Johannes Vermeer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (June 2009)

Jan Vermeer van Delft
The Art of Painting
Born	baptized October 31, 1632 (1632-10-31) Delft, Netherlands
Died	December 15, 1675 (1675-12-16) Delft, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Field	Painting
Movement	Baroque
Works	About 35 paintings have been attributed
Influenced by	Carel Fabritius, Leonaert Bramer, Dirck van Baburen?

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (baptized in Delft as Joannis on October 31 1632, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on December 16 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.^[1]

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. ^[2]

After having been forgotten, but not by some connoisseurs, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Thoré Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, (although only thirty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Youth 1.2 Marriage and family 1.3 Career 2 Style 3 Works 4 Legacy 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Life

Relatively little is known about Vermeer's life. He seems to have been exclusively devoted to his art in the city of Delft. The only sources of information are some registers, a few official documents and comments by other artists; it was for this reason that Thoré Bürger named him "The Sphinx of Delft".^[3]

[edit] Youth

On October 31, 1632, Joannis was baptized in the Reformed Church.^[4][5] His father, Reijnier Janszoon, was a middle-class worker of silk or caffa (a mixture of silk and cotton or wool).^[6] As an apprentice in Amsterdam Reijnier lived in the fashionable Sint Antoniebreestraat, then a street with many resident painters. In 1615 he married Digna Baltus. In 1620, Reijner and his wife had a daughter, baptized as Gertruy.^[7] In 1625 Reijnier was involved in a fight. The soldier died from his wounds five months later. A some time Reijnier started to deal in paintings, but around 1631 he leased an inn called "The Flying Fox". In 1641 he bought a larger inn at the market square, named after the Belgian town "Mechelen". The acquisition of the inn constituted a considerable financial burden.^[8] When Vermeer's father died in 1652, Vermeer replaced him as a merchant of paintings.

[edit] Marriage and family

In 1653 Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic girl named Catherina Bolenes. The blessing took place in a nearby and quiet village Schipluiden.^[9] For the groom it was a good match. His mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on April 5.^[10] Some scholars doubt that Vermeer became Catholic, but one of his paintings, The Allegory of Catholic Faith, made between 1670 and 1672, reflects the belief in the Eucharist. Liedtke suggests it was made for a Catholic patron or for a schuilkerk, a hidden church.^[11] At some point the couple moved in with Catherina's mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church. Here Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, producing paintings in the front room on the second floor. His wife gave birth to 14 children: four were buried before being baptized, and registered as "child of Johan Vermeer".^[12] From wills written by relatives, ten names are known: Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, and Ignatius.^[13] Quite a few have a name with a religious connotation and it is very likely that the youngest, Ignatius, was named after the founder of the Jesuit order.^[14]

[edit] Career

It is not certain where Vermeer was apprenticed as a painter, nor with whom. It was generally believed that he studied in his home town. While Vermeer owned some paintings or drawings by Carel Fabritius it was suggested that Fabritius was his teacher. The local authority Leonaert Bramer acted as a friend, but their style of painting is rather different.^[15] Liedtke suggests Vermeer taught himself and had information from one of his father's connections.^[16] Some scholars think Vermeer was trained under the catholic painter Abraham Bloemaert. Vermeer worked in a similar style as some of the Utrecht Carravagists. In Delft Vermeer probably competed with Pieter de Hoogh and Nicolaes Maes who produced genre works in a similar style.

On December 29, 1653, Vermeer had become a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war and economic crisis, not only Vermeer's financial circumstances were difficult. In 1657 he might have found a patron in the local art collector Pieter van Ruijven, who lent him some money. In 1662 Vermeer was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he (like Bramer) was considered an established craftsman among his peers.

Vermeer worked slowly, probably producing three paintings a year, and on order. When Balthasar de Monconys visited him in 1663 to see some of his work, the diplomat and the two French clergymen who accompanied him were sent to a baker Hendrick van Buyten, owning a painting with only one figure.

In 1672 a severe economic downturn (the "Year of Disaster") struck the Netherlands, after Louis XIV and a French army invaded the Dutch Republic from the south (known as the Franco-Dutch War). Not only the French burned and robbed country estates. During the Third Anglo-Dutch War an English fleet, and two allied German bishops attacked the country from the east, tried to destroy the countries hegemony. Many people panicked; courts, theaters, shops and schools were closed. Five years passed before circumstances had improved. In the Summer of 1675 Vermeer borrowed money in Amsterdam, using his mother-in-law as a lien.

In December 1675 Vermeer fell into a frenzy and suddenly died, within a day and a half. Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. The collapse of the art market damaged Vermeer's business as both a painter and an art dealer. She, having to raise 11 children, asked the High Court to allow her a break in paying the creditors.^[17] The Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city council as a surveyor, was appointed trustee. The house, with eight rooms on the first floor, was filled with paintings, drawings, clothes, chairs and beds. In his atelier there were besides rummage not worthy being itemized, two chairs, two painter's easels, three palettes, ten canvases, a desk, an oak pull table and a small wooden cupboard with drawers.^[18] Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catherina and her mother. The widow sold two more paintings to the baker in order to pay off quite a debt.

In Delft, Vermeer had been a respected artist, but he was almost unknown outside his home town. The fact that a local patron, Pieter van Ruijven, purchased much of his output reduced the possibility of his fame spreading.^[19] Vermeer never had any pupils; his relatively short life, the demands of separate careers, and his extraordinary precision as a painter all help to explain his limited oeuvre.

[edit] Style

Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint to the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been positively 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. The extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.

There is no other seventeenth century artist who early in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, or natural ultramarine. Vermeer not only used this in elements that are naturally of this colour; the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light within a painting's strongly-lit interior, which reflects its multiple colours onto the wall. In this way, he created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed.^[20] 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.^[21] 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. 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 generously, such as in 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.

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Besides religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can be found in his work.

[edit] Works

Only three paintings are dated: The Procuress (1656, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), The Astronomer (1668, Paris, Louvre), and The Geographer (1669, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut). Two pictures are generally accepted as earlier than The Procuress; both are history paintings, painted in a warm palette and in a relatively large format for Vermeer — Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (Edinburgh, National Gallery) and Diana and her Companions (The Hague, Mauritshuis).

Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil-on-canvas Procuress (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. After his own The Procuress almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows and greys. It is to this period that practically all of his surviving works belong. They are usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a serene sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by a pearly light. Mundane domestic or recreational activities become thereby imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g. Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). To this period also have been allocated Vermeer's two townscapes, View of Delft (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and A Street in Delft (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).

A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and these are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come The Allegory of Faith (c 1670, New York, Metropolitan Museum) and The Letter (c 1670, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).

The often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings have been linked to his possible use of a camera obscura, the primitive lens of which would produce halation and, even more noticeably, exaggerated perspective. Such effects can be seen in Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (London, Royal Collection). Vermeer's interest in optics is also attested in this work by the accurately observed mirror reflection above the lady at the virginals.

[edit] Legacy

• Vermeer's View of Delft features in a pivotal sequence of Marcel Proust's The Captive.
• The book Girl with a Pearl Earring and the film of the same name are named after the painting; they present a fictional account of its creation by Vermeer and his relationship with the model.
• Salvador Dalí, with great admiration for Vermeer, painted his own version of The Lacemaker and pitted large copies of the original against a rhinoceros in some now-famous surrealist experiments. Dali also immortalized the Dutch Master in The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table, 1934.
• Dutch composer Louis Andriessen based his opera, Writing to Vermeer (1997-98, libretto by Peter Greenaway), on the domestic life of Vermeer.
• Greenaway's own film A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) contains a plot line about an orthopedic surgeon named Van Meegeren who stages highly exact scenes from Vermeer paintings in order to paint copies of them.
• Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter who worked in the classical tradition. Lured by the huge sums an authentic Vermeer would command, van Meegeren forged several works in Vermeer's style in several of his own paintings with the intention of selling them as works of Vermeer. ^[22]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Johannes Vermeer

• (Videos): Vermeer: Master of Light - at the National Gallery of Art, Washington
  • Part 1: The Music Lesson
  • Part 2: Girl with the Red Hat
  • Part 3: Woman Holding a Balance
  • Part 4: Camera Obscura
• Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance In-depth discussion of this painting in the National Gallery of Art along with discussion of the artist's life, conservation, illustration of related works.
• Essential Vermeer, In-depth coverage of Vermeer's life, works, and environment
• Jan Vermeer, Dutch Neoclassic Painter - Profile
• Entry in Britannica encyclopaedia
• www.Vermeer-Foundation.org Familiar biography and 111 images of works by Vermeer
• Virtual Vermeer, Familiar biography, interesting entries.
• Vermeercentrum, housed at the site of the former St. Lucas Guild in Delft. (The Vermeer Centre offers a visual voyage of discovery through the life, work and city of Johannes Vermeer.)
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Jan Vermeer. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.