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THE GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is the starting poing for most people
Her face is familiar to so many more people through Tracy Chevalier's book, ... staring up from so many bookshop tables.
The plot of the Chevalier's novel is a tacky re-hash of a story we have heard so many times before in the age of #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein.
What is so sad about that is that the novel ignores the extraordinary dramas in Vermeer's actual life. And, even sadder, Chevalier seems as if tone deaf: she doesn't see the drama in that extraordinary portrait.
Vermeer painted only about 35 paintings over the course of his career. And remarkably, there are no drawings or preparatory sketches. This has one enormous advantage for anyone wanting to learn more about him: almost any book about Vermeer will offer the 'complete works'.
Many books, in order to conform with a series format, will offer reproductions by many of Vermeer's contempories. That can be confusing because so many painters painted similiar subjects, sometimes with quite similar compositions.
Vermeer remains mysterious in so many ways. Although he painted many of the same subjects as his contemporaries when you look at his works as a whole, you get a sense of a painter like no other.
This may be the reason why Vermeer was more or less forgotten for a century and half. His best compositions were just too different from what his contempories were doing, even when they painted similar subjects. He was rediscovered by Theophile Thoré (1807-1869) who had fled to exile in the Netherlands to avoid arrest for his role (as a printer and publisher) in the 1848 revolution. Vermeer's re-discovery occurred after photography had begun to reveal a new, different way of seeing.
Vermeer's themes may have been similar to those of other painters practicing in Delft or nearby at the time but his motivation for his work was almost certainly very different from theirs. And the fact that he painted so few paintings is one of the clearest indications of this.
Jan Steen (1626-1679), who was based in Leiden and who painted some paintings with pretty much the same subject matter as Vermeer, painted something like 700 paintings in his lifetime. He was producing paintings for the very active art market of the time. Vermeer was pursuing rather different obsessions.
Vermeer was a painter of women. He painted only two paintings that feature only men, The Astronomer and The Geographer, and one, The Artist in his Studio (also known as The Allegory of Painting) in which a male figure features prominently. Men in his paintings they are usually giving their attention to the women.
Foreign visitors to the Netherlands were astounded that women enjoyed more freedom, played a more active role, than they did almost anywhere else.
This did not mean that there were not anxieties about the activities of girls and women. There was a great deal of moralising about was considered proper behaviour for the female half of the population.
Books of "moral emblems" and instructions for marriage and the keeping of a proper, clean and industrious, home were common.
Among Vermeer's contemporaries who painted domestic scenes similar to Vermeer's are Gerrit Dou (1613-9-1675), Ludolf de Jongh (1616-1697), Gerard Teborch (1617-1681), Jan Steen (1626-1679), Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684), Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667) and Nicolaes Maes (1632-1693) In some of their pictures one can detect a kind of finger-pointing moralising. Various symbols are used, the meaning of which everyone would know from popular sayings ("Cleanliness is next to godliness" and so on) and the emblem books.
Vermeer used the most expensive pigments available in his paintings. The money for this may have come from Vermeer's principal patron, the Delft collector Pieter Claesz van Ruijven. Vermeer certainly had a certain reputation, even during his life-time.
On June 21, 1669, one Teding van Berkhout, after attending to correspondence in the morning, "went out and visited a famous painter named Vermeer who showed me some examples of his art, the most extraordinary and the most curious aspect of which consists in the perspective. After that I saw my Aunt Lodensteyn, with whom I returned to The Hague ... ?"
Letters feature in many (by my count, seven) of Vermeer's paintings. Women read letters, they write letters. In one painting a woman is handed a letter by her maid just as she is busy writing. In another the maid waits looking out of the window while her mistress finishes writing a letter. In yet another the lady of the house is handed a letter while she is playing music. Music is another repeated theme. Again, I count seven paintings in which music features, with at least two pictures in which both music and a letter occur.
Even when Vermeer appears to repeat a composition in a pair of paintings, the changes he makes appear systematic, rather than haphazard. In the painting below, the reflection in the glass of the window, the drapes and table covered with a rich carpet frame the reader.
The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1662–1665) stands in front of one of the highly detailed maps that feature in five of Vermeer's paintings. So detailed, that historians have been able to identify the exact map and its edition. It is likely that Vermeer owned at least three such maps and the two male figures who figure in paintings of their own, The Geographer and The Astronomer were, of course, both mapmakers of sorts.
In the painting of A Girl Reading a Letter (below left) we can see where a painting that was part of the composition has been painted over. Currently (2021) the painting is being restored before going on display again in Dresden and the painting of Cupid is being restored, adding to complication of an already layered and complex painting.
That painting of cupid features in three of Vermeer's paintings. Many other items, chairs, paintings, maps, curtains, dresses occur again and again in his compositions.
Like two frames from a movie
The dress of the maid and her mistress is the same in the two paintings. In one the maid arrives with a letter; in the other... the next... the mistress has taken the letter. In both, the mistress looks a little hesitant about the arrival of the letter.
Only the two frames are from the same sequence: the mistress who is writing a letter in one frame is playing music in the next. Whereas we are almost in touching distance before the letter arrives, in the other painting it is through a door and its curtain that we observe the arrival of the letter while the mistress playing music.
With 10 or 11 children, Vermeer's must have been a busy, noisy household. All the more surprising then that there are no children in his paintings except the two tiny tots seen in the distance in The Little Street. Other painters painted women, maids and mistresses, at work. Vermeer painted them at leisure, or in contemplation, reading letters, playing music. But then, as if to answer this deficit, he paints a pair of masterpieces depicting work: The Milkmaid and The Lacemaker.
The composition of this painting is focussed, like the attention of the woman at work, on the point at which the fingers of her right hand hold the threads converging from the bobbins in her left. Look at how sharply drawn those threads are. They are in sharp focus. Everything behind, and especially, in front of, those threads is painted with softer, broader outlines. Look at the way the spilled threads bottom left are painted.
Red, yellow, blue. Vermeer's use of primary colours was something noticed by Piet Mondrian. Often yellow and blue predominate; sometimes with a pair of paintings: one yellow, one blue. But one should alway take note of Vermeer's use of the red.
Everything is still as the milkmaid pours the milk. Light pours in through the window but only to emphasize the stillness needed to pour the milk. Although her blouse does not shimmer in the way some of the silks do in other paintings, the yellow compliments the rich cascade of various blues in the bottom left of the picture. The red of her skirt is a colour worn by many women in pictures painted in Delft at that time.
The effect of realism - of a self-contained 'reality' - is so strong in Vermeer's paintings yet it is unlike the realism of his contemporaries. In part, this is because no area of the painting, no corner of the depicted room, is exempt from his special treatment. It is all of a piece. The reality of the peaceful scene seems to have come into the frame with the light that pours in and fills the space.
The little bubbles of light add a great deal to our sense of the reality of the scene. The is also another important piece of evidence that Vermeer used an optical device, the camera obscura, to paint his paintings. Those little globules (in Dutch, klootjens) of light are just like the 'circles of confusion' generated by certain lenses when slightly out of focus.
Such devices were known and several of his contemporaries, and indeed his predecessors in Delft (such as Carel Fabritius) experimented with a variety of optical devices and optical effects.
In his book, Vermeer's Camera, Ian Steadman, of the Department of Architecture at the Open University, argues that Vermeer painted within a closed chamber... the painter working in a very slow and painstaking way, turned himself into a kind of camera.
(On the left) Vermeer's painting of The Music Lesson has been copied (to scale) and photographed by Ian Steadman and his team. That is just not something one can do in the same way with other 'realistic' paintings of the time.
Painting in this way may have been very difficult and slow but it may explain the absence of drawings as well as several aspects of Vermeer's actual application of paint.
Only two men have a whole canvas to themselves. This gives them a heroic aspect. Both are experts involved in optics, lenses and map-making. Like many of Vermeer's women, they seem deeply involved in contemplation, paused deep in thought. They hold respectively: a globe, a mathematical compass. The world turns, the heavens revolve: an eternity of time can be resolved into an instant.
In Vermeer's ultimate masterpiece, The Painter in his Studio, the painter is certainly not wearing the kind of clothes in which painters would normally work. He paints a young girl who is posing as Clio, the muse of history. The work is also known as The Allegory of Painting and Vermeer draws on some of the symbolic language prescibed in the Iconology of Cesare Ripa, an emblem book popular with artists of the time.
The Allegory of Painting is so universally admired and yet the same cannot be said of its companion piece, the Allegory of Faith, which also takes much of its symbolic language from the template offered by Cesare Ripa.
The most interesting element of this strange and challenging composition is the glass sphere suspended from the ceiling. That is one significant element not taken from Cesare Ripa's Iconology. It must have some private significance for Vermeer.
But we should never lose sight of the fact that Vermeer's paintings are populated with women going about their business with grace and dignity in an atmosphere that will always remain calm and looked on with kindness.
Behind A Woman Holding a Balance (below) is a painting of The Last Judgement. She is pregnant. Is she being judged? or are we being reminded that we will all be judged? For many years this painting was called A Woman Weighing Pearls - pearls perhaps being a symbol of wealth and vanity. Then a clear-eyed viewer noticed that the scales she is holding are empty. She is testing them. She is asking questions about fairness... she poses questions about how we judge...
Vermeer's only landscape painting is exceptional, not only among his life's work, but in the history of art generally. There simply is nothing quite like it.
Many people love it and find it wonderfully satisfying.
Although it is not much larger than most of Vermeer's paintings, it does give a sense of open air and open space and it is on a grander scale than The Little Street in Delft with which it could be said to be 'paired'.
What makes it so satisfying? That surely has to do with the way in which Vermeer has once again captured a very particular quality of light. We feel the warmth of the sun on the side of the canal nearest to us; we see the raindrops which have just fallen glistening on the buildings in the distance. The darkest clouds are almost overhead but the people standing to the left of the picture are standing in the sunshine.
The picture is imbued with a wonderful sense of stillness and calm but on the far side of the canal, just in front of the bridge we can see where the breeze and the raindrops that have shaken loose from the clouds have stirred the calm waters.
If you visit the painting in its present 'home' in the Mauritshuis in the Hague you may be lucky enough to see the whole painting lit by the sun. In order that it catch the sun and and to add a subtle sparkle, Vermeer mixed sand into the paint with which he painted the land on this side of the canal.
Finally, we need to come back to The Girl with a Pearl Earring and to everything which Tracy Chevalier was unable to see. So many of Vermeer's women enjoy a kind of reserve, we observe them from a distance. Here, not only has everything been stripped away but suddenly it is we who are observed, ... vividly, suddenly, seen.
The shocking mystery of Vermeer's painting will survive Tracy Chevalier's mediocre novel.
Anyone interested in learning more about Vermeer is lucky to be able to visit the "Essential Vermeer" website which contains a complete catalogue and very detailed, blanced information based on the latest research. To visit the site click on the brown button below.
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Images taken from the internet and presented here under 'fair use' for purposes of education only/