Why was vermeer unique

The alkali, or lye, was commonly prepared from the ash of wood or other plants extracted with water. The soluble dyestuff components were then converted into the insoluble lake pigment by the addition of alum potassium aluminium sulphate and often in the case of yellow lakes, some form of calcium carbonate such as chalk.

In fact, analyses of yellow lakes in 17th-century paintings have shown that they almost always contain predominantly chalk. In a sample from the yellow sleeve of 'The Guitar Player' lead-tin-yellow has been detected together with a large amount of chalk, most probably employed in the preparation of the yellow lake pigment which has now markedly faded [figs.

The mid-tone of the drapery laid in first over the ground, and visible in the cross-section as a yellowish translucent layer beneath the pale yellow paint layer, was also found to be rich in chalk, again suggestive of the presence of yellow lake.

Analysis of a sample from the pale yellowish brown skirt in 'Young Woman seated at a Virginal' also suggested the presence of a yellow lake pigment. The paint cross-section shows a pale layer with a particle of bone black upper left , two tiny particles of red earth and a small yellow particle at lower right.

The presence of calcium is suggestive of chalk, again indicative of a yellow lake, which has now largely faded. The paint surface is now rather blanched in appearance and the skirt has a pale yellowish-brown colour, now largely due to overpaint and discoloured varnish. A red mercuric sulphide pigment prepared from finely ground mineral cinnabar; or artificially prepared by the wet-process or dry-process.

Dry process vermilion was extensively manufactured in The Netherlands in the 17th century, while the wet process was not commercialised until the 19th century. Accents of brilliant red vermilion are applied sparingly in these paintings except in 'Young Woman seated at a Virginal' where it does not appear to have been used at all for example: for ribbons, bows 'Young Woman standing at a Virginal' and 'The Music Lesson' [figs.

The pigment was also used to produce the intense mixed orange colour in the corner of the lid of the virginal in this painting [fig. The source of the red organic dyestuffs could be plant or animal in origin; dyestuff could be extracted from the roots of the madder plant, for example, or from scale insects such as Mexican cochineal.

A red lake pigment was employed for mixed purples with natural ultramarine as previously described [ figs.

This pigment was also mixed with lead white for shades of pink, for example in the design on the chair back in 'Young Woman seated at a Virginal' [figs.

In this painting a sample taken from the warm brown colour of the viol shows multiple layers of red lake pigment combined with calcium carbonate and a very small amount of bone black pigment applied over the ground [figs. Given the context and colour of the instrument, it seems likely that the chalk present here is the substrate for a yellow lake which has faded in the uppermost layer. The dense, opaque white pigment, basic lead carbonate, has been produced artificially since antiquity.

From the cross-sections examined, the lead white in these four paintings appears to have a range of particle size consistent with production by the Dutch stack process. In 'The Art of Painting', Boon and Oberthaler have identified an extremely finely grained lead white pigment employed for the surface layers of the floor tiles.

These researchers suggest that this finely divided lead white is the reason for the delamination of some surface paint layers. Unfortunately, it was not possible to take a paint sample from this area. However, visual examination at magnification suggest that there are a number of factors which might be considered in relation to this type of loss: the upper white paint layer may be too lean poorly bound ; the underlying layer was too dry and may have had a surface accretion of dust preventing proper adhesion of the uppermost layer; and eruptions from underlying layers may be implicated in pushing off the fine white surface paint layer in these areas.

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Search Entire website. Chair upholstery showing the use of natural ultramarine. Rich-blue curtain behind the virginal. Showing a stud on the chair upholstery. Leaded lights showing the use of ultramarine combined with red lake to form a purple colour.

The uppermost paint layer consists of ultramarine combined with red lake. Showing lead-tin yellow combined with ultramarine for the shading of the sleeve. Since that time there have been a number of important studies, mostly on individual paintings and generally linked to conservation programmes. Gifford, J. Wadum and N. These studies provide vital comparative insight into Vermeer's painting technique and working methods: H.

Gaskell and M. Jonker, eds. Groen, I. Van der Werf, K. The face of the young girl is only summarily rendered and may have never been brought to completion. The lack of finesse and the highlights make the eyes and skin seem opaque. The psychological nuance that belongs to its companion work, the Girl with a Red Hat , was long stripped away by poor restoration.

Nonetheless, viewers can console themselves with the brilliant passage of the fur trim the left-hand sleeve has been clumsily overpainted and the bizarre, oriental-looking hat, headgear that is rarely seen in Dutch painting. It is truly odd that this work such as this is not among the most popular paintings of Vermeer. It displays many of the artist's most characteristic motifs and details that would be envied byf almost any Dutch interior painter of the time.

Moreover, the brilliant original color scheme has been uncovered by recent restoration. The bar graph below displays the total number of yearly website visits to each of Vermeer's paintings listed in the Complete Vermeer Catalogu e.

The vertical bar represents the number of visits each painting received. For example, the first bar to the extreme left shows that painting no. The progressive numbers on the graph's horizontal axis refer to the order of the paintings by popularity.

Thus, painting no. The great part of the visits to the single paintings originates from Complete Vermeer Catalogue index page where each painting is represented by a small thumbnail image, title and other basic information arranged in chronological order.

By clicking on the index titles, the visitor can access a page that provides in-depth information about the work. It is evident from this graph that the greater part of Vermeer's paintings are grouped within a relatively limited range of approximately 15, to 11, visits per year. Occasionally, the difference between contiguous paintings is one hundred visits or less which may not express a meaningful preference.

In one case, only fourteen visits separate two pictures. The first six paintings constitute a relatively distinct group.

The difference between the first three and last three paintings of this second group is marked. We might consider the first three as "Vermeer's most popular paintings" with certainty. Owing to their iconic status, the positions of the first two come as no surprise. A third group is composed of eight paintings each of which received less than ten thousand visits. There is at least one factor that might contribute to the low classification of these pictures which has little to do with their capacity to interest viewers.

Three of the four are among Vermeer's last paintings and, hence, are located at the bottom of the index. The lower position makes it less likely that the average visitor will scroll all the way to the bottom of the page before settling on one particularly eye-catching work.

On the other hand, the colorful and very "typical" Glass of Wine has received very few visits even though it is near the top of the catalogue list..

Other anomalies might be considered the famous Little Street , which is in position no. Both works have been reproduced countless times in both popular and art history literature.

Although it has hardly drawn critical praise by experts, the recently attributed A Young Woman at the Virginals New York private collection stands at a healthy no. One might suspect that the St Praxedis , certainly the least typical painting of the artist's oeuvre, has gained the respectable position no. Send me an email at: jonathanjanson essentialvermeer. Want to make this the perfect website Vermeer deserves?

Take a poll. Essential Vermeer 3. Vermeer's Most Popular Paintings. Girl with a Pearl Earring c. The Milkmaid c. Rijksmuseum , Amsterdam museum contact. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window c. The Art of Painting c. Kunsthistorisches Museum , Vienna museum contact. The Girl with a Wine Glass c. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher c. Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York museum contact.

Woman with a Pearl Necklace c. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter c. The Love Letter c. View of Delft c. A Lady Writing c. National Gallery of Art , Washington D. The Music Lesson c.

Officer and Laughing Girl c. Frick Collection , New York museum contact. The Procuress Oil on canvas x cm. The Geographer c. Girl with a Red Hat c. National Gallery of Art , Washington, D. Woman Holding a Balance c. The Concert c. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston museum contact. The Little Street c. A Maid Asleep c. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary c.

National Gallery of Scotland , Edinburgh museum contact. The Lacemaker c. The Astronomer Oil on canvas 50 x 45 cm. Saint Praxedis Oil on canvas National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. The Leiden Collection , New York. Diana and her Companions c. Girl Interrupted in her Music c. Mistress and Maid c. Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid c.

National Gallery of Ireland , Dublin museum contact. The Guitar Player c. Although crude in comparison to Vermeer 's quietist haute-bourgeoisie interiors, Buytewech 's ground-breaking interior spaces of the late s were replete with wall maps and groups smartly dressed damsels and dandies, more or less wiling away their youth in frivolous pastimes. Brightly colored figures occupy a shallow interior, "pressing on us their enjoyment of music, wine and those notorious aphrodisiacs, oysters.

But rather than communicating an obvious narrative, the figures are posed in attitudes of merriment, swagger and romance. During the decades that followed, interior painting slowly became more refined. Buytewech 's merry companies evolved into the hushed interiors of Gerrit ter Borch with one or two figures quietly engaged in refined activities such as letter writing or letter reading no doubt love letters with a Petrachan slant.

Buytewech 's garish palette gave way to Ter Borch faint powder blues and pinks and Vermeer 's impalpable grays, sky blues and light lemon yellows. After a full 50 years, the happy chaos of Buytewech 's mixed-up compositions were replaced by Vermeer 's quietist, pas pro toto interiors. The pursuit of lifelikeness, a preoccupation of Northern painting since Jan van Eyck, can said to have reached its technical apogee in the last decades of the s and s when Vermeer was active.

While landscape encompassed numerous modes, from the pastoral to the allegorical, its least assuming theme was its most innovative: the local land. In general, it can be said that monetary value coincided with a hierarchical order and the size of the paintings. Larger historical paintings receiving the most amount and small floral paintings receiving the least. The convenient price and availability of landscape paintings made them the art form of the middle-class.

Vermeer painted two landscapes which have suruvued, or more precisely, one cityscape, the The View of Delft and one streetscape, The Little Street. A surviving document informs us another streetscape existed. The View of Delft is Vermeer 's largest and most time consuming work of his oeuvre, except perhaps, the elaborate Art of Painting.

Since nothing has come down to us concerning the artist 's intentions in regards this or for that matter, any other work art historians have felt obliged to somehow fill the gap. Walter Liedtke believes that the view could have been commissioned by Vermeer 's patron, Pieter van Ruijven who had collected more than half of the artist 's artistic production including the View of Delft. Furthermore, the art historian points out that Van Ruijven 's collection the two small-scale streetscapes already mentioned as well as three architectural paintings by Emanuel de Witte, including a patriotic view of William the Silent 's tomb in the Nieuwe Kerk which Vermeer spectacularly highlighted in his View of Delft.

Van Ruijven would have also been aware of the historically proclaimed relation between an artist 's reputation and the fame bestowed on his city. Dutch citizens strongly identified not only with their republic, but with their city of birth as well.

Their civic pride is testified by innumerable Dutch cityscapes many of which are so similar to one another that they are virtually indistinguishable expect a few characteristic church towers or large civic buildings. Curiously, even the earliest reference to The Little Street describes it as a "house" rather than a "street. In those times, Vermeer 's house was not the kind of luxurious townhouse that was going up on the fashionable Oude Delft but a modest house from a distant past which had somehow resisted the misfortunes of the city, old but not dilapidated.

To anyone who gazed upon the Little Street in seventeenth-century Netherlands the now unfamiliar Dutch term, schilderachtig , would have come to mind.

Schilderachtig , which means "picture worthy" or "worthy of painting" corresponds fairly well to today 's "picturesque. Accordingly, an old woman, a dilapidated farmhouse, a village peasant scene or Vermeer 's humble house would have drawn sneers since only grand Biblical or historical narratives were truly worthy of great art. The emergence of the Dutch school of painting in the early seventeenth century is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the visual arts. The Dutch Republic, a small country that had only become a political entity in and was still suffering from the effects of a long and arduous war with Spain, would hardly seem to have had the resources to nourish and sustain its artistic traditions.

Nonetheless, in every respect, the Dutch seem to have drawn strength from adversity; they profited in terms of trade, political awareness, religious tolerance, wealth and above all, self-esteem. They were proud of their achievements and were determined to provide for themselves a broad and lasting foundation that would define their unique social and cultural heritage.

The political and religious attitudes of the period are not readily apparent in the work of Dutch artists. The still lifes, portraits, landscapes, seascapes and genre scenes that characterize this school of painting are surprisingly lacking in information on the major events of the day.

Nevertheless, the philosophical bases from which artists worked are clearly the same as those governing decisions in contemporary political, military and religious activities. This ideology was essentially threefold: that God 's work is evident in the world itself; that, although things in this world are mortal and transitory, no facet of God 's creation is too insubstantial to be noticed, valued, or represented; and that the Dutch, like the ancient Israelites, were a chosen people, favored and blessed by God 's protection.

Underlying the essential realism of Dutch art, thus, is an allegorical view of nature that provided a means for conveying various messages to contemporary viewers. The Dutch, with their ingrained Calvinist beliefs, were a moralizing people.

While they thoroughly enjoyed the sensual pleasures of life, they were aware of the consequences of wrong behavior. Paintings, even those representing everyday objects and events, often provide reminders about the brevity of life and the need for moderation and temperance in one 's conduct. Subjects drawn from the Bible, mythology and ancient history, likewise, were often chosen for their moralizing messages or for establishing parallels between the Dutch experience and great historical, literary and political events of the past.

For centuries it was believed that Dutch painters, Vermeer included, represented real-life situations to the best of their ability and little more.

However, modern art historians argue that such narrow view of a Vermeer 's production does not do justice to the artist 's complex agenda or the seventeenth-century mind set in which the artist created his works.

As the Dutch art historian Eddy de Jongh wrote, scholars "usually do not doubt Vermeer 's intention of investing his work with meaning.

The question is merely what that meaning was and, above all, whether it still can be deciphered. Inspired by Erwin Panofsky 's revolutionary study of iconography in Italian art, the Dutch iconographic movement spearheaded by De Jongh postulated that Vermeer and his fellow Dutch painters were not only talented all-eyes-and-no-brain realists after all, but thinkers who cleverly incorporated hidden messages in their illusionist images in order to "instruct and delight.

Dutch thought was characterized by an "enormous fascination" with analogies, metaphor, paradox "as well as anything that was or appeared to be multilayered or open to a variety of interpretations. Thirty years later, however, De Jongh would, admit with the intellectual honesty that distinguishes his thought, that he was uncertain exactly how the painter intended the inserted moral to function.

Was Cupid 's message a confirmation of the young musician 's solid moral standards or was he "confronting her precisely because her conduct was not above reproach"? Could Vermeer have directed the moral to the viewer of the painting instead of the musician or, perhaps, "left all the interpretations open inviting the viewer to make a choice, or a combination of choices. Since the fifteenth century, when theorists sought to elevate the status of the painter by contending that he dealt in "ideas" worthy of the philosopher or the poet, the lesser genres of Dutch painting had suffered in comparison with Italian history painting.

Bestowing narrative value to Vermeer 's works made them more worthy of intellectual appreciation. One of the weak points of the iconographic argument, lamented even by its founder De Jongh, is that there exists no t a single period text that deals in any detail the concept "hidden meaning" in reference to genre painting. Moreover, there is no way to show that "a moral purpose, even if it can be shown to have been explicitly declared by painters or collectors, was more than a pretext for the gratifications" 12 offered by the painting 's illusionist image.

In too many cases, symbols appeared to have had multiple meanings, often contradictory, making once-and-for-all interpretations near impossible. De Jongh later widened his own theory to include the possibility of deliberate ambiguity and multivalence. The most sustained period discussion of genre painting by de Lairesse in, "Handelende van 't antiek en 't modern" "Of things antique and modern" , part of de Lairesse 's exhaustive examination of history painting of in the Groot Schilderboek , makes no mention of concealed meaning or any kind of meaning at al.

On the contrary, the theoretician laments that "modern" painting accomplishes little more than representing what meets the eye without any attempt to improve or ennoble it. Some art writers have come to resent the fact that iconographers have brought many to believe that pictures should be looked upon as puzzles, or as "a ciphered text…or a skeleton hidden in a cupboard…always there waiting to be found, somehow behind the painting…" as if, "the painted work had committed a crime…" 13 If Dutch paintings were reminders that pleasure is fleeting and death inevitable, "one begins to wonder why so many people were eager to buy them.

It is hard to believe that what has been called the first mass-consumers' art market in Europe was mainly driven by a collective appetite for moralizing In , Svetlana Alpers , albeit quietly, declared intellectual war on the idea that Dutch paintings could be read like texts. Her major contention is that Dutch painting could be summed up as an "art of description.

It could not be understood within the terms of the dominant Italian "textual culture," which, instead, sought emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. According to Alpers, Vermeer 's View of Delft provides a perfect example of how Dutch painters described "a world that continues beyond the canvas," spread out, "staining the surface with colour and light, impressing itself upon it. Alpers' point of view was initially well received.

Didactic moralizing, teasing, humor and sexual innuendos that the iconographers had seen as typical preoccupations of Dutch painting, were out: science; optics, philosophy and the means by which pictorial illusion is achieved were in.