Richard A. Smith on Girl with a Pitcher of Water

Vermeer is speaking to the main theme of his body of work, which is Temperance, or Moderation based on pure motives. The young woman in the Pitcher painting is prepared to wash herself and has poured the water to the basin for that purpose. The act of purification from the grit and grime of the world would appear to be Vermeer’s assignment to the lady in this work, but her progress is interrupted by what may appear to be, at first sight, thoughtful inactivity. Yet Vermeer leaves clues to his real intent for this painting, by the means of the woman’s physical connection to the symbol of purity–the ewer and basin, but also to the open window. Open casement windows in dutch genre painting have iconographic significance and are meant as a warning to women of the dangers of not paying attention to household matters (minding ones own affairs), and the lures of the outside world to social and moral ills to which she may be attracted. The lady has departed from her original intent, however briefly, and, we may assume, to dwell on innocent household matters to which her new days efforts will be spent addressing or just a pleasant interlude. Vermeer does not leave that interpretation open to the observer. The lady holds the window open, but does not look out to the street. Physically, the open window is behind her, and, as her downcast eyes to the floor are not actively engaged or focused on anything that we can discern, why would we assume that the symbolism of the casement window, being open, is a problem? The answer is not apparent at first, but one troubling observation with regards the lady’s other hand on the pitcher is very revealing about the state of her mind and, symbolically, the moral state of the woman. Vermeer shows and indicates that the absorbed mind of the woman is involved in an intemperate activity when he pictures the lady’s absentmindedness. For, it is not logical that the lady would put down the pitcher in the bowl of the basin after she had filled it! Vermeer cleverly shows the viewer that the woman is not attending to her work as she should.
What, then is she attending to? It is true that her eyes do not betray her, by peering out of the window, but that does not preclude the woman from engaging the world outside with her ears. Is it plausible, then, that Vermeer is addressing her penchant for eavesdropping on her neighbours. After all, isn’t listening a prime activity of the gossip?
Twice, in his ouvre Vermeer used the visual device of the ebony map weight in an identical fashion. In this picture and the Luteplayer, he placed the map weight in close proximity to the crook of the women’s necks. It has the visual effect of slowing down the movement of the viewers eye, as it passes through the space behind their heads. In both cases, it has the effect of freezing their heads in their respective places. The lady with the lute is tuning her lute and listening as she turns a peg on the head of the instrument. Is it not likely that Vermeer has used the same painterly device to portray a woman listening at an open window?

Rcihard A. Smith on Girl with a Pitcher of Water

The Pitcher picture can be read like a secret love-letter. It has the code of symbols of its iconography to tell the tale. The ewer or pitcher and basin are about Purity. Christian art painted the Virtues and this was one. The pitcher and bowl of the Milkmaid has the same meaning, but no other writer will say it, because the meaning of both of these paintings points, not to purity, only, but also to impurity. The Ermine, with it’s black-tipped tail, was for the kings of Europe the symbol of purity, but as is pointed out by by Alcaito in his emblemata, the Romans viewed it as denoting impurity amongst their young women. Vermeer paints a highlighted ermine, I believe on the side of the jewelry box in the Pitcher painting. If it is not an ermine, then he made up for this lack in many of his pictures, with the white fur trim on the yellow jacket! I find it sad and dishonest that the experts (to name them is unecessary, as they are legion) will try, in Vermeer’s case, to side-step his moralizing, and considering only other genre painters guilty of “morality” narratives in their preacher paintings. They would ascribe only sweetness and light to their hero. The truth, for them, is hard to swallow when it goes counter to their admiration for the great artist. Do they defend their previously naive statements before new knowledge was obtained? Some lack of perception would embarass, but truth must be owned to make an expert.

Girl With a Pitcher of Water

This tranquil scene, notable for the simplicity of the forms which define the composition and the relationship between the different shades of red, blue and ochre, presents an idealized vision of feminine virtue and is an excellent example of Vermeer’s exquisite sensitivity in the observation of reality.

From the beginning of the 1660s when this work was produced, Vermeer’s interiors became simpler, and focused less on the construction of the perspective and more on the representation of light, possibly under the influence of Leiden artists such as Metsu and Van Mieris. In contrast to these artists and to his own earlier work, in the 1660s Vermeer painted scenes which do not appear to depict any specific event or activity nor do they offer dues as to what has just happened or is about to happen.

Both the woman’s clothing and the Persian carpet on the table as well as the other carefully arranged objects in the scene identify her as a member of the upper classes, depicted here in a moment of repose. Vermeer’s mastery lies in the way he makes the formal structure of the work correspond to the serenity of the subject matter, allowing the spectator to discover the harmony and beauty beneath the chance events of everyday existence. To achieve this, the details are extremely important, such as the cadence created by the lines of the woman’s arms and her amiable expression which contribute to the warmth and sensation of restraint which the scene conveys. The artist’s care in the design of the composition led him to make changes (right above) as he worked on it beneath her right elbow are traces of a chair, which Vermeer subsequently decided to move back to the wall behind the table. We also know that the map of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands initially hung closer to the window.

The light is another key element in this work. With great subtlety Vermeer represents the way the light that bathes the scene falls on the metallic objects or the interior frame of the window, while the luminosity of the end wall gives unity to the composition.

It is likely that for a 17th-century viewer, used to looking at religious scenes in which the ewer was an allusion to the Virgin’s purity, the presence of such an object in the present work implies the same connotations of innocence and purity.

The following resources were used for this interactive research:

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/cat_about/pitcher.html

Girl With a Pitcher of Water

With a few exceptions - The Music Lesson being the most obvious – Vermeer in the early 1660s moved away from the type of interior that he, De Hooch, and other painters (such as Ludolf de Jongh in Rotterdam) had painted in the period about 1657-6, and adopted an approach that in some respects was closer to that of the Leiden artists Metsu and Frans van Mieris. The preoccupation with linear perspective and geometric order diminished in favor of simpler compositions, in which the view is usually brought in closer, only one figure is depicted, and the behavior of light becomes the dominant aesthetic concern.

The description of light on surfaces such as fine materials, metal, and glass had already engaged Vermeer in The Letter Reader,  The Milkmaid, and other paintings of about 1657-58, partly in response to Leiden artists. De Hooch’s style of the late 1650s  offered a different model in that space and light are more broadly rendered, and details are textures generalized. A similar approach is found in the oeuvres of Carel Fabritius and Emanuel de Witte, and from the beginning Vermeer was also  predisposed to an optical rather than a tactile manner. His style of the 1660s is a distinctive synthesis of qualities absorbed from various sources in a highly selective way. Light, broad areas of shadow, and pregnant spaces reveal close observation and a survey of current artistic alternatives. Qualities that might have been admired in the same sources-for example, the precise drawing that commonly accompanies an enthusiasm for artificial perspective (as in De Man’s work) and the dwelling upon surface incident for which Gerard Dou was known-were passed over by Vermeer. Pieter Teding van Berkhout’s appreciation of perspective in Vermeer, expressed in 1669 would have been appropriate for paintings like The Glass of Wine and The Music Lesson, but the “most curious aspect” of the artist’s work after the early 1660s was his consistent description of forms and space in terms of light and color values despite the importance of perspective in his work.

These considerations bear upon the placement of the Marquand canvas in Vermeer’s oeuvre. Recently it was dated to about 1664-65 and interpreted as a mature instance of “Neo-platonic” composition, something of which no other Dutch artist has been accused. Lawrence Gowing more plausibly suggested a date of about 1661-62 and with a surprising but incisive choice of words described the painting as “the most primitive of its type,” which he finds in more mature form in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter and other works that he dates to about 1662-64 and groups together as “pearl pictures” (in honor of Woman with a Pearl Necklace).

The painting’s wonderful sense of order and harmony was achieved by restricting the color scheme mostly to whites and values of the three primaries, by framing the conical figure with rectangular shapes, and by suspending animation through an intense study of light effects. In general terms, the design is a reduction of the De Hooch-like compositions found in the paintings in Berlin, Brunswick, and the Frick Collection, where in each case a standing man hovers over a seated woman; the figures and furniture form pyramids in a Cartesian realm. The admirable but rather deliberate dovetailing of motifs (in The Glass of Wine for example, the ‘bench is slotted between the wall and table like a strip of marquetry) continues in the present picture: the woman’s left arm extends the contours of the pitcher; the map’s wood bar tucks into the angle of her shoulder and head (the map originally extended much farther to the left, so that the head was framed in a corner); and the “negative” shapes within and around the contours of the figure are all given their proper visual weight (which required removing a chair from the corner). The pose of the figure and placement of the table have a noble ancestry descending from Van Miereveld’s state portraits to Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (the cavalier contemplating a young woman in The Glass of Wine has some affinity with Rembrandt’s philosopher). Of course, Vermeer did not derive ideas from these sources but simply shared with them a high regard for the classical tradition.

The painting’s design exquisitely suits its subject, which is an idealized view of feminine beauty and virtue. Dou painted pictures of old women, their heads less elegantly covered, watering plants outside of windows, and also pictures of an attractive young woman opening a window or pushing a curtain aside. Vermeer may have conflated two such images or derived his version from a Leiden model now unknown. That the artist avoids conventional narrative has been stressed by recent writers. However, a contemporary viewer would have recognized the head and shoulder coverings, the silver-gilt basin and pitcher (with which one would not normally water plants), and the jewelry box as the accoutrements of a well-to-do city woman’s toilette. That she opens or looks out the window does not disturb, indeed enhances, the sense of unself-conscious activity. Vermeer represents but a moment of private life, and a patrician ideal.

The following resources were used for this interactive research:

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/cat_about/pitcher.html

Girl With a Pitcher of Water

Vermeer focused many of his scenes on a female figure lost in thought while in the midst of a daily activity. He discovered in such quiet moments of contemplation, when one gazes outward but looks within, a window into an individual’s spiritual nature. Here, the woman’s reverie occurs as she stands near the corner of a room, holding the frame of a leaded-glass window in one hand and a water pitcher in the other.

 

The following resources were used for this interactive research:

http://www.mystudios.com/vermeer/17/vermeer-pitcher-review.html

This article belongs to Dakota185 (Zulema Cabrera):

Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians and advocates of the Hockney-Falco thesis, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer’s dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.

There is no other seventeenth century artist who from very early on in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine. Not only used in elements that are intended to be shown as appearance: the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light from the strongly-lit interior, reflecting its multiple colours back onto the wall.

This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object.^[5] This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour.

A comparable but even more remarkable yet effectual use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with a Wineglass (Braunschweig). The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and due to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful.

Even after Vermeer’s supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine most generously, such as in the above-mentioned “Lady Seated at a Virginal.” This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector, and would coincide with John Michael Montias’ theory of Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven being Vermeer’s patron.

(Taken from the Wiki)