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.

View of Delft I

View of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer, a guided art history tour through this painting

This is a webpage full of detailed information about the paint of Vermeer. I use it in my presentation of the picture. In the web, you can fine information about the way the painting is done and information about how Delft is depicted in the picture. There is also information about what has changed in the city. And there are link through the text that link you to more details, that will appear at the top of the text.

There are also references to other paint by Vermeer and to other analysis and interesting webpages of View of Delft. You can also email the author of the analysis.

References:

- The ‘View of Delft’ by Johannes Vermeer, a guided art history tour through this painting [online] [17-05-09] WWW Page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kalden/verm/view/Vermeer_main.html

The Woman with a Pearl Necklace

                           The Woman with a Pearl Necklace

 

  Introduction: 

     When looking to all the paintings of Vermeer, we find that they are moments which we experience in our lives and that what makes his paintings so beautiful and eternal. But what had attracted me in The Women with a Pearl Necklace is that we see in it an action which we do in everyday life, women and men. For some people, the lady is admiring herself, for others she is looking to the beautiful pearl necklace, but for others she is thinking of something else which may or may not have a relation with the pearl necklace. The painting may seem very calm and silent but in a way it talks to the viewer and breath into him many feelings. This painting in particular is putting us in the state in which we come to decide which way to take, which things we like, and what do we want to.patron, Van Ruijven

 

 Description of the Painting:

    The woman with the a Pearl Necklace portrays a woman gazing into a mirror while holding two yellow ribbons that are attached to a pearl necklace she wears. She stands behind a table on which there are many different subjects and a chair in the corner of a sunlit room.

 Comparing to other Paintings:

 

     In this painting, along with Woman in Blue Reading a Letter and Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer made a composition in which he showed a single woman focusing on some kind of occupation. In each case, the woman is shown turning inward with her thoughts, and using some minor physical activity to give herself some countenance. In this case, she gazes into a mirror while holding two yellow ribbons attached to a pearl necklace around her neck. The distance between the lonely figure to the right and the mirror on the wall, next to the window to the left, is filled by a heavy table slightly to the fore. This part of the painting is very dark, with nothing more than a Chinese vase and a rug irregularly covering the table to occupy the space.

The falling light in from the left, dispersed by the creamy bare wall, shows the meditative young woman admiring her reflection in the small mirror.  The stillness and introspection of the models reflect the search for aloof withdrawal and serenity as taught by Buddhist writings. It is in this sense that we must understand and appreciate Vermeer’s creations during his maturity.  

      The Woman with a pearl necklace, now in Berlin, is one of the largest of Vermeer’s small, single-figure paintings, having a few centimeters more height than the National Gallery paintings, for example. It is probably the work listed in the 1696 inventory as “a young lady adorning herself, very beautiful”. Yet despite this and its size, it was priced at only 63 guilders, in contrast with the smaller but in many ways similar Woman holding a balance.

      Even within the restricted range and constant repetitions of Vermeer’s pictorial topography, these two most narrowly coincide. Only the Woman tuning a Lute, in the Metropolitan, New York, which is on the scale of the Woman with a pearl necklace, might be compared with them. All three show the window butted against the plain rear wall; the leading, where it is visible, is the clear version of the heraldic pattern seen in the other Berlin painting, the Glass of wine. All three have a similar heavy table placed against the window wall, slightly to the fore of the window. Two further similarities are shared by the Woman with a pearl necklace and Woman holding a balance: the carpet covering the table is rucked back to form an irregular range of ridges and valleys, at once exposing the bare table-top and obscuring the objects on it, and beside the window hangs a similar mirror. Oddly, perhaps, the mirror into which the woman with a pearl necklace is looking is smaller than that in the Woman holding a balance. In reproduction the two appear to make a pair not dissimilar to the two in the National Gallery, London. In reality, the difference in size means that they cannot have been intended as pendants in the strict sense. Nevertheless, as they both were, in all probability, bought directly from the artist by his patron, Van Ruijven, it may be that the second piece (whichever that might have been) was painted in the knowledge that the two works would remain in the one collection and be seen in a similar light.

 

References:

Retrieved March 17, 2009, from: 

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/v/vermeer/03a/19woman.html

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/v/vermeer/03a/19woman.html

http://www.mystudios.com/vermeer/19/vermeer-pearl-detail-woman.html

http://www.vermeer-foundation.org/Woman-with-a-Pearl-Necklace-(detail)-1662-64.html

http://www.paintinghere.com/painting/Woman_with_a_Pearl_Necklace_7109.html

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/timelines/timeline_vermeers_life_4.html

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

http://www.bibliotecadigital.ufmg.br/dspace/bitstream/1843/ECAP-7A3H7K/1/dissertacao_mestrado_miriam_vieira.pdf

Where were Vermeer´s children?

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.”

 

Women represented as pictures. (turbans, pearls…)

Vermeer has represented especially young women integrated in narrative context, even if this context is not clearly defined. The representation of the plot is suggested by an attribute, like, for example, by a music instrument. Apart from those paintings, there are some of Vermeer´s works that lack of some elements, giving the impression of being paintings. This is a reworked impression due to the fact that these women are painted in the foreground.

Nowadays, numerous paintings are intellectual activity and occupation suggesting attributes of constitutive significance and vice versa. Not all the representations that correspond to the shape of the painting have to be interpreted as a conscious and individualized characterization. Precisely, in the called “historical painting”, it is very difficult to decide if the individualized intention is prior or if the model “owns” only its exterior for another aim of representation.

 

A clear example to see and to understand all this is the painting called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring”. With a dark, neutral background, with a tendency toward the black, which makes possible a big contrastive effect, the girl side face looks toward the spectator. Her mouth is a little opened and this means that the girl, as it occurs in most of the Dutchwoman paintings, speaks to the spectator. Her head is lightly inclined, explaining the sensation that the girl is lost in her dreamful thoughts; however, at the same time, she fixes her look to the spectator.

She is wearing a brown yellowish jacket, without any applications; against we can distinguish the bright white of her neck blouse. The next contrast can be found on the blue turban she is wearing, from which extremity falls, in a veil´s shape, a yellow cloth on the shoulders. Here, Vermeer works with simple colors, nearly pure, reducing the pictorial tones.

The girl´s headdress seems exotic. Turbans were in Europe, and on the XV century, a very important and useful accessory. On the Turkish wars, the foreign way of life and the exotic cloths used to show a big fascination. In this Vermeer painting, we can say that the most important thing to remark is the big pearl earring that hangs from the girl´s ear. With its golden highlights, the pearl distinguishes among the dark area of her neck.

Apart from this painting, some similar effects happen with paintings like: “Girl´s Head”, “Girl with a flute” and “Red Hat Woman”:

 

        

 

My second ESP class at computers room

This is our second class with Joseba and we have been asked to write a brief presentation. Our first class with Claire was focused on “Girl with a Pearl Earring” but the subject also deals with other Vermeer’s paintings.

Last Tuesday we were watching a documentary of the BBC about some of his paintings. This helped the class to choose between one of them. Today, some people’s paintings were added to the pages of this blog. Finally, we hope to write and learn interesting things about this great Dutch painter’s work.