Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance”: a General Review

I decided to choose Woman Holding a Balance because it is probably one of Vermeer’s most harmonious and peaceful paintings, and because it conceals many curiosities, secrets and symbols. The work of art has received many other names, as Woman Weighing Gold, Woman Testing a Balance and Woman Weighing Pearls. The reason why it has got so many different names is that, although at first experts thought the portrayed woman was weighing some kind of precious material, later X-rays and microscopic examination proved that the balance she is holding is actually empty, and this aroused a great controversy. There are different opinions about the theme and symbolism of the work of art, as the woman is viewed as a symbol of holiness and earthiness.

"Woman Holding a Balance", by Vermeer

This composition is thought to have been made between the years 1662 and 1665. The material Vermeer used is oil on canvas and its size is pretty small (42.5 x 38 cm) if compared with the idea I had of the painting. Currently, the piece is located at The National Gallery in Washington DC.

In the painting, we can see a young woman, seemingly pregnant, who is holding a balance before a table where there are three containers like an open box of jewelry, and some pearls and gold coming out of it. There is a blue cloth in the left foreground, as well as a curtain and a window through which light enters the scene. We can see a little mirror in the wall that is just in front of the woman and a picture of the Last Judgment scene in the wall right behind her.

The origins of this work have been traditionally linked to the also Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch, whose painting Gold Weigher matches Vermeer’s picture very closely. Since neither of the paintings are dated accurately and since both artists were contemporary, “who influenced who” has been a subject of debate for critics. It seems that de Hooch was living and working in Amsterdam but lived in Delft for some years, so it is very likely that the two artists met and exchanged ideas. However, it seems that de Hooch’s Gold Weigher originally had a male figure in the scene, which later was erased by the artist himself. If this were true, the paintings would not look so alike.

"Gold Weigher", by de Hooch

Regarding the woman’s appearance, the same white cap that she is wearing was represented by the artist in other paintings too, both tied and opened. According to Dutch costume experts, the cap was partly ornamental and it served to protect the hairdo; it was typically made of white linen, sometimes of nettlecloth and cotton.

One of the greatest mysteries is who posed for the young lady in the painting. Maybe because of the intimate nature that Vermeer’s paintings usually have, there has been a tendency to link the painter’s family members to the sitters of his paintings, some of whom seem to have posed for him more than once. This makes a lot of sense, for employing professional models at the time was very expensive. Most people believe the woman holding the balance is his wife Catharina, who apparently also posed for The Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

The same model, probably Catharina, in other two paintings by Vermeer

To modern viewers, it looks quite obvious that the woman is pregnant but, according to experts, pregnancy was not a common subject in art and there were actually very few depictions of women in maternity clothes. Even in religious paintings such as the Visitation, where depictions of pregnant women were required, the bodies were usually completely hidden by draperies. In addition, apparently, Dutch fashion in the 17^th century encouraged bulky silhouettes.

The two most important elements of Woman Holding a Balance are, no doubt, the picture-within-the-picture and the balance. The picture-within-the-picture shows the Biblical scene of the Last Judgment –the final eternal judgment of every nation by God, where he decides which souls will go to Heaven and which souls will go to Hell. The artist of the painting remains an enigma, but he is thought to be Jacob de Backer, as Vermeer was an art dealer and he was thought to have a similar painting in his possession. A detail that gives evidence to the fact that Backer’s work was a model to Vermeer is that Christ is depicted with both hands raised and outstretched, which is not very common in the depictions of the Last Judgment.

"The Last Judgment", by Backer

Another interesting element of the work of art is the mirror, which appears four times in Vermeer’s whole oeuvre. Iconographic associations to mirrors are numerous; for instance, sometimes they represent pride, other times vanity, prudence, self-knowledge, and truth. It seems that the mirror in this painting is the same as the one in Woman with a Pearl Necklace, as both are said to be of the same size and presumably made out of ebony. Painters depicting someone gazing into a mirror often also show the person’s reflection, although this is not the case, as we see the mirror from the profile. This is a kind of abstraction, as in most cases the angle of view is such that the person’s reflection should not be visible.

"Prudenza with a Mirror", by Giovanni Bellinni

On the other hand, the balance the woman is holding is probably very closely connected to the idea of judgment and the Weighing of the Souls, so Vermeer clearly wants the viewer to see the link between the picture-within-the-picture and the balance. Besides, scales were really important at that time in order to prevent fraud; it was necessary to keep a constant check not only on the amount of goods one had, but also on coins.

A golden balance

The curtain seems to be very similar to the one in Woman with a Pearl Necklace, but warmer in tone. The same yellowish color is used in the two golden stripes in the frame of the Last Judgment picture, as well as in the woman’s dress. One should also pay attention to the stained glass window that was so typical of the period and that the painter used in many other paintings.

In addition, the wooden extendable table seen in the painting appears to be the same as the one Vermeer used in other interiors. This kind of table was considered a luxury item in Dutch painting of the time. The legs have a beautiful bulbous form, and in the 17^th century, this piece of furniture was known as a draw-leaf table ­–because it could be extended by pulling out extra leaves.

The floor tiles are also worth taking into account, as they are the typical black and white chess-like tiles that Vermeer often used. Likewise, Cornelis de Mann, who was also contemporary to Vermeer, depicted the same table and the same floor tiles in his works.

Detail of "A Man Weighing Gold", by Cornelis de Mann

To sum up, it is well worth noting that Woman Holding a Balance is one of Vermeer’s most interesting and mysterious paintings, due to its great symbolism and its several possible interpretations. I will go posting additional information about the painting in order to make the overall study of the work as complete as possible. For more information, I leave my Powerpoint presentation here:

References:

• Wikipedia, Woman Holding a Balance. Retrieved 13:28, April 15, 2011 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Holding_a_Balance
• National Gallery of Art, Woman Holding a Balance, a Moment Captured. Retrieved 17:32, April 20, 2011 from http://www.nga.gov/feature/vermeer/moment1.shtm
• Essential Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance. Retrieved 20:13, May 1, 2011 from http://www.essentialvermeer.com/

The Girl with the Wine Glass

In the following lines you can find the presentation I did on Vermeer’s ‘The Girl with the Wine Glass’.  First, I will show you the technical details and then I will try to reconstruct the essence of this particular painting.

• Title: The Girl with the Wine Glass  
  By: Jan Vermeer (1632 – 1675)
  Year: 1659
• Original Size: 66 x 77 cm
  Medium: Oil on Canvas
  Location: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, Germany 
• Signature: Inscribed lower right window pane: IVMeer

Vermeer’s paintings belong to a genre of domestic scenes in mid 17th-century inHolland. Many of these scenes focus on relationships and man’s inability to resist his sexual appetite particularly under the influence of wine and tobacco. And briefly speaking, that is the story of this painting. Here we can see a scene of seduction where an elegant young man encourages a young woman to enjoy a glass of wine. However, the smile on her face as she turns to the viewer indicates that he, rather than she, is the one being seduced.

Now, let’s focus on some details. One of the most remarkable features is the portrait that Vermeer includes since this was the only time when Vermeer drew a picture-within-a-picture in one of his works. According to Vermeer expert Arthur Wheelock, the rigid pose and the elegant clothes of the man in the portrait as well as the careful placing of the upright portrait between the two male figures focus on the artist’s concerns for the lack of moral constraint in contemporary life.

 Another important feature of the painting is this coloured stained-glass window. In this zoomed picture we can see how Vermeer portrays a lady in the glass window. The female figure holding bridle is said to personify Temperance. The bridle would symbolize emotional control. Thus, again it is very probable that, together with the portrait on wall, this window may represent moderation due to the protagonists’ lack of self restraint.

 The young woman’s expressive face is not typical in Vermeer; he usually hides the emotions of the characters. One  early Vermeer expert has suspected that her staring eyes and awkward smile were the result of overpainting. In any case, the woman, rather than exchanging glances with her suitor, turns towards the viewer, separating herself from him. Arthur Wheelock believes that the woman’s smiling is a knowing one, indicating not only that she is aware of the situation, but also that she is in control. Thus, it is he rather than she the one that is being seduced.

Although Vermeer’s paintings are primarily known for its lemon yellow and deep blue colour harmony, in this case the artist experimented with strong reds in his early days as a painter. In this way we can see erotic overtones such as red and yellow in the woman’s dress that may actually suggest desire. The fiery red of this dress may denote the hidden passions of the young woman who seems to be accepting the advances of the gentleman.

 The suitor in the foreground carefully accompanies the woman’s hand which holds the wineglass in a delicate way. His intentions have been interpreted in a number of ways by Vermeer specialists, stating that he is a comic man, a seducer or the seduced. The truth is that his posture and expression is so formalized that he fails to unlock the precise narrative meaning of the painting.

 Among all Vermeer’s paintings, it is the only painting other than the Concert to include three figures, but where the Concert shows two women and a man making music together, in this painting the third figure is apart from the couple in the background resting his head on his hand in a melancholy attitude. The obvious explanation is that, as his pose suggests, he is a suitor for the young woman too but he has been rejected. It is therefore understandable that his position is uncomfortable since he clearly does not fit in this situation.

Finally, it is important to point out that the two lemons, pipe, silver plate, wine and the sheet of paper possibly containing tobacco may be seen as a connotation of luxury, consumption and seduction. In many scenes of ritual courtship lemons are commonly set along side oysters served up on a silver plate and although we cannot clearly see oysters in this plate they may be. Moreover, lemons were also used to sweeten and soften the wine, in this respect once more they serve symbolically to indicate the importance of moderating one’s behaviour.

References:

• Googlebooks. Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing by Bryan Jay Wolf. Retrieved on April 25, 2011 from http://books.google.es/books?id=TZgSLFesAZwC&pg=PA123&dq=Vermeer+The+girl+with+a+wine+glass&hl=es&ei=LVG4TYzzAs7A8QOUr7E4&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Vermeer%20The%20girl%20with%20a%20wine%20glass&f=false
• EssentialVermeer. The Girl with the Wine Glass by Johannes Vermeer. Retieved on April 25, 2011 from http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/girl_with_a_wine_glass.html

Windows Patterns in Vermeer´s Paintings

If we pay attention to more than one dozen of Vermeer´s paintings we can notice that the greater part of the artist’s oeuvre, are of course representations of domestic interiors and that just a few of these show distinctive and unique spaces.

The great majority of them seem to depict just a few rooms repeatedly, with sitters and furniture rearranged. It is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about how many rooms might be involved, by making an inventory of their architectural features: floor tiles, wooden ceilings, and characteristic patterns of leading in the window panes.

Paying attention to the patterns that Johannes Vermeer followed when drawing the windows of his paintings, we can notice how the main motives are based mainly on squares and on circles. To prove this, just look at the following photos in which a comparison between different paintings is developed:

A) The Glass of Wine                                          B) Girl with a Wineglass                                                                    C) The Music Lesson

 References:

• Vermeer´s Camera: Uncvering the Truth behind the masterpieces: The Music Lesson . Retrieved on May 15, 2011 from http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/chapter4.htm

Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”

With the purpose of showing you the presentation I did on Vermeer’s The Milkmaid,  I have decided to post it by by using Slidshare, the tool we learned to use last year. Hope you find it interesting!

Slide 2: Background

Johannes Vermeer  was a Dutch painter born in Delft on 31 October 1632. He specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a slightly  successful genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.

Since that time, Vermeer’s reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Slide 3: Painting Technique

The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a “milkmaid”, in fact a domestic kitchen maid, by the Dutch painter. It is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, which esteems it as “unquestionably one of the museum’s finest attractions”.

This painting has “perhaps, the most brilliant color scheme of his oeuvre”, says the Essential Vermeer website.

Slide 4

One of the distinctions of Vermeer’s palette, compared with his contemporaries, was his preference for the expensive natural ultramarine where other painters typically used the much cheaper azurite.

Along with the ultramarine, the lead-tin yellow is also a dominant color in an exceptionally luminous work. The white walls reflect the daylight with different intensities, displaying the effects of uneven textures on the plastered surfaces. The artist here used white lead, umber and charcoal black. Although the formula was widely known among Vermeer’s contemporary genre painters, “perhaps no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively”, according to the Essential Vermeer website.

The woman’s coarse features are painted with thick dabs of impasto. This technique consists on leaving the paint on an area of the surface very thickly.

The seeds on the crust of the bread, as well as the crust itself, along with the plaited handles of the bread basket, are rendered with dots. Soft parts of the bread are rendered with thin swirls of paint, with dabs of ochre used to show the rough edges of broken crust.

One piece of bread to the viewer’s right and close to the Dutch oven, has a broad band of yellow, different from the crust, which Cant believes is a suggestion that the piece is going stale.

The bread and basket, despite being closer to the viewer, are painted in a more diffuse way than the illusionistic realism of the wall, with its stains, shadowing, nail and nail hole, or the seams and fastenings of the woman’s dress, the gleaming, polished brass container hanging from the wall. The panes of glass in the window are varied in a very realistic way.

The woman’s bulky green oversleeves were painted with the same yellow and blue paint used in the rest of the woman’s clothing.

The brilliant blue of the skirt or apron has been intensified with a glaze (a thin, transparent top layer) of the same color.

Slide 5: What does the painting suggest?

Despite its traditional title, the picture clearly shows a maid   (a low-ranking servant) in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a container  on a table.

Also on the table are various types of bread.

She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms.

The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table.  With half of the woman’s face in shadow, it is “impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration,” wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic for The New York Times.

“It’s a little bit of a Mona Lisa effect” in modern viewers’ reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator of the department of European paintings at The Museum of Modern Art, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. “There’s a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling. And our reaction is ‘What is she thinking?’”

Slide 6: Relationship Picture-Poem

In this last slide, I have analised the relationship between the picture of “The Milkmaid” and the poem that went with it in our books and we have been looking at in class with Claire:

The poet takes us back on time to what has been done. It is not a static moment in time.

The picture shows a rude woman, not a delicate or fine one. Everything she touches is hard, crude. There is no flattery at all.

She is holding the jug as if it were a baby, as if she were bathing him.

The maid is an earthy woman, not a delicate one, but she turns into kind of holly or precious when the light shines on her. Light transforms her actions onto something holly, full of grace and admirable.

References:

• Johannes Vermeer. Britannica. Retrieved: May 2, 2011 at 21:00 from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/626156/Johannes-Vermeer
• Johannes Vermeer. The Milkmaid. Retrieved. May 2, 2011 at 21:00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)
• Johannes Vermeer. Retrieved. May 2, 2011 at 21.00 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer
• Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/
• English for Specific Purposes. Orange Book.

POEM: A LADY WRITING A LETTER By VERMEER

 

All day I am walking to the square

in the sun. I don’t know what to say.

I’ve begun the letter but it lies

on a black tile in the sitting room.

It has been five years

since the child. There’s no reason

for delay. I sip tea, plead

with the bargain-marker, sass

the servant-girl, but no luck.

I take a pinch of chocolate, search

birds’ tracks at the corners

of my eyes. No one knocks.

So what keeps me here?

 

 

It has taken this long to write.

Now, even you expect no reply.

That is as it should be.

I write to tell you I am alive.

What else is there? All the devils

you see in the air mean nothing-

this you know, so I write to assure you

you are not mistaken, your skin

is where you are not, around me

tight as stays. If I picture your face,

there is nothing left but this:

my stomach flowers as it once did.

I have not forgotten yet.

 

 From Afterimages. Poems by Cathryn Hankla.

References:

• Google books. Afterimages, poems by Carhryn Hankla. Retrieved on May 15, 2011 from http://books.google.es/books?id=MANvuJ3aFwgC&dq=a+lady+writing+a+letter+vermeer&source=gbs_navlinks_s