Musical instruments in Vermeer’s paintings

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

The Music Lesson comes to life again

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

Vermeer’s Corner by Graham Burchell

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 Music Lesson, by Katharine Weber.

As part of this subject we were asked to write a piece of literary work, finding the inspiration in the painting we have chosen. However, I think I am not able to overcome Weber’s work, a writer named by Granta to the controversial list of 50 Best Young American Novelists in 1996.

The Music Lesson was published in 1999, and up to now it has been published in eleven foreign languages (not in Spanish). In the words oh Katharine:

‘ve had in mind a story about a woman alone in a remote Irish cottage with a stolen painting since I first traveled to Ireland in 1976, on my honeymoon. In the tiny fishing village where we spent two rainy weeks, there was still much talk about the discovery and arrest, two years before, of the Anglo-Irish woman who had rented a local cottage in order to hide a cache of paintings stolen for ransom by the IRA from the Beit Collection in County Wicklow (a theft that made the Guinness Book of World Records for record value of stolen artworks at that time).

Among those paintings was a Vermeer. I remember tramping down a muddy lane in order to peer into the windows of what locals still called “the picture cottage.” At the time, I was intrigued by the notion of this woman in solitude at the edge of the sea with some of the great paintings of the world. Did she ever look at them, I wondered. What did they mean to her? The facts of the actual case have never been of enormous significance to me. Over the next twenty years, what stayed with me were those questions.

In 1986, my husband and I bought a little house in the same village — and I can see “the picture cottage” from my window. We spend time there with our two children in the summer, but I also spend several weeks alone in Ireland each year, and it is there that I have done some of my most concentrated writing, and it is there that I began to write The Music Lesson.

The story is then based on a true story happened on Friday, April 26, 1974, when a young woman knocked on the door of Russborough House in County Wicklow. Seconds later she was joined by three men brandishing revolvers, and together they stole 19 paintings from their frames. Among these pictures there were a Goya, three Rubens, two Gainsboroughs, and the jewel of them all, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid. The total value of the haul was set in 8 million pounds.

The pintings were early restored to their original place, but his owner, Sir Alfred Beit, gave some of these masterpieces to the National Gallery of Ireland. However, this was not the unique adventure the Vermerr’s peinting had to live, because it was stolen one more time. In 1986 Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid was stolen, and it was found in September 1993 (7 years after the robbery) in the trunk of a rented car at Antwerp AirportThe travelling Vermeer was scratched and dented.

Weber’s The Music Lesson is, then, inspired by the everyday view of that cottage rented by a thief in order to hide one of the best paintings in history. she tell the reader the story of Patricia Dolan, who is alone with a stolen Vermeer painting in an Irish cottage by the sea. How she got here is part of the story she tells; about her father, a Boston cop; the numbing loss of her daughter; and her charming Irish cousin, who has led her to this high-stakes crime.

The Music Lesson has been awarded with different honors, Among them, the New York Times Book Review Notable Book, the Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year or the Chautauqua Institution Literary Circle. selection. There are favourable critiism on the book: the New York Times says of it that it is “affecting and elegant… Weber astutely explores the gap between perception and reality”.

For further information, see http://www.katharineweber.com/books/ml_about.html

To read a good piece of criticism, see The New York Times on the Web