The Concert

The change in mood is most evident in the benign treatment of the male figure. He is still a visitor in an interior that obviously favors feminine presence. The two landscapes function as the map does in The Soldier and the Smiling Girl, framing his head against an image of the outer world, while enclosing the seated woman even more rigorously within the space of the room. Yet now the structure of the painting conspires to absorb him, and render his intrusive aspect as inconspicuous as possible.

Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979

No signature appears on this work.

c. 1665-1666
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1663-1666
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

literature

exhibitions

In the paintings of Vermeer, we find both factual and fictive elements combined according to the artist's necessities. While the window casements and walls appear to be factual, the floor patterns in most cases are fictive created with linear perspective. While more humble objects such as the porcelain wine jugs, tables, pictures, mirrors and maps were probably Vermeer's own, the tapestries and keyboard instruments were brought in for the occasion.

Vermeer had full access to these luxury items through his rich Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven or similar channels. In a certain sense Vermeer's painted environments are analogous to today's photographs in interior design magazines advertising luxury homes which are assembled only to be photographed (and afterwards disassembled). They represented an ideal of the interior - brighter, cleaner, neater and more richly decorated. Moreover, these representations of refined domestic interior were expensive commodities in themselves which would have bolstered cultural prestige of their owners.

A Merry Company Making Music
Dirck Hals
1623
23 x 31 cm
Private collection

In the 17th century, music was an integral part of Dutch life from the lowest rungs of the poor to the most elevated stratus of society. In the world represented in this picture, musical gatherings were not only a pleasurable way of fleeing the inevitable hardships of life, but an accepted way to promote social contacts particularly with the opposite sex. Many songbooks published for domestic use were devoted exclusively to love.

Merry Companies, as they were called, had become a bread-and-butter motif of pioneering Dutch artists such as Dirk Hals (see left), Willem Pietersz. Buytewech, Anthonie Palamadesz. and Willem Cornelisz. Duyster. They portray the conduct of the careless young, frittering away their lives on drink, women, music and revelry gathered around tables covered by freshly ironed linens and set with expensive goblets and platters. Musical instruments were prominently on display. Some Merry Companies include biblical analogies to suggest that a moral life avoids the perils of the easy life given over to indulging the senses. These scenes were also enjoyed as a substituting experience of the relaxed morals of the inn or brothel within an otherwise strict society.

When Vermeer turned his craft to the motif of the Merry Companies it had been refined to a incredible degree by Gerard ter Borch. However, only Vermeer was capable of infusing such a trivial genre with a sense of pictorial order and empathy that had not been seen before.

When somber hues dominated the Dutch palettes in the decades prior to Vermeer's activity, most painters found it difficult to resist the seductive power of a patch of bright color, draperies being the main choice. Although hardly any bright pigments were available, artists learned how to produce an exceptional range of lavish hues through multi-layered techniques and calculated juxtaposition of colors. Instead, Vermeer worked principally with the primary colors: blue, red and yellow which in every composition establish the principle chromatic harmonies of his art. Measured areas of these primary colors are enclosed by areas of low-key silvery grays and subtle browns that lend them their unique character.

The range of Vermeer's strong colors were more restricted than those of many fellow genre painters. He used orange and purple uniquely in his initial history paintings. The occasional patches of intense green which appear in his work play secondary roles and in most cases are composed with mixtures of yellow and blue pigments. He employed verdigris, the most lustrous of all green pigments so loved by early Flemish painters, only sparingly.

Thumbing through a catalogue of Vermeer's work, we notice that the costume of nearly every key figure is painted with red, blue or yellow. Only one important figure, the writing mistress in A Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, is painted in a muted green. All of the red-clad figures were made early in his career. The secondary figures are usually rendered in dull or secondary hues: olive green, dull brown or black. By rendering the principle figures with bright, positive colors, the observer is signaled where he must look first. They are immediately distinguished from the secondary ones thereby reinforcing the narrative clarity of the painting.

The Painter in his Studio
Hendrick Pot
c. 1650
42 x 48 cm
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

In fourteen of the thirty-seven known Vermeer paintings, a remarkable variety of musical instruments are portrayed even though they are not always clearly visible. Nonetheless, their frequency suggests that they held significant interest for the painter.

In Vermeer's oeuvre we find four muselar virginals, one harpsichord, three bass viols, five citterns, two lutes, a guitar, a trumpet and a recorder. In eight or nine compositions, music-making is the central theme. We do not know whether Vermeer himself kept any musical instruments in his household. Not a single one was listed in the inventory of 1676. However, it is very likely that Vermeer's patrician mother-in-law, Maria Thins, had at least one instrument, perhaps a lute, and that the artist often had the chance to observe them first-hand at the home of his rich patron Pieter van Ruijven. In Van Ruijven's inventory, a viola da gamba, a violin and two flutes, together with several music books were mentioned.

Vermeer may also have had direct access to musical instruments at the home of the wealthy Delft brewer Cornelis Graswinckel whose remarkable collection of music books contained a large part of vocal music, several editions for keyboard instruments and tablatures for flutes. Many critics have speculated on Vermeer's ties with Constantijn Huygens who is considered one of the foremost figures of Dutch 17th-centuy culture. Huygens was an accomplished musician, composer and art connoisseur and if indeed Vermeer did know him, he would have certainly taken the hal-hour's boatride or hour's walk to the nearby Hague to admire his important collection of musical instruments.

How accurate are Vermeer's portrayals of musical instruments?

In a recent interview, Dutch early music expert Louis Peter Grijp points out that the instruments "are accurate, but they could be more accurate." Albert Pomme de Mirimonde ("Les Sujets musicaux chez Vermeer de Delft") wrote that the musical annotation on the crumpled sheet of paper lying on the foreground chair in Love Letter does not make musical sense. Moreover, the structure of the flute in the Girl with a Flute does not seem entirely convincing, a fact, together with other anomalies in the work, that has brought many Dutch painting experts to doubt its authenticity. All in all, the musical instruments in Vermeer's paintings seem to be coherent with his overall system of representation.

Collector's Gallery
Frans Francken, the Younger
115,5 cm x 148 cm
Schönborn-Buchheim Collection,
Leichtenstein Museum, Liechtenstein

There may be no other country in which so many paintings were executed as during the 17th century than in the United Provinces. It is estimated that between 1600 and 1700 no less than 5 million paintings were executed in small and large centers of painting. This astronomical figure is even more surprising if we remember the distrust of holy images professed by Calvinism from the very beginning of its spread. The wave of iconoclasm had destroyed an incalculable number of works of art. Today, the large churches in Dutch towns still welcome the faithful with bare whitewashed plastered walls, with plain, stark spaces, where there is no indulgence in decoration. Inscriptions and coats of arms may sometimes grace the memorial tablets and sporadic images decorate the balustrades of the galleries, but everything else is strictly imageless.

Dutch homes however, were covered with paintings and eventually became to be pictured themselves in many interior scenes. It was not uncommon for a Dutch citizen to own ten or fifteen paintings, in addition to prints and large maps. In the homes of the well-to-do, 50 paintings could be expected. The fact that Dutch paintings were generally very small and easy to handle made it easier to place them on the market and increased their diffusion. Laborers or peasants in the countryside probably could not afford paintings, but contemporary reports suggest that even humble homes often contained drawings and prints. Prices varied widely—while some paintings fetched fewer than 20 guilders, a large-scale portrait by Rembrandt could command 500 guilders and a small scene of everyday life by Leiden master Gerrit Dou 1,000, enough to buy a comfortable house.

Photograph of Thoré-Bürger from
the sales catalogue of the
Thoré-Bürger collection, 1892

Thoré-Bürger, who is considered the rediscoverer of Vermeer, wrote under the name of Wilhelm Burger. An enthusiast for Dutch 17th-century art, particularly that of Frans Hals, in 1866 Thoré published an important essay on the work of Jan Vermeer which became extremely influential although it lead to some misunderstandings about Vermeer's oeuvre. Thoré attributed 66 pictures to Vermeer although there are only 36 paintings firmly attributed to him today.

Bürger did not himself have the financial means to acquire paintings on anything like the scale of the major European collectors with whom he was associated. Nevertheless, his collection, informed by his avid researches and his energetic search for related works, soon developed well beyond a "somewhat unusual gallery of bric- à-brac." He once possessed Vermeer's View of Delft, Concert, Lady Standing at the Virginal and the entrancing Woman with a Pearl Necklace.

Prelude 1 [1.39 MB]
François Couperin

from L'Art de Toucher de Clavecin,
performed by Hendrik Broekman
on a Flemish single harpsichord.
http://www.hubharp.com/sound_samples.htm

Come, Charming Sleep
John Johnson

performed by members of Musica Antiqua,
Iowa State University.
http://www.music.iastate.edu/antiqua/

Harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers
1643
National Music Museum
Vermillion, South Dakota

The Harpsichord

Like the virginal, the harpsichord is probably derived from the medieval psaltery with a keyboard applied to be able to play polyphonic music (melody with accompanying chords).

The earliest known reference to a harpsichord dates from 1397 telling that a certain Hermann Poll claimed to have invented an instrument called "clavicembalum." The earliest known representation is a sculpture in an altarpiece of 1425 from Minden/North-West Germany.

The main centers for harpsichord making were situated in Germany, Flanders (above all Antwerp with the renowned families Ruckers and Couchet) and Italy.

The harpsichord had its peak in the 16th and 17th century and remained in active use throughout the 18th century, for performance of solo keyboard music (above all Bach, Couperin, Froberger) as well as essential participant in chamber music, orchestral music and opera (accompaniment of the "recitativo").

The harpsichord is characterized by an elongated wing shape like that of a grand piano, which results from the fact that the strings, growing progressively longer from treble to bass, run directly away from the player. The heart of the harpsichord's mechanism is the jack, a slender slip of wood that stands resting on the back of the key. The top of the jack carries a plectrum which plucks the strings when the key is depressed. There are two strings per key, the courses, tuned either to the same pitch or in octave. A padded bar placed overhead — the jackrail — prevents the jack from flying out of the instrument, when the key is struck.

Two manuals were common, though the upper manual was originally used for transposing. Only in the second half of the 17th century the additional manual was used for contrast of tone with the ability to couple the registers of both manuals for a fuller sound.

The Seduction (detail)
Caspar Netscher
1664
38 x 32 cm
Private collection

Once the immensely popular brothel scenes of the Utrecht school had lost commercial steam, the theme was adroitly recycled into a new idiom of elegant genre interiors. Earlier Vermeer writers, taking the clue of the explicit bordello scene by Dirck van Baburen which hangs in a heavy black frame to the right, proposed that Vermeer had portrayed one such high-class but thinly disguised bordello with a moralizing function, equating it to a sort of Christian sermon. Recent scholarship has questioned whether the affluent Dutch needed a constant reminder of moral values in art and propose that Baburen's work was meant to contrast the chaste, musical meeting even though it is not out of the question that Vermeer may have meant to overlap hints of vice and virtue.

In the work by Caspar Netscher (see detail left) of roughly the same years as Vermeer's Concert, the elegant young woman standing at left assumes the role of the procuress. She points insistently at her palm demanding money from the young man seated before her (the same gesture is seen in Baburen's work). The "gentleman," in turn, dutifully offers up a gold coin in payment. The second young woman, clad in a lustrous satin gown, is poised with pitcher and glass, ready to commence festivities the moment the transaction is completed.

In order to understand who bought painted scenes of prostitution like Vermeer's Procuress we need not look further than Vermeer's own household. In fact, Dirck van Baburen's Procuress, which hung as a conspicuous background prop in two works by Vermeer, was property of his staunchly Catholic and patrician mother-in-law, Maria Thins.

In some respects, this immensely popular genre reflects the ubiquity of the prostitution trade in 17th-century Netherlands but it does not explain why they were sought after by elite buyers. Neither the Procuress by Vermeer nor the hundreds of similar paintings reflect real, sordid working conditions of mankind's oldest trade in those times. Traditional art history theory has it that these scenes were meant to have a moralizing significance on the viewer but as Wayne Franits points out that "interest in offensive materials permeated Dutch society all levels, a fact that does not square with lingering modern constructs of a sober, religiously zealous Calvinist nation. The pervasiveness of such materials naturally provoked impassioned condemnation by leaders of the Reformed Church but it would be a mistake to assume that their denouncements were endorsed by the population at large."

In fact, theatre, itself controlled by the cultural elite, featured a consistent flow of comical lewdness and risqué plots. These sophisticated theatre-goers were evidently the same who collected paintings like Vermeer's Procuress, whose overtly lewd subject ran no risk of being misunderstood. Most likely, the distance between the elite buyers and the explicit sexual contents of both this type of theatre and painting was maintained by the sophisticated qualities of the artistic production and the fact that the subjects belonged to a separate, inferior social class.