The Guitar Player
(De gitaarspeelster)
c. 1670-72
oil on canvas
20 1/4 x 18 1/4 in. (53 x 46.3 cm.)
Kenwood, English Heritage as
Trustees of the Iveagh Bequest
A Wooded Landscape with a Gentleman
and Dogs in the Foreground
Pieter Jansz van Asch
c. 1679
(whereabouts unknown)
Dutch art expert Gregor Weber identified the painting-within-a-painting as A Wooded Landscape with a Gentleman and Dogs in the Foreground by by Pieter Jansz. van Asch. In Vermeer's version, Van Asch's painting has been cropped on the right and slightly on the top. The group of gentlemen and dogs is covered by the guitar player's head. Vermeer often availed himself of poetic license when he included the works of other Dutch painters in his own.
Van Asch's landscape may have been a possession of Vermeer at the moment of his death. Like many other Dutch artists, he dealt in paintings of his colleagues to augment his earnings since many painters were not able of support themselves by painting alone. In his late years Vermeer's trade went poorly. Catharina Bolnes, the artist's wife, stated in a petition to her creditors that her husband "during the long and ruinous war with France not only had been unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other mers he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the very great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead."
According to the scholar Elise Goodman, even though we know nothing of Vermeer's literary and musical predilections, the young girl that appears in the painting is a member of the haute bourgeoisie who read, wrote, and spoke in several languages. She probably collected European poetry and had a taste for the lyrics of Dutch, French and even English songbooks which circulated in great numbers in 17th-century Netherlands. Her hairstyle, dress and guitar reflect the latest styles of the day.
The young girl's open expression is quite unusual for Vermeer's sitters who usually convey their emotion in a veiled manner. Perhaps her flirtatious expression suggests the presence of a male listener nearby.
In the 17th century, pearls were an extremely important status symbol. In 1660 English diarist Samuel Pepys paid 4 1/2 pounds for a pearl necklace, and in 1666 he paid 80 pounds for another, which at the time amounted to about 45 and 800 guilders respectively. At about the same time the traveling French art connoisseur Balthasar de Monconys had been shown a single-figured painting by Vermeer which had been paid 600 guilders and that he considered the price outrageous.
Vermeer used a remarkable technique for rendering the pearl necklace in this painting. He first painted a light gray stroke of paint over the greenish shadow of the neck to serve as the basis of the strand of pearls. He then deftly applied a sequence of white spherical highlights that indicate the spherical nature and reflective quality peculiar to pearls. Pearls are linked with vanity but also with virginity - a wide enough iconographic spectrum.
This detail illustrates the strong tendency towards stylization in Vermeer's late works. Instead of continuously modeled form, objects are abstracted into a series of flat patches of differently toned paint, which, however, never fail to convey the play of light on the delicately formed fingers of the young girl.
The guitar was just coming into vogue in the 17th century as a popular instrument for solo accompaniment. The music it created was bolder than that of the lute, in large part because its chords produced a resonance not possible on the lute. By then, the lute had begun to take on associations with an idealized past, a sophisticated era where music had been enjoyed and contemplated for the purity of its sounds. The bright and direct character of the Guitar Player thus, spoke more to the modern world of music represented by the guitar than to the conservative and contemplative traditions of the lute.
The rendering of the guitar is a technical tour de force. Maximum attention was paid to the rendering of the decorative black and white inlay of its border whose visually "staccato" effect intensifies the painting's crisp, sparkling atmosphere and lends a rhythmic note consonant to the musical theme. The ornate hand-carved sound hole (see detail left) is rendered with an astounding calligraphic shorthand of thick blobs of impasto paint which miraculously describes the way light rakes across the uneven shiny surface. But perhaps the most subtle technique has been reserved for the painting of the instrument's strings. If carefully observed, we find that some of them are strongly blurred to suggest vibration in a quite unconventional manner which finds few parallels in 17th-century painting.
Why Vermeer simplified his technique is an open question. Some art historians believe the artist's creative powers began to wane under the weight of terrible personal calamities. Others believe he was simply following the French influence that had begun to dominate high culture. Yet others may have simply wished to abbreviate the painting process in order to compete more advantageously in an extremely fickle art market which had all but collapsed due to the French invasion of the Netherlands in 1672.
Paternal Admonition (detail)
Gerard ter Borch
1654-1655
71 x 73 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Satin was sometimes starched and ironed to stiffen the material. From the heavey fall of the folds, the dress in the Guitar Player appears to be made of starched satin.
In the 17th century, Dutch painters had reached pinnacle of pictorial illusionism and especially delighted in the depiction of textures and light. In particular, the description of luxurious fabrics like silk, satin and velvet were considered a test of the painter's ability and the best never lost the chance to show off their technical prowess in this area. Philip Angel wrote in 1642, "A painter worthy of praise should be able to render this variety in the most pleasurable way for all eyes with his brushwork, distinguishing between harsh, rough clothiness and smooth satiny evenness..."
Finely rendered satin gowns were strong selling point of an enormous number of genre works. Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster were particularly good at it but Gerard ter Borch surpassed them all. So when Vermeer included this kind of luxurious garment in his painting, he was well aware that it would be compared to those of the most highly appraised and sought after painters of the moment.
Painting luxurious fabrics was particularly difficult and time consuming. Because the folds change with the movement of the body and painters could not usually finish them in a single session, life-size wooden manikins were dressed with the sitter's most costly clothes.
The three books which lie on the table give an air of learning to the picture even though it is impossible to know their subject or title. The size of the bulky volume suggests it was a Bible. One critic has conjectured that the presence of the holy text in the worldly context represents a veiled admonition to the girl's vain pursuits.
It is not easy to understand the space that the young girl inhabits but she appears to be quite far from the background wall even though the golden frame seems to bind her closely to it. We might assume that the hidden window to the far right was similar in structure to other windows found in Vermeer's interiors with two lower and two upper casements. The upper casements had shutters that could be closed from the inside while the lower shutters were on the exterior of the house. Thus, the curtains such as the one seen in this painting were used to shield incoming light and indiscreet eyes. It would seem that the light which floods the girl comes from a second window nearer to the artist.
Although it can barely be made out, the dark silhouette represents the top of a lion-head finial of a so-called Spanish chair which Vermeer had portrayed in many of his works including the early Officer and Laughing Girl. These particular chairs probably derived their name from the use of leather instead of cloth as was common practice in Spain. They were so prized that their makers' regarded themselves as a distinct and superior group within the craftsman guilds. Similar chairs can be seen countless times in genre interiors of Vermeer's time.
A similar elegant fur-trimmed yellow morning jacket appears in five other paintings by Vermeer such as the Mistress and Maid. In the mid-1660s or after they were depicted in an enormous number of Dutch genre interiors, in a wide variety of colors. Very few have survived.
These jackets were worn by middle and upper class women. They served as protection against the long gelid Dutch winters while performing household chores.
The shimmering material of the jacket is broken down into an abstract pattern which seem almost unrelated to the actual tuck and fold of the garment. Vermeer expert Arthur Wheelock points out that the brisk, remarkably free brushwork coupled with the highly unusual, off-center composition may have been meant to convey the character of the popular guitar whose sound is far more joyful than the contemplative lute.
- signature
- date
- the painting with its frame
- how big is this picture?
- related works 1 2 3 4 5
critical excerpt
c. 1670
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)
c. 1670-1672
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)
literature
provenance
exhibitions
Lady with a Lute
Palma Vecchio
96.5 x 73.7 cm
Alnwick Cle, Alnwick
According to art historian Elise Goodman, Vermeer's Guitar Player belongs to a construct that may be called the "lady and the landscape" which was a popular, international convention for glorifying female beauty in the 17th-century painting, prints and literature. A typical example of this convention is Palma Vecchio's Lady with a Lute (see left) which represents a female musician in front of an idyllic landscape.
The idea that a lady was a "masterpiece of nature" to be admired, possessed and displayed, appeared in countless poems, songs and tracts on women in the 17th century. In poetry, women's features were delicately entwined with their natural environment. The metamorphosis by which she was turned into a metaphorical tree or verdant meadow was popular in English and French 17th-century literature and was echoed in Dutch poems by Hooft, Huygens and Vondel. Vermeer may have been aware of the convention when he recalls the dangling curls of the young girl's hair in the hanging branches of the idyllic landscape directly behind her head.
Since Vermeer was once consulted as an expert in matters of Italian artworks, he must have been familiar with this type of painting through Italian pictures and prints which widely circulated throughout Europe and were avidly collected on the Dutch art market.
John M . Montias, expert of Vermeer's life and extended family, mused that the yellow-jacketed girl has the characteristic jaw formation of the Wrightsman portrait (see left). Assuming the date assigned to that picture (1671-1672) is about right, it could represent Maria (Vermeer's eldest daughter) at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Elisabeth, born about 1657, is a less likely candidate since she was probably less than fifteen years old at the time the Kenwood picture was painted.
In any case, it is difficult to imagine how the father of 11 children was able to avoid the influence of their presence. Many critics have noticed the apparent discrepancy between Vermeer's perfectly-ordered interiors and what may have been the artist's daily life with a brood of children. Where are the cradles, beds and chairs, according to the inventory taken after his death, strewn out over the house? Contrary to many Dutch genre painters such as Jan Steen, Nicolaes Maes and Gabriel Metsu whose pictures literally overflow with children, Vermeer gave them only two minor, but poetic parts to play.
The problem is not so difficult as it may seem. Simply put, Vermeer's paintings were not intended as biographical statements. Even though they do represent contemporary settings and modes, they were not meant to reflect the conditions of his personal life. As Walter Liedtke wrote, "the artist depicted a patrician ideal.
Poverty disease, the deaths of children and other loved-ones, and the large-scaled calamities that occasionally afflicted Delft left no trace on his human subjects who are concerned with beauty, the arts and sciences, spiritual life, and worldly pleasures in moderation."It is difficult to explain the radiant joy of the Guitar Player in the light of Vermeer's private life. In the years when this picture was presumably painted, he faced grave financial difficulties brought on by an ever-growing family to feed and eventually exacerbated by an economic collapse (and virtual evaporation of the art market) following the French invasion of the Netherlands in 1672.
Whether the unusual compositional formula and abbreviated technique of the Guitar Player was fruit of an artistic collaboration with a client or the artist's attempt to overcome his stinging personal hardships, it remains, perhaps, the happiest of his works. In any case, Vermeer and his wife Catharina Bolnes must have treasured this canvas since it remained in Catharina's possession after her husband's early death. Some time later, she was forced to hand it over as collateral for a formidable debt accumulated with the Delft baker Hendrick van Buyten. In 1675, Vermeer had suddenly died leaving his wife with 11 children, 10 of whom were minors.
For some unknown reason the light in this painting enters from the right instead of following the pictorial convention of light entering from the left. The origins of this pictorial formula may be linked with the fact that artists usually paint with the light source coming from the left so that the shadow cast by their working hand did not disturb the area on which they were working. The fact that western spectators read from left to right also contributes to the success of the formula.
Conservator and Vermeer expert Jorgen Wadum has suggested that the few works of Vermeer in which the light enters from the right "may have been created to fit a collector's 'gallery' and how the light fell in that room. Is it conceivable that Van Ruijven (Vermeer's patron) acquired paintings from his favorite artist with this in mind, equal to the manner with which the artist Jacob van Campen, working under the supervision of Constantijn Huygens, perceived the Oranjezaal outside The Hague? For this interior it was stated that within certain paintings the light should be painted entering from the left and in others from the 'wrong side' (the right). This was done in order to complete for the spectator the illusion of natural light and painted light following the same laws of nature."
Vermeer expert Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. pointed out the uniqueness of Vermeer's highly unusual composition. The girl is placed asymmetrically to the left so much that her arm is cut off. The viewer intuitively enters the painting from the right and immediately confronts the guitar player's presence making it impossible to explore the rest of the painting aside from the gold-framed landscape. The rest of the composition remains dramatically empty. There is no way that the viewer can subtract himself from the arresting beauty of the boldly painted face, jacket, guitar and gown.
The Guitar Player represents an exception in 17th-century painting in that it has not been relined and is on its original strainer. The canvas is still fixed to the strainer by wooden pegs, which were less costly than metal nails which in those times had to be produced by hand, one by one.
Riverscape with Travelers
Herman van Swanevelt
1644
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Grenoblex-Arts,
Grenoble
Although the gilt-framed landscape has been identified by Gregor Weber as A Wooded Landscape with a Gentleman and Dogs in the Foreground by Pieter Jansz van Asch, Bert Meijer has recently pointed out strong affinities with a wooded landscape by Herman van Swanevelt (see left).
Villanesque [2.14 MB], Guillaume Morlaye
performed by Michael Craddock
on a Renaissance guitar.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~lsa/old/Cleveland2008/CraddockMConcert.html
Baroque 5-course-guitar,
attributed to
Matteo Sellas, Venice, c. 1630-50
.
Richly decorated with ivory,
bone and various woods.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York
There are various different theories about the origin of the guitar. Some thought it as a remote descendant of the ancient Greek kithara, suggested by the etymological relationship of "kithara" and "guitar," but this is in any case out of the question. Others have seen early ancestors among the long-necked lutes of Mesopotamia. From the 1st to the 4th century A.C. some examples of short-necked lutes with guitar shape were found in Central Asia.
In the early Middle Ages the Arabs ("Moors") passing through Egypt on their way to conquer North Africa and Spain, may well have brought with their instruments the cardinal features of the guitar to Western Europe. Hence the name "Guitarra Morisca" for a kind of guitar with a long neck, an oval soundbox and several sound holes on its soundboard, depicted in medieval miniatures together with a "Guitarra Latina," with distinctive curved sides, which has been developed then into the form of the guitar known to us today.
By the 15th century the four-course guitar emerged as the preferred one, but the number of courses (pairs of strings) became more and more variable. The four-course guitar remained very popular by the common people throughout the 17th and 18th centuries because its limited range of courses made it useful for playing light dance settings or simple accompanying chords for popular songs.
The five-course guitar emerged in the 16th century at first in Italy, as a development and transformation from the four-course instrument with the emphasis on brighter, higher-ranged music. It was used both for accompanying the voice and in continuo ensembles. From there the five-course guitar spread to an increasing popularity throughout Europe during the 17th century. Both four- and five-course guitars seem to have been rather small instruments compared to the today's Classical guitar.
The nature of the guitar changed noticeably in the middle of the 18th century along with the musical styles in general. An arpeggiated style similar to that of a keyboard instrument (harpsichord) required true bass notes and stressed the use of a bourdon on the fifth course. The guitar was becoming an instrument closer in character and playing style to the modern guitar.
The back of the "normal" guitar is flat. Along the fingerboard are complete gut frets tied round the neck. The bridge is similar to that of the lute, fixed on the table and with a typical decoration in form of a "moustache" at both sides. The strings were normally made of gut. From the 15th to the 18th century the sound hole appeared as a decorated rose, then it was open like at the modern guitar.
The technique of plucking the strings individually was called in Spain "punteado" (in Italian: "pizzicato"). Another technique is the strumming of chords by sweeping the hand back and forth over all the strings at once - the "rasgueado" (It. "battuto" or "battente"), providing a piece with a particular character.
Gerrit van Honthorst
c. 1624
82 x 58 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Herman van Swanevelt
1644
Grenoble Musee de Beaux-Arts
Caspar Netscher
1669
37.5 x 28.1 cm
Wallace Collection, London
attributed to Jan Gerritsz van Bronckhorst
oil on canvas
28.7 x 41.2 cm
Museum of Art, Philadelphia
c. 1700 (?)