated by the small scale, personal subject matter, and natural composition. The lacemaker’s total preoccupation with her work is indicated through her confined pose. The use of yellow, a dynamic, psychologically strong hue, reinforces the perception of intense effort. Contrasts of form serve to animate the image. For example, her hairstyle expresses her essential nature - both tightly constrained and, in the loose ringlet behind her left shoulder, rhythmically flowing. Another strong contrast exists between the tightly drawn threads she holds and the smoothly flowing red and white threads in the foreground. The precision and clearness of vision demanded by her work is expressed in the light accents that illuminate her forehead and fingers.

The number of pigments available to the 17th c. Dutch painter were few indeed when compared to those available to the modern artist. While the current catalogue of one of the most respected color producers (Rembrandt) displays more than a hundred pigments, less than 20 pigments have been detected in Vermeer’s oeuvre. Of these few pigments only ten seemed to have been used in a more or less systematic way.

In Vermeer’s time, each pigment was different in regards to permanence, workability, drying time, and means of production. Moreover, many pigments were not mutually compatible and had to be used separately. The following study examines the history and origin of each pigment and how they were employed by Vermeer and his contemporaries as well as essential aspects of the artist’s palette.

Some of Vermeer’s pigments:

Azurite
Azurite mineral is usually associated in nature with malachite, the green basic carbonate of copper that is far more abundant. Azurite was the most important blue pigment in European painting throughout the middle ages and Renaissance by contrast, despite the more exotic and costly ultramarine having received greater acclaim.

Vermeer seems to have used azurite in light grays and mixtures of green where the brilliance of ultramarine would not have been appreciable. Like other painters of the time, Vermeer may have used azurite as a base color on which the far more costly natural ultramarine was painter over, for economical reasons

Green Earth

The name green earth  is applied to several different minerals, but most importantly in medieval painting is the light, cold green of celadonite, found chiefly in small deposits in rock in the area of Verona, Italy. Today the color is chiefly a durable mixture of chromium oxide, black, white and ochre, since the natural product is scarcely obtainable.

In Vermeer’s painting green earth was  found mixed with white-lead and a little lead-tin yellow in the lighter tones of the trompe d’oile curtain of Vermeer’s early Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

Raw Umber

 Ochre containing manganese oxide and iron hydroxide. Colored earth is mined, ground and washed, leaving a mixture of minerals - essentially rust-stained clay. Burnt umber is produced by heating umber.

The best variety is sold under the name of Cyprus umber, which comes chiefly from the Harz mountains. Painter have used umber to paint the shadows of flesh tones replacing green earth widely used in the medieval times. Umbers with  greenish tinge are highly valued by artists. Rembrandt and Rubens used umber extensively  in their underpaintings.

The artist has long appreciated the variety of cool and warm hues, which serve as a valuable shadding tool in any sort of painting technique. When umber is used transparently or semi-transparently on a light or medium toned ground it produces a warm brown but not “hot” ground. However, when it is mixed with white  in varying quantities, a range of very greenish and silvery  grays are produced.

Lead-Tin Yellow

Natural ultramarine blue could be considered the king of Vermeer’s palette, lead-tin yellow would justly be called   its queen. What is now commonly called lead-tin yellow has had several different names in the past. Italian manuscripts have described a color, giallolino, which is identical to lead-tin yellow. In northern parts of England the term massicot  was used to describe the same pigment. The current name lead-tin yellow is self explanatory. It is a result of the components of the pigment lead and tin which combine to form a yellow hue. Due to its high lead content, it is very poisonous and has been replaced by safer products. Used between 13th and 18th centuries, but most common from 15th to 17th centuries.

White Lead

White has always played an important part in the art and craft of painting. The great part of pigments on a progressive scale of gray would fall into the medium dark to dark category. Only lead-tin yellow is by itself light pigment. In order to portray the light areas which are for indispensable to convey the sense of natural illumination, white must be added to heighten most of the darker pigments.

Vermeer, as all other painters of the time, used it extensively to lighten other colors and as the principle component used to depict the characteristic white-washed walls (see right below) seen in so many of his paintings. Vermeer was also aware that the rendering of surface textures enhances the visual significance of various material realities he portrayed.

Information taken from:

  Essential Vermeer

The number of pigments available to the seventeen century, Dutch painter was few indeed when he was compared to those available the modern artists. While the current catalogue of one of the most respected color producers (Rembrandt) displays more than a hundred pigments, less than 20 pigments have been detected in Vermeer’s oeuvre. Among these few pigments only ten seemed to have been used in a more or less systematic way.

In Vermeer’s time, each pigment was different in regards to permanence, workability, drying time, and means of production. Moreover, many pigments were not mutually compatible and had to be used separately. The following study examines the history and origin of each pigment and how they were employed by Vermeer and his contemporaries as well as essential aspects of the artist’s palette.

All Known Vermeer’s Pigments were:

It is extremely unlikely that Vermeer had on his palette in any given work session all the pigments that were available to him. Painters were known to use specific palettes set out each day according the passage to be painted. The wooden palette to the left represents the seven principle pigments which Vermeer commonly employed: 1 White lead; 2 Yellow ochre; 3. Vermillion; 4 Red madder; 5 green earth; 6 Raw umber; 7 Ivory black

While the mistress concentrates on writing, the maid looks out of the window. Another Vermeer shows the mistress and maid theme: The Love Letter, but in this the interaction between the women is the subject, whereas here the women look in opposite directions.

The composition moves the eye towards the women from both sides. from the right we see a chair and a rich oriental rug covering the table; the chair invites us in, while the table is a barrier. From the left the sequence is a dark curtain, the window, and an exquisitely rendered translucent curtain that seems to be painted from light itself. The mistress is dressed in a starched blouse, rendered with sharp polygons of white, and pearl jewelry. On the floor in front of the table is a seal and sealing wax for completing the letter, and also a crumpled sheet, which may be an initial version of the letter she is writing, or it may be the letter to which she is responding.

The large painting on the wall behind the women is The Finding of Moses, the same painting as in The Astronomer, but not the same size. This indicates that somebody must be rescued and cherished, but it is not clear who that is.

It is difficult to imagine that the father of 11 children was not in some way or another influenced by their presence. Many critics have noticed the apparent difference between Vermeer’s perfectly-ordered interiors and what may have been the artist’s daily life with a brood of children. Where are the cradles, beds and chairs, according to the inventory taken after his death, spread out over the house?

Contrary to many Dutch genre painters such as Jan Steen, Nicolaes Maes and Gabriel Metsu whose pictures literally overflow with children, Vermeer gave them only two small, but poetic parts to some of his plays.

The problem is not as difficult as it may seem. Simply put, Vermeer’s paintings were not intended biographical statements. Even though they do represent contemporary settings and modes, they were not meant to reflect the conditions of his personal life. Vermeer worked within established and well defined genre categories and some critics believe that the artist wished to express the arrogant values associated with traditional history painting.

Vermeer’s principle biographer was John Michael Montias. He maintains that even though the lack of disorder represented by such a large family may seem conspicuous; he says about the artist’s that the “subjects and the way he handled them are rooted in much earlier experience and were invariant to the things that happened to him in his adult years.”

Curiously enough, Vermeer directly portrayed children only two times in 35 paintings, once in The Little Street (picture) and another time in The View of Delft (picture) where a young girl can be seen with an infant in her arms to the extreme left of the foreground. There are however, more than a few indirect representations of children in other paintings. A painting-within-a-painting of Cupid appears either partially or entirely in three other works and we can also see that children are represented on the tile baseboards in The Milkmaid , A Woman Standing at a Spinet and A Lady Seated at a Spinet.

These decorated baseboards, fabricated in Delft, were commonly found in Dutch houses and were widely exported. They protected the lower part of the white-washed walls from passing mops. However, even if Vermeer’s miniscule renditions of the children that populate them do express something of the children’s naive simplicity; they were most likely included as a comment on the principle theme of the picture. In the case of the Lady Standing at a Spinet, the little Cupid on the tile directly to the left of the lower portion of the woman’s silk gown, subtly reinforces the representation of the large-scale painting of a Cupid which hangs on the back wall in an ebony frame.

The figure just to the left of the woman’s gown is similar to the fishing Cupid in a print from Hooft’s Emblemata amatoria. “Hooft’s emblem plays on the conventional comparison of courtship to fishing. In Vermeer’s Cupid tile, the fishing rod is visible, the proportions of the figure are consistent with Cupid, and the dark shape on his back can only be his stubby wings. (The same figure may be repeated on a tile to the right, partially obscured by the virginal’s leg.) Prints like that from Hooft’s book often served as patterns for tiles. Contemporary viewers who were familiar with these recurring designs on their own walls would readily have identified the Cupid in Vermeer’s tile.”

After Vermeer’s death his widow Catharina undertook a series of legal and financial actions, probably to prevent bankruptcy. These are recorded in extensive documents. On 27 January 1676, she pledged two paintings by her late husband to the baker Hendrik van Buyten, in lieu of payment of ‘the sum of 6 I 6 guilder and 6 stuivers …owed to van Buyten far delivered bread.’

Two weeks later, on 10 February, Catharina contracted to sell ‘26 pieces, large paintings and small, far the sum of 500 guilders’ in order to satisfy another of her shopping bills. It has often been maintained that these twenty- six paintings must have been works by Vermeer. It seems most unlikely, however, that Catharina would have sold twenty-six of her late husband’s works for the sum of 500 guilders, when only two weeks earlier the mere pledge of two of them satisfied a creditor with a 600 guilder claim. The documents suggest that she owned only a very few paintings by Vermeer, and that she took every measure possible to retain ownership of them. This would explain why, on 24 February, she sold ‘a painting by …her late husband, representing the Art of Painting’ to her own mother, Maria Thin, ‘in partial settlement of her debt’.

A few days later, on 29 February, an inventory was made of the contents of the house on the Oude Langedijk, probably because of a threatening bankruptcy. Catharina’s property was listed separately from her mother’s. It included some framed drawings, and twenty-four paintings-among them   heads by Fabritius and Hoogstraten, ‘a large painting of Christ on the cross’, ‘alle containing a bass fiddle with a death’s-head’, and another representing ‘Cupid’. The last three are surely the same paintings Vermeer depicted in the background of some of his own works. Significantly, no paintings by Vermeer himself are mentioned. “

None of these measures were effective: on 30 April the High Court of Delft declared Catharina bankrupt. She stated that she was ‘charged with the care of eleven living children. Her husband, having been able to earn little or nothing in the years since the war with the King of France, was forced ‘to sell at a great loss the paintings he had bought and in which he traded, in order to feed the aforementioned children, thereby falling so deeply into debt that she was unable to satisfy all her creditors (who are not willing to take into consideration her great losses and bad luck caused by the war).’

In the autumn the biologist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, not yet famous for his work with the microscope, was appointed trustee ofher estate. Angry objections were voiced to Catharina’s prior disposal of paintings to certain creditors, such as her mother, which was interpreted as prejudicial to the interests of the other creditors. Despite strong protest, her mother was instructed to relinquish The Art of Painting for sale at auction.

from:
by Albert Blankert, Vermeer: 1632-1675, London, 1978, pp. 10-11

Although there are a number of excellent studies which explore particular aspects of Vermeer’s painting techniques and materials, there still exists no single work which describe in detail Vermeer’s painting procedures. The difficulty of describing Vermeer’s painting methods is further complicated by the fact that the artist experimented with different techniques throughout his career.

• Early works

In Vermeer’s early works, thickly applied impasto paint is characteristic. This evident paint build-up combined with a relative freedom of brushwork create uneven and granular effects. The artist probably wished to accentuate the material presence of his subjects although repeated overpainting may at times be considered evidence of technical uncertainty. Tones tend to be rather muted and in more than one painting, such as the Maid Asleep, they create an overall sullen effect. In Vermeer’s early interiors, which immediately followed  the mythological and religious themes, impasto is used more selectively and the complicated admixtures of pigments found in preceding works are less frequent. The brilliant tones needed to suggest the intensity of incoming daylight, which had become one of his principle artistic preoccupations, are generally composed of two or three pigments. In this early phase Vermeer’s contours tend to be very sharp, sometimes  to the point of brittleness.

• Late works

In his last years of artistic activity Vermeer had acquired an extremely high degree of control of every facet of painting technique.  Outline had become again distinct, but paint is applied with the utmost economy and his brushwork often calligraphic, at times borders on the virtuoso. A sense of brittleness is adverted in the modeling of his sitters. In some areas paint has been applied so thinly that the underlying ground can easily be seen.  This fact has even lead some scholars to believe some of the paintings were not completely finished.

Further information:

http://girl-with-a-pearl-earring.20m.com/index.htm

        Delft is a city located in Holand, in mid way from Rotterdam to La haya. The city had 94.098 habitants in 2005. Delft is more than 750 year old and its name comes from the word “dig”, “diging the oldest channel”, The Oude Delft.  Delft received its license of city in 1246. From then on, the city thrived and new neighbourhoods appeared.

       THE FIRES

   In 3rd of may 1536, the big fire burned out. The cause of the fire is unknown yet bit it is believed that the wooden neddle of the Nieuwe Kerk had been shaked by a flash of lighting and the spark fly set fire in the houses nearby. Aproximately, 2,300 houses were in fire until they become ashes. More than a hundred years later, in 1654, an explosion ruined a big part of the houses of the city. The basement of the Poor Clares convent on the top of Paardenmarkt was used to store gunpowder. This central store for the Dutch region contained more or less 80,000 pounds of gunpowder. The consequences of the explosion had been huge, 200 houses had been devastated, others end up semi-ruined and many others got broken windows. In 1660 a new gunpowder house was built a mile away from the center of the city.

         THE DUCTH EAST INDIA COMPANY

    The Dutch East India Company was one of the most important merchant societies of the world with a more than a hundred shiped fleet, thousands of employees, offices settled in Asia and six places in Benelux ( Belgique o Belgie, Nederland and Luxemburg) among then one being in Delft. In 1602, Delft was a flourishing city, a center of painting, arts, crafts and science. The stablishment of the company and the opening of the branch in the city, added another important motive to the economy of Delft and the trade with distant countries. Since then on, spices, coffee, te and the Chinese porcelain were connected with the city.

         KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE

        In 1842 the Benelux was under the other neighbour countries from an industrial point of view. The country required technicaly qualiphied people so the Royal Academy for Civil Ingeniering was founded. The academy used the building of the old artillery school. Nowadays, the old academy has turned to be the Technical University which is the most important building of Delft.

         Delft is not only a cultural city, but also a city of knowledge. The university is not the only building for education. There are also plenty of Institutes based on knowledges and bussiness, for instance, the DSM essencial idea, The Ducth Institute of Meassurement, Exack Software, Delft Instrument and so on.

         PEOPLE CONNECTED TO THE CITY

• The painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft. Vermeer made use of the streets and insides of Delft as motives or background of his paintings. His master pieces, famous worldwide, are shown in museums all over the world. Apart from the refined colours and armonious compositions, the treatement of the deepness and the play with the light is what makes the paintings of Vermeer to be so good. Vermeer worked and lived with his family in different places of the center of the town, which he used as his inspiration. Thanks to his paintings, an idea of the old Delft and also the life in Deflt at Golden Age, can be easily made.
• Delft is also the birthplace of the scientist Antoni Van Leeuwehoek (1632-1723) who polish some minuscule lens which increase the image up to 266 times, using them fro an interesting device; the microscope. Vermeer lso based on this device in his painting “The Geographer” and “The Astronomer”. Van Leeuwenhoek became the administrator of the inheritance of Vermeer after his death. 

   The “View of Delft” is a painting made between 1659 and 1660 by the Dutch painter Johanes Vermeer. Nowadays, it can be found in the Mauritdhuis of the Hague.

   If one knows the paintings belonging to Vermeer, it is quite amazing to find a painting about a view. However, topographic views of cities had become a tradition by the time Vermeer painted his famous canvas. Hendrik Vroom was the author of two works depiciting Delft, but they are more archaic as they follow the traditional panoramic approach that can be seen in the cityscapes by Hercules Seghers at the Berlin museum. The latter artist was one of the first to make use of the inverted Galilean telescope to transcribe the preliminary prints and their proportions (more than twice as high as wide) into the more conventional format of his paintings.

   Vermeer shooted his “View of Deflt” on the first floor of a house in the south of the river Schie. He worked on the spot, but the optical instrument pointed towards the city and providing the artist with the aspect translated onto canvas, which we admire for its consciseness and special structure, was not the camera obscura but the reversed telescope. It is only the latter that codeness the panoramic view of a given sector, diminishes the figures of the foreground to a smaller than normal magnification, emphasizes the foreground as we see in the picture, and by the same signe makes the remainder of the composition recede into space. The image obtained provides us with optical effect that, without being unique in Dutch seventeeth-century painting, as often claimed, convey a cityscape that is united in the composition and enveloped atmospherically into glowing light.

   We admire the town, but it is not a profile view of a township, but an idealized representation of Delft, with its main characteristics simplified and the cast into the framework of a harbour mirroring selected reflections in the water, and a rich, full sky wik magnificent cloud formations looming over it.

   The “View of Delft” is chronologically the last painting by Vermeer that was painted in rich, full pigmentation, with colour accents put in witha full loaded brush. The artist outdid himself in a rendition of his hometown, which stands as a truly great interpretation of nature.