- Artist: Johannes Vermeer

- Year: c. 1667

- Type: Oil on canvas

- Dimensions: 53 x 46.3cm

• Brushstrokes became freer and more expressive than in his earlier works:
  

– He emphasized patterns of color rather than textures.

-The face also is treated differently.  Its expression is outward and not self-contained.

• His composition away from the center of the painting:

- The girl is placed so far to the left that her arm is cut by the edge.

– Light falls to the left and a landscape hangs behind the girl on the back wall.

– The off-center composition is further emphasized by the direction of the girl’s glance.

   – The guitar was just coming into vogue in the late seventeenth century as a popular instrument for solo accompaniment. —

   - The music was created, more audacious than the lute, in large part because its production line with a resonance that the lute was not possible. —

   - Also in that time the music was very sofisticated and enjoyed by the purity of their sounds. —

   – The brilliant character and direct guitar offered us over the world of modern music represented, in contrast to the traditional conservative covered with lute.

-—Assuming the date assigned to that picture (1671-1672) is about right, it could represent Maria (Vermeer’s youngest daughter) at the age of seventeen or eighteen.

-—Elisabeth, born about 1657, is a less likely candidate since she was probably less than fifteen years old at the time the Kenwood picture was painted.

The Art of Painting

Jan Vermeer

c. 1666-73; Oil on canvas, 130 x 110 cm

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

   As Vermeer left behind no drawings or preliminary studies, our information about his artistic process can only be gleaned from the paintings themselves. In this regard, The Art of Painting is particularly valuable for it depicts an artist at work. It demonstrates that an artist sat rather than stood at his easel, and also shows that he used his mahlstick to steady his hand while painting. Having already covered his canvas with a light gray ground and indicated his composition with white lines, the artist applies flat, unmodulated strokes of color as the underlying tones. At a later stage a variety of glazes and small highlights would model the form.

   Technical examinations of Vermeer’s paintings have shown that he often followed this procedure. Sometimes it appears that he changed his mind during the painting process and made adjustments even after he had blocked in compositional elements. Nevertheless, in this painting not a single compositional change has been discovered, either through microscopic analysis, infrared photography, or x-radiography. Such compositional assurance seems to indicate that Vermeer had worked out his composition beforehand.

   Whether or not he was inspired by the optical and spatial effects of the camera obscura, he organized and structured his painting with careful attention to the laws of linear perspective. As seems to have been his standard process, he marked his vanishing point, just below the black finial of the pole weighting the map, with a pin. Strings would then have been attached to the pin to mark the orthogonals of the tiles and table edge. Despite these careful preparations, Vermeer adapted his perspective to enhance the dramatic impact of the scene. To emphasize the artist’s central importance within the allegory, Vermeer painted him at a disproportionately large scale: standing, the artist would tower over his model. Even though the artist’s face is not visible, the viewer senses both the forcefulness of his personality and the intensity of his gaze.

   The artist at his easel is executed with broad strokes that match the boldness of the image. The patterns of the black jacket, red hose, white boot hose, and black slippers are almost abstract in their crisp renderings of light and shadow. At the rear of the room, however, Vermeer has described forms with more attention to light and textural effects. The nuances of light falling across Clio’s hands, face, and robe convey the softness of her skin, the smoothness of the leather-bound folio she holds, and the sheen of the blue fabric. Vermeer similarly recorded the worn surface of the wall map as light models its form and reflects its aged appearance. Finally, in one of the most striking passages found in any of his works, he captured the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off the polished surface of the brass chandelier. With sure strokes that range from thick impastos of lead-tin yellow in the highlights to darker and thinner strokes of ocher in the shadows, Vermeer created the illusion of an object that seems almost tangible.

Excerpt taken from: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/verm_5.shtm

Johaness Vermeer was a Dutch painter who especialized in painting domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. He was moderately successful, but maybe because he painted relatively few paintings (35 are attributed to him) he was not wealthy and left his family in debt when he died.

He worked slowly and with great care, he liked the use of bright colours and sometimes, even, expensive pigments. He is renowned for his mastery in the use of light in his paintings. He was, unfortunately, forgotten for a time, until Gustav Friedrich Waagen rediscovered him. He and Thoré Bürger published an essay about him, and since that time Vermeer’s reputation grew up, being nowadays acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Cite the site: Johannes Vermeer. (2009, June 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:25, June 7, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Johannes_Vermeer&oldid=294906079

The Astronomer harmonizes space, color, and light to convey a single human activity, a unified moment in time. Perfectly staged, the scene is a subtle composite of interlocking diagonal, rectangular, or elliptical fields and has no empty or undefined surface. The composition is not narrative but rather forms the context of a sole figure, frozen in a pose of profound preoccupation.

Like many Vermeer characters, the astronomer is placed near a window on the onlooker’s left, which casts a glow on the man of science, revealing youthful freshness, sudden insight, and nervous anticipation. Expressive hands define the geometric space between the sympathetic figure and the celestial globe (drafted by Dutch cartographer Jodocus Hondius in 1600) and drive the forward movement of the body. The desk, framed by a thick tapestry, holds an astrolabe (precursor of the sextant) and a book. On the wall is a circular figure with radial lines.

The moment of discovery reflected on the astronomer’s face captures centuries of human fascination with the universe. The generic physiognomy, unremarkable features, untended hair, and drab attire draw the eyes to the illuminated face of the thinker, in a room where the only light is that of knowledge.

A model to all stargazers, old and new, Vermeer’s scientist reaches beyond the globe at hand into the mysterious continuum of time and space, charting, measuring, counting, categorizing, naming, recording. His contemporary counterpart, whether an astronomer exploring the cosmos or a biologist investigating the microcosm, is still guided by the light of discovery. Uncharted in Vermeer’s days, the spatial distribution of disease follows the evolution over time of agent, host, and environment and is the domain of those today who trace the time-space continuum of emerging pathogens, from Ebola to influenza and SARS.

Web resource  http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/Eid/vol10no1/about_cover.htm

Johannes Vermeer was one of the greatest of all Baroque painters.  His painting entitled “The Astronomer” is a true masterpiece that captures the mood of the Baroque era.Vermeer produced less than forty paintings in his lifetime, but their incredible detail and unique design made him famous.  One of his greatest works of art is “The Astronomer.”  This painting is a portrait of an astronomer in his office, examining a globe.  Like many paintings of this time period, the astronomer is seated by a glass window, the only source of light in an otherwise dark room.  While the wealth of the astronomer is not obvious, the fact that the astronomer can afford glass windows, a painting on his wall, and a shelf full of books shows that he is a rich man.  This portrayal of wealth is common in paintings of this time period.

The astronomer in this painting is a man of science.  He is not posing for his portrait, but rather he is shown performing his profession as an astronomer. This type of portrait was common in the Baroque era.  With a book open on his desk, he reaches for the globe, staring past it with a facial expression which reveals that he may have just made a great discovery.  According to some historians, the astronomer in this painting was inspired by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who was born the same year as Johannes Vermeer.  Leeuwenhoek was the inventor of a microscope, and a master at astronomy and navigation.  Vermeer’s painting reflects Leeuwenhoek’s zeal for science.“The Astronomer” depicts not just a single man but the dawning of a new era of logical thought and scientific revolution.  In a balanced array of color and light, this painting captures the human fascination with the complexities of world around us.  This is a true masterpiece of the Baroque era.

By Matthew Elton

Web Resource   http://www.scribd.com/doc/1243/Johannes-Vermeers-ASTRONOMER

Vermeer is known to have been extremely conscious about the real nature of colour, and about the fact that objects change in different circumstances and under different lights. In the film “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, this sharp consciousness is represented through a conversation between the painter and Griet, where he asks the young maid about the colour of the clouds. Her reaction is similar as ours would have been: “White”. However, she soon realises that the answer is not as straightforward as she had thought, and discovers that the clouds actually reflects the colours of the world that expands beneath them.

“The Little Street” is another example of this for, though red is apparently the predominant colour, we realise that most details contain blue: the cracks on the wall, the pavement, the woodwork of the windows, the tree at the left, etc. Appart from Vermeer’s mastery, this is also a sign of his economic status. Art historias from UCL, quoted in Science Blog (accessed on June 5th), pointed out that lapis lazuli was a very expensive material in the 17th century, and that unlike most painters, Vermeer used it in the representation of materials like wood and chairs. This contrasts with the generalised belief that Vermeer belonged to the lower-middle class.