Girl with a Red Hat

For a painter who excelled in the observation of light, nothing was a more suitable vehicle than the present picture: a bust length figure of a woman in wrap of luxurious material, an outrageous hat, moist lips set between glistening pearls, and daylight streaming in from a nearby window on the right. That the model has a distinctive, somewhat androgynous features and conveys a certain attitude (which would have been needed to carry-off such a costume) adds considerably to the work's "curiosity," a term routinely employed by connoisseurs of the period to express admiration.

Walter Liedtke, Vermeer and the Delft School, 2001

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

c. 1665-1667
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The support is probably oak, with a vertical grain. A slightly larger cradle 24.3 x 19.2 cm. (9 9/16 x7 9/16 in.) and wooden collar protect the edges of the panel. X-radiography shows, over the white chalk ground, a portrait of a man with a lager hat. The Girl with a Red Hat was painted directly over this earlier image. The painting is in remarkably good condition, with only slight abrasion to the thin glazes of the face and a few scattered minor losses.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock

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Surprisingly, x ray photography and neutron reflectography have revealed that underneath Vermeer's image lies a bust length portrait of a man with a wide brimmed hat, perhaps similar to the one worn in the early Officer and Laughing Girl. Before painting directly on the old portrait, Vermeer turned it upside down to avoid being excessively influenced by the image. The male portrait was executed in broad thick brushstrokes inducing Arthur Wheelock to consider Carel Fabritius as its author even though there is no evidence that rules out Vermeer himself. Wheelock cites the fact that at his death Vermeer detained two small tronies by Fabritius which must have been part of his stock in Vermeer's collateral painting trade.

Walter Liedtke points out that it is curious that Vermeer would have destroyed a painting by an author which he had so admired.

Man in Oriental Dress
Fans van Mieris
1665
14.0 x 11.2 cm.
The Picture Gallery of Willem V,
The Hague

The Girl with a Red Hat is considered as a tronie, an obsolete term that refers to a type of picture made familiar by Rembrandt and his followers. Most Dutch tronies were based upon living models, including the artists themselves, relatives or colleagues. However, they were not intended as formal portraits but were kept on spec in the artist's studio ready to stimulate the potential buyer's appetite. An old man, a comely young woman, a "Turk," or a dashing soldier were all standard tronies subjects. Artists favored garments that looked particularly exotic which would offer an opportunity to show off painterly technique, one of the strongest calling cards of the professional artist. In the 17th century there was an avid market for tronies, which were considered a separate genre. They also served as a storehouse of facial types and expressions for figures in history paintings.

Vermeer is known to have painted three tronies in all. John Larson was a Hague/London sculptor who in an inventory drawn up in August 1664 had a painting described as "a tronie by Vermeer" valued at 10 guilders. In the Dissius auction of 1696 in which 21 works by Vermeer were sold, two of the paintings were described as tronies.

The word pendant comes from the Latin pendere, meaning to hang. A pendant is a counterpart: a painting intended to hang together with its pair. They are often of the same format and with identical frames. At times they were hung on the two sides of a door or fireplace.

Some Vermeer specialists have proposed that the Girl with a Red Hat and the Girl with a Flute (see above) were intended as a pendant. They both show a similar young girl wearing an exotic hat with tapestry hung in the background in very similar lighting conditions. Importantly, they were both the same size and are the only two surviving Vermeer paintings executed on panel.

Of all 35 surviving Vermeer's, only two works, the Girl with a Flute and Girl with a Red Hat were not painted on canvas. The later was done on thin oak (?) panel with a vertical grain. However, in Vermeer's death inventory of 1676 there were listed 10 unpainted canvases and 6 unpainted panels in his studio. This fact may indicate that the artist's preference for canvas was not so accentuated as the proportions of his surviving paintings would lead us to believe.

Vermeer experts have proposed various explanations, principally aesthetic, for the artist's choice support for this work. Paint tends to flow easier on the smooth, hard panel favoring a calligraphic touch which is evident in this work. Arthur Wheelock supposed that the artist employed a panel because he wished to emulate the dreamlike sheen of the images produced by the camera obscura. However, the perfectly smooth surface of the panel also permits the highest degree on detail possible with the oil paint technique. We should also consider that in this case panel may have been chosen for a somewhat venial motive. Since Vermeer's painting lies over another work, he may have simply found a convenient format for a quickly done, salable work in the hopes of attracting a buyer with an enticing image in the final years of economic crisis which had all but caused the art market to collapse.

Self Portrait as a Young Man
Rembrandt van Rijn
c. 1628
22.5 x 18.6 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The distinctive lighting scheme whereby the hat projects a soft shadow over both of the young girl's eyes which gaze directly into the eyes of the observer has often be traced to early self portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn (see left). As Vermeer expert Walter Liedtke points out, while Vermeer did not have easy access to Rembrandt's early works, his talented pupils Flinck and Bol had made such poetic expressions a familiar pictorial convention by the 1650s and 1660s.

Curiously, the deep shadows of the young girl's face are painted with a dull green tone (green earth) readily visible when observing the original. Vermeer used the same green tone in other late paintings for the same purpose. By the 17th century painters of the time invariably used warm brown for darker flesh shadows although this unusual technique had been experimented by a few nearby Utrecht Caravaggists. Vermeer specialist John Michael Montias hypothesized that the young Vermeer may have studied in Utrecht but still, this specific technical/stylistic tie is tenuous at best.

Among all of Vermeer's paintings, this is perhaps the one which comes closest to the type of image produced by an instrument known as the camera obscura, an optical device which is a precursor of the modern photographic camera. This devise allows the user to view and project an image from the exterior onto a wall in a dark room or on the surface of a small chamber specially prepared for it.

While experts are not in agreement as to how or to what extent Vermeer and other artists used the camera obscura to compose their paintings, it is certain that the images which it produced present many of the characteristics seen in Vermeer's painting.

Charles Seymour ("Dark Chamber in a Light Filled Room," in Art Bulletin 46, 1964) tested the hypothesis that Vermeer might have been guided by the images he saw in a camera obscura. By observing similar objects (he carefully chose the props) in similar lighting conditions to the ones found in Vermeer's painting through a real 19th-century camera obscura, Seymour found that the resulting image exhibited qualities much like those seen in Vermeer paintings (see above).

The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (detail)
Michelangelo
c. 1497
104.5 x 77 cm
National Gallery, London

One of the most curious techniques of Vermeer's late works is the use of the dull green natural earth as a component of the darker shadows of the flesh tones. In both the Girl with a Red Hat and its pendant, The Girl with a Flute, green earth can be clearly detected with the naked eye although it is not always apparent from reproductions. Art historians have not been able to offer a plausible motive why Vermeer would have opted for such an outdated technique.

Green earth had been widely employed by medieval and early Renaissance painters as a base tone for flesh in order to mitigate the effect of the stark white gesso preparation of panels or canvases. When the pinks and red tones necessary for painting flesh are laid over the white gesso preparation a fastidious "sunburn" effect is procuced. In short, the flesh was modeled over the dry layer of green earth with varying mixtures of white, red lakes and yellow ochre. The layering of the warm flesh tone over the cool green created a very natural pearlessence close to natural skin tones. However, due to the fading of the red pigments many examples of this technique today appear much greener than they were in origin.

An unfinished painting by Michelangelo reveals much about how artists of the time constructed their compositions in a piecemeal fashion, (something today's' painters universally abhor) and also reveals how a flat layer of green earth was laid in under those areas to be occupied with flesh tones.

It is likely that Vermeer did not lay in an unmodulated layer of green earth as in Michelangelo's work. Perhaps he applied green earth only in the shadowed areas (over a brownish ground) feathering it wet-in-wet with the warm, light flesh tones as adjacent areas of light and dark came into contact.

It has been noted that some Mannerist painters from Utrecht had unearthed green earth as a component for painting flesh but their artistic and aesthetic goals were so extremely divergent from those of Vermeer that the connection seems less than plausible.

Jan Dismas Zelenka
Trio sonata ZWV 181, no. 1, Adagio ma non troppo [972 KB]
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