A Virtual Tour of Vermeer´s House

The multimedia encyclopedic web site on Johaness Vermeer and his life in Delft, allows us to visit Vermeer´s home and his studio.  There is a complete  study of the architectural floor plans, and you can enter the house in 3D to see the full inventory of all household objects.

Source of information: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/

Vermeer’s Camera Obscura

It is claimed that over 100 years of speculation and controversy  the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer, used the camera obscura to create some of the most famous images in Western art.

The so-called Vermeers Camera web site tries to uncover the truth about the painter’s possible knowledge of seventeenth-century optical science to develop his style and choice of subject matter.

In order to support the idea that Vermeer experimented with new technology , there are some interesting materials available in the web-page.

To begin with, we can find two books. The first one: Vermeer’s Camera: afterthoughts and a reply to critics, by Philip Steadman (27/03/2002), which thought it got a generally kind critical reception, there have been a few dubious notices by Vermeer scholars and curators of 17th century Dutch painting.

The book shows how it is possible to reconstruct the three-dimensional spaces seen in ten of Vermeer’ s paintings of domestic interiors, using a method of ‘inverse perspective’ (roughly speaking, a reversal of the normal procedures of perspective drawing).

Here you have some of the pictures shown throughout the pages:

Figure 10: Map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands by Claes Jansz Visscher (left) compared with Vermeer’s painted version in ‘Allegory of Painting’ (right). (The ornamental borders showing views of Dutch towns are omitted in both cases.)

The second book, also written by Philip Staedman, is a brief chapter sypnoses with added images not found in the book. It starts with a review of how the camera obscura worked  throgout history and then we are moved into the subject of Vermer´s use of it, giving detailed examples and reconstructions of his paintings with great precision in order to demonstrate how the painter set up a camera obscura. Eventually,  the book concludes with a discussion of the influence of optical images on Vermeer´s work.

The following images belong to chapter 6 of the book:

And finally, the most striking among the materials is  the three-dimensional computer models produced by Mr Yasuo Furuichi of Yokosuka City, Japan.

The images remain his copyright. Mr Furuichi has produced a short movie entitled ‘Before the Glass of Wine’, from which a series of stills are illustrated here. He is now working on models of all the pieces of furniture appearing in Vermeer’s paintings, which he is storing in ‘Vermeer’s warehouse’. He plans to make reconstructions of the three-dimensional spaces shown in some of those pictures where the floor tiles are not visible, and which were not reconstructed in ‘Vermeer’s Camera’ for that reason.

These are some of the models you can find in this section:

Perspective Method

In the very same page of the previous article, that is, a multimedia encyclopedic web site on Johannes Vermeer and his life in Delft, we can find a short explanatory video about how Vermeer worked with the perspectives.

Internet Source:  http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/

Vermeer’s Birth House

The multimedia encyclopedic is a very complete web site on Johannes Vermeer and his life in Delft.

By going to this page http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/ and pushing Vermeerś Birth House you will find a research overview of little known facts about the house were the painter was born. What is more, there are very interesting photographs and documents supporting the information given.

Vermeer Centrum Delft

The Vermeer Centre offers a visual voyage of discovery through the life, work and city of Johannes Vermeer. The visitor steps into 17th century Delft, sees samples from Vermeer’s oeuvre, goes in search of his mentor and the stories behind the paintings.

If you want to meet the master of light and feel yourself in Vermeerś times, have a look to this website where the visitor will be very well-informed about the latest news on the painter.

Here you have some of the points of interest available on the page:

The Vermeercentrum

The Painter Vermeer

Visitor information

Now at the Vermeercentrum

Exhibits

Education

Tours and Activities

Shop and Café

Organisation

Press

WEBSITE: http://www.vermeerdelft.com/195.pp

The Appreciation of Vermeer in the twentieth-Century America

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Marguerite Glass do close the edition of the Cambridge Companion to Vermeer telling the readers about the influence of Vermeer throughout the time within an American context.

Should anyone have ever questioned that Johannes Vermeer is an artist of international repute, as beloved in the United States as he is in The Netherlands or France, one only needed to have been in Washington, D.C., during the winter of 1995-6 to have witnessed the extraordinary response to the Vermeer exhibition when it was shown at the National Gallery of Art.

What happened during the course of the 20th century to place Vermeer at the center of such a cultural phenomenon?

The fact that he died penniless in 1675 seems to have been less his own fault than the collapse of the art market that ensued after the invasion of The Netherlands by the troops of Louis XIV in 1672. Finally, his quiet, intimate scenes of domestic life are unremarkable is subject matter. hardly the type of image that would seem to excite a late-twentieth-century society that all too often seems to crave the new, the exotic and the unusual.

So, why did people stand in line in the snow and ice for hours outside the National Gallery to have an opportunity to see this small group of masterpieces? There were a lot of reasons, to be sure.

I, too, was first attracted by Vermeer’s work because of his perfect composition and the harmony oh his colors. But as I grew older and matured, I began to sense that his work could help me understand my life experience.

Vermeer’s images are so distinctive that once seen, they are never forgotten. With knowing one, there is this powerful urge to see another, and yet another, for one can never tire of the beauty of his light and color, or the sense of peace that his works bring.

And how is that Vermeer’s genius has entered into the mainstream of cultural life?Certainly, color reproductions of his paintings have brought them to a wide public and have helped make Vermeer’s art known to many who have never actually stood in front of one of his works.

The availability of reproductions, however, is only part of the answer for his broad appreciation of Vermeer in America at the end of the 2oth century.

The discovery of Vermeer’s unique qualities as an artist coincided in America with what Anette Scott has defined as a “Holland Mania”.

They suggest not only how directly Vermeer’s paintings spoke to this generation of art lovers but also how his works fascinated viewers because they could not be precisely defined and described. Most important, these writers recognized Vermeer genius lay in his ability to fuse the specifics of Dutch realism with the universal and the spiritual.

The situation, however, was rapidly changing, at least on th East Coast where a number of Vermeer’s rare paintings began to enter the American collections.

The period of the Holland Mania coincided with the rise of an extraordinary breed of American collectors intent upon enriching their lives with masterpieces of European art. The Concert at Fenway Court, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, influenced a number of Boston painters.

Vermeer on the Question of Love

Elegant young men and women converse, drink, or play music together in domestic settings. Alone in their rooms, other play musical instruments. Still others receive, read, or write letters, either alone or in the company of their maidservants. The thoughts of all, it seems, turn to love.

The Ambiguities of Love

Vermeer’ s allusiveness is frequently bound up in pictures-within-the picture that suggest meaning rather than determine it, or rather, deliver a range of possible meanings.

Youth, Fashion, and Dutch Simplicity

Like the artists of the garden parties, Vermeer pictures courtship as a self-enclosed world of youth, from which parents and older guardians are excluded. It is an imagery that accords well with the desire of contemporary young people in The Netherlands for their own social and emotional space apart from adult supervision.

The young culture we encounter in Dutch love songs, and romances is a decidedly elite one, composed of the nobility and high-burgher class.

You can find this piece of writing in the 6th chapter of The Cambridge Companion To Vermeer written by H. Rodney Nevitt Jr.

The Landscape on the Wall in Vermeer

Vermeer is the most enigmatic of the painters. It is difficult to be altogether certain about his iconographic intentions, although it is evident that he had intellectually demanding programs. Little interpretative help is provided by his contemporaries. The few 17th century references to his pictures are cursory and iconographically unenlightening.

The concern here is the landscapes depicted on the walls of his paintings. In the case of The Concert, the painting we are going to concentrate on, though Goodman offers analysis on four more, it insets pictures that are integral elements of the tableaux themselves. Recent art-historical scholarship has demonstrated that the enframed figural paintings and maps placed in the paintings relate iconographically to the scenes transpiring in front of them. The landscapes hung on the walls, however, have scaped discussion, presumably because they have been seen as decorative fillers, paintings merely imitative of the style of contemporaneous pictorial landscapes, rather than as iconographically charged emblems that contribute to and expand on the meaning of the pictures. If other paintings on the wall have meaning, then why should not the landscapes?

Their symbolism becames apparent when one examines their analogues in literary landscapes, specifically some of the kind appearing in period love lyrics that were set to musical accompaniment. I believe that the meaning of the enframed lanscapes lies in what I take to be the artist`s major and “poetic” theme, the celebration of love and beauty.

Vermeer provided subtle clues to the meaning of his inset pictures by the fashionable performers with their musical instruments he placed in several of his paintings. Vermeerś landscapes are “poetic” and even “melodic”, in a very direct sense, paralleling and perhaps imitating, as they do, the natural landscapes in many contemporaneous lyrics and songs that dealt with wooing, courtship and beauty.

This fragment is taken from The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer by Elise Goodman

“A Study of Vermeer” by Edward Snow

The following web page: http://vermeer0708.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/images.jpeg is a very good link to the Dutch painter.

Edward Snow makes a detailed study on the paintings by Johannes Vermeer, providing us with excellent pieces of information and interesting interpretations focused on art and sexuality. In pages 91 and 92 we can find the so-called chapter “The enigma on the image“,which will change our feelings about the picture giving as the opportunity to think, imagine and acquire a new point of view when looking at The Concert.

Actually the scene of the trio around the piano hides a high sense of eroticism and mystery.

….Understanding The Concert

Arthur Wheelock

Jan Vermeer
1981, p. 120-121

The Concert and The Music Lesson are two paintings that point out the difficulties of interpreting precisely the meanings of Vermeer’s works. The theme of music is a frequent one in Dutch art and is generally associated with love and seduction. Paintings by Steen, Van Mieris, and Metsu often include a small statue of Cupid surmounting a door or mantelpiece as a reference to the underlying emotional context of the scene. Associations with love and seduction are also evident in the general attitudes or the figures in these paintings. The music instructor frequently appears more than professionally interested in his student and her progress as a musician.

Vermeer, however, did not provide such clear meanings for his paintings. His choices of objects offered tantalizing suggestions, but the attitudes of his figures remain surprisingly neutral. In the background on the right of The Concert, for example, hangs The Procuress by Baburen. The subject of this scene has often been thought to indicate the nature of the relationship of the three figures involved in the concert before it. These figures, however, are earnestly concentrating on their music, and do not, in themselves, reinforce the licentious nature of the scene portrayed on the wall.

If we assume that Vermeer intentionally placed The Procuress and the landscape to its left on the wall, how are we to interpret this scene? One solution could be that the figures were meant to be in contrast to the paintings rather than to represent, as it were, a tableau vivant, music was also used as a symbol for harmony and as a salve for the soul. With such an interpretation, we note also that the landscape on the clavecin is peaceful and Arcadian whereas that on the wall is rugged, in the manner of Jacob van Ruisdael. It includes a dead tree trunk, a motif Ruisdael was fond of using to indicate death and decay.

In this sense the theme of The Concert parallels that of The Music Lesson more closely than one might expect. One may rightly question the appropriateness of the title of The Music Lesson. The gentleman, who is very properly dressed, seems more intent on listening than on instructing. No written music is evident in the formal and spacious interior. As in The Concert, the theme seems to be the mollifying effects of music on the human soul. On the cover of the clavecin is written: Musica Letitiae C()[me]s Medicina Dolor[um] (Music: Companion of Joy, Balm for Sorrow). By placing the girl so that her back is to us, Vermeer effectively underplayed the importance of her personality and of any relationship between her and the man, allowing us to ponder the significance of music in our lives.

The similarities between The Concert and The Music Lesson are such that they have often been dated at the same time. Both the conception of the scene and the painting techniques of The Concert, however, place it around 1665-66, sometime after the conception of The Music Lesson. The mood of The Concert is more relaxed than that of The Music Lesson. The figures seem to belong naturally to the room and to participate in the rhythm of the music. The case in their demeanor probably resulted from Vermeer’s experiences in depicting the series of single figures during the years 1662 to 1665.

The ways in which the women’s yellow jackets are painted are also strikingly different in the two paintings. In The Music Lesson the paint is densely applied. Shadows are almost totally created by a thin glaze that covers this opaque layer. In The Concert the colors of the dress are painted more sparingly. Shadows, particularly in the skirt, are formed with the ground color rather than with glazes over opaque yellows. The effect of the painting is softer and more delicate than that of The Music Lesson.

Unfortunately, this change to a more delicate technique created serious problems of physical condition. Some paintings from the mid-1660s, including The Concert and the Woman with a Lute, have suffered from abrasion. Perhaps Vermeer recognized this potential problem, for he painted in this manner for only a short while. In his later works his style became crisper and his paint denser; he depended less extensively on glazes and transparent effects to create his images than he did in The Concert.

Source of information: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/cat_about/concert.html

Perspectives on Women in the Art OF Vermeer

Vermeer ś artistic devotion to women is one of the most striking features of his extraordinary oeuvre; only a third of the surviving works pictures a man. But quantity is the least phenomenon. The very concept, “Women in the art of Vermeer”, takes us into every aspect of his production, from professional aspirations to personal predilections, from broad cultural norms to private meditations, from mundane working conditions to exquisite pictorial adjustments.

Figuration

The qualities that we attribute to Vermeerś works as a whole apply to the women they picture: paintings and personages share dignity, equilibrium and en exceptional measure of both vivid presence ans abstract purity. The figures range from girlish to maternal, yet are youthful, with high curved foreheads, features that evenly balance the individualized and the classical, and simple, believable postures. Their costuming-its colors, shapes and associations-contributes so much to bodily construction and expression that the absence of nudes from Vermeerś oeuvre hardly seems surprising.

Apart from a few early works with religious or mythological subjects,all of them, depicting women, Vermeer fashioned figures to evoke his own time and place, “The Netherlands”, now. Clothing and settings usually signal the world of prosperous burghers, the urban elite, a world where women enjoyed sufficient space and leisure to cultivate private moments within the home.

In three of the paintings, a maidservant appears in the company of a lady, emphasizing the latterś higher social position and evoking the conventions of the courtship.. But these servants also command interest in their own right.

Vermeerś women often seem familiar to us, too, because his concept of significant human activity embraced habitual, universal ways of engaging the world.

This excerpt written by Elise Goodman is taken from the Cambridge Companion to Vermeer by Franits, Wayne E.

Vermeer´s Craft and Artistry

As Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. claims in the Cambridge Companion to Vermeer by Franits, Wayne E., Vermeer was an extraordinary craftsmn who carefully conceived and structured his compositions to achieve the purity of expression he sought to convey. He had great sensivity to optical effects found in the world about him, and he translated these in his paintings through his use of light and color. He mastered a wide range of painting techniques to allow his vision to take visual form, which, when analyzed, provide extraordinary insights into Vermeer`s pictorial ideas.

Many of the scenes he chose to depict are those encountered in daily life, passing moments seemingly of little consequence. In his hands they take on almost metaphysical significance. Other paintings have explicit allegorical connotations, where ideas about human endeavor are introduced through complex emblematic and symbolic elements.

The study of the structure and execution of his paintings must likewise not remain an end unto itself but rather be understood as a means for exploring the emotional and intellectual framework within each of his works was created.

Brief comment on the scene of the painting

“The change in mood is most evident in the benign treatment of the male figure. He is still a visitor in an interior that obviously favors feminine presence. The two landscapes function as the map does in ‘The Soldier and the Smiling Girl,’ framing his head against an image of the outer world, while enclosing the seated woman even more rigorously within the space of the room. Yet now the structure of the painting conspires to absorb him, and render his intrusive aspect as inconspicuous as possible.”

Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979

 

This information is taken from: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/concert.html

Why The Concert?

In the previous post we can appreciate the originality of the excerpt  found. Actually it is quite shocking to read such a comment on a painting as if we were reading  an advertisment in which the word WANTED  is printed on the face of a persecuted criminal. But that fact did not determine at all the choice of this painting, though it made me look at it with more interest.

When Claire told us that we had to take any of Vermeer`s creations as a tool for the development of the ESP course with both: Joseba and her, I felt quite confused and hesitant, since my first impression was that they were quite similar among them. However, after having a look to his collection, I stopped in the so-called ” The Concert”. It was something on it that inspired me for the essay writing we have to hand in for our final proyect. Maybe it was the scene represented by the man playing the piano and the two female figures,  or the parallelism between them and the painting on the wall. Maybe it was the subject of the painting itself, or perhaps the sensation of dealing with something different from the rest. Whateverit was, I chose it. And this choice worked as an impulse to know something else about this picture. So that after checking various web pages I got surprised not only with the interpretations around  the portrayed characters, but also about the robbery of the painting.

Who knows where the music of the concert is being listened?

Welcome to the world of the arts

This is my first and real contact with the blog, and from now on we will all share Vermeer and his paintings as a common point to write about and elaborate this page.