The Lacemaker

The achievement of Vermeer's maturity is complete. It is not open to extension: no universal style is discovered. We have never the sense of abundance that the characteristic jewels of his century gives us, the sense that the precious vein lies open, ready to be worked. There is only one Lacemaker: we cannot imagine another. It is a complete and single definition.

Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, 1952

c. 1669-1670
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1669-1670
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The support is a slightly open, plain-weave canvas with a thread count of 12 x 12 per cm: The canvas has been glued onto an oak panel measuring 23.9 x 20.5 cm. X-radiography shows line of tack holes and cracks from former fold lines at the left and right edges. Strainer bar marks are evident also at the sides 2 cm from the fold lines. Along the top edge the line of cracking is 1.4 cm. from the edge of the canvas and along the bottom edge 2 cm. Assuming that the strainer bars were of equal width, this would suggest that only the tacking edge has been removed from the bottom edge and the tacking edge plus 6 mm. from the top edge. This would give original measurements of 24.5 x 19.3 cm. making the painting slightly narrower and taller than at present.

The thin, gray-brown ground contains chalk, lead-white, and umber. The red; pink and light blue areas were painted wet-in-wet. Brushmarks impart texture to the background paint, and impasto touches are found on the highlights. X-radiograph shows a pentimento: the knee was lower so that a triangle of wall was visible under the tabletop. The blue in the tablecloth is discolored. The flattened tacking edges along the left and right sides have been retouched.

* 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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Domestic imagery only began to be produced with great frequency after the Treaty of Münster in 1648, a period of tremendous affluence and, related to this, increased awareness of civility that self-conscious cultivation of grace and status. In painting, people were no longer represented as mere stand-ins for gods, mythological and historical figures, but as real people in real settings engaged in real activities.

According to author Simon Schama, the Dutch culture of the 17th century was a conflict between home and world. In response to their own commercial successes, they invented the "cult of housework," an ideological elevation of domestic work to an almost sacral status. Numerous prints, manuals, and sermons contributed to the process of sanctifying the home as a refuge against the incursions of market values. No aspect of daily life was considered too insignificant to be portrayed, whether strumming a lute in solitude, reading a letter or quietly making lace. However, the Dutch often attached moral values (frequently contradictory) to each of these activities so that the painting could not only delight the eye, but nourish the soul as well.

Embroidery, like lacemaking, was traditionally shown in representations of the Education of the Virgin. In Dutch literary and pictorial traditions sewing and lacemaking were associated with fundamental values of Dutch culture, industriousness and domestic virtue. Women belonged in the home, doing needlework, taking care of the household, and looking after the children. This painting therefore shows the ideal: an industrious woman in a tidy house. While engaged in work rather than leisure, the lacemaker's elaborate coiffure and elegant satin dress seem to be more in keeping with middle or upper class. However, there can be little doubt that her diligence will preserve her virtue: within easy reach is a small book on the foreground table, most likely a prayer book or small Bible.

An example of Dutch lace called Cauliflower
or Chrysanthemum lace. This kind of thick, closely
worked, strong lace can be seen in many portraits of
the period which provided a contrasting effect to the
austere black of the sitter's costumes.

One of the greatest extravagances in the history of clothing was lace. True lace was not made until the late 15th and early 16th century. Until the time of Queen Elizabeth of England lace was not common. A true lace is created when a thread is looped, twisted or braided to other threads independently from a backing fabric. All lace was handmade and very expensive. It was made from many fibers such as cotton, silk, and flax as well as metallic threads like gold, silver, copper, and even hair. In Vermeer's painting, we can clearly see that the girl is making bobbin lace. As needle lace is to embroidery, bobbin lace is to weaving. In bobbin lace the threads are plaited, twisted and interwoven. The solid parts resemble woven cloth.

Bobbin lace became more popular than needle lace because it was lighter in texture and it worked well in Elizabethan costume. It also lent itself to the manufacturing system of the day. Businessmen would purchase the raw materials and pass them out to home workers. They would get paid for each piece they completed. The businessman would sell the product and keep the profit. Bobbin lace, unlike needle lace, was made by men as well as women. Even fishermen in the "off season" would make bobbin lace. The advent of machine lace at first pushed lace-makers into more complicated designs (ones that the machines couldn't handle) and then eventually pushed them out of business almost entirely. Bobbin lace is also known as bone-lace. The name bone-lace comes from the fact that some bobbins were formerly made of bone. The collar worn by Vermeer's lacemaker is presumably made of lace although it has been painted with such economy that only its transparency transpires.

So what kind of lace may the girl in Vermeer's painting actually making? Of course, we must take to account that Vermeer most likely did not paint exactly what he saw with photographic precision. However, an educated guess would be that she is working on a rather short piece of lace, perhaps a geometric motif for non-continuous lace or a short stripe later to be attached to a piece of linen, for instance for a small tablecloth or runner or for a cushion. She is certainly not making a very complicate pattern or non-continuous lace, for which she would have far more bobbins at hand and would probably use a "Bolster" pillow.

From both an anthropological and architectural viewpoint, the home had acquired enormous importance in the second half of the 17th century in the Netherlands. Scenes of Dutch domesticity flourished and women were among the most frequently depicted subjects. They reflect concepts that were important to the Dutch culture such as family, privacy, intimacy, comfort and luxury. The new Dutch household had begun to be perceived as the realm and responsibility of woman while the public world, divided for the first time cleanly from it, belonged to the male.

Vermeer principally painted women engaged in cultivated leisure (playing musical instruments or letter writing or reading) in order to emphasize their literacy (pictorial tradition suggests the letters his women read are about love but they also speak to a burgeoning ideal of the educated domestic woman). Only two times did he portray them working, in the early Milkmaid and the late Lacemaker. According to a study made by Gary Schwartz and Trudy van den Oosten, working from a database of 3,340 Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Spanish paintings, males comprise about 74% of the figures, women 19% and children 7% . Vermeer painted proportionately more women than his colleagues. However, unlike his colleagues, Vermeer represented no families, no children or no elderly people in his interiors.

Some authors have creatively asserted that "women dominated the life of Vermeer" citing along with the choice of his motifs, a domineering mother-in-law, a household of daughters and at least one strong-willed maid. On the basis of the treatment of his subjects others have psychoanalyzed him as a "person who is afraid of women" or as a "distant father." However, it is far more likely that the unusual proportion of women and their manner of depiction reflect consciously elaborated artistic goals rather than psychological or personal motives. In more than one case, the known lives of some Dutch painters contrasts directly with their preferred subject matter.

The Paranoiac-Critical Study
of Vermeer's "Lacemaker"
Salvador Dalí
1954-1955
27.1 x 22 1 cm

The extravagant surrealist painter Salvador Dalí wrote: " the first time I saw a photograph of [Vermeer's] Lacemaker and a live rhinoceros together, I realized that if there should be a battle, the Lacemaker would win, because the Lacemaker is morphologically a rhinoceros horn."

One of Dalí goals was to "rescue" modern painting. His figurative mode and obsessive extolling of the Old Masters not only incited fellow Surrealists against him in the 1930s, but also later situated him in a diametric opposition to the avant-garde's penchant towards abstraction.

Throughout art history, artists had incessantly attempted to grasp form and to reduce it to elementary geometrical volumes. Leonardo always tended to produce eggs Ingres preferred spheres, and Cézanne cubes and cylinders. According to Dalí, all curved surfaces of the human body have the same geometric spot in common, the one found in this cone with the rounded tip curved toward heaven or toward the earth the rhinoceros horn!

After this initial discovery, Dalí surveyed his own images and realized that all of them could be deconstructed to rhinoceros horns.

Dalí also discovered what he termed "latent rhinocerisation" in the works of the Great Masters. According to the Spanish Surrealist, "The Lacemaker is a rhinoceros horn (or an assemblage of horns), and the rhinoceros' actual horn is, in fact, a Lacemaker. The painting triumphs over the living rhinoceros because it is entirely comprised of these animated, spiritualized horns, whereas the rhinoceros wields only the single diminutive horn/Lacemaker on its nose."

A copy of the Lacemaker had hung on the wall of his father's study and had obsessed Dalí for a number of years. In 1955, he asked permission to enter the Louvre with his paints and canvas to execute a copy of The Lacemaker.

Dalí explained, "Up till now, The Lacemaker has always been considered a very peaceful, very calm painting, but for me, it is possessed by the most violent aesthetic power, to which only the recently discovered antiproton can be compared."

A Woman Spinning (detail)
Gerard ter Borch
Oil on canvas
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Although the faces in Vermeer's paintings are adequately painted, they differ, and in a few cases suffer, if closely compared to those of his close colleague Gerard ter Borch, one of the Netherlands's most accomplished and financially rewarded painters. While Ter Borch's formal portraits remain refined but muted by the necessities of convention, the men and women who populate his genre interiors breathe true life. They evoke emotions that range from painful uncertainty, to quite desperation, unguarded expectation and solitude. His depictions of both working class and haute bourgeois rival, albeit in an understated manner, the portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn.

If we match up Vermeer's Lacemaker and Ter Borch's Spinner, both picturing women immersed in domestic chore, the difference jumps immediately to the forefront. In Ter Borch's work, the activity of the spinner absorbs her intellect but she remains an individual. Her facial characteristics are treated by the artist with respect, warmth and dignity. For Ter Borch, the sentiments of his tangible sitter and art of painting are equally precious.

On the other hand, in Vermeer's Lacemaker, the viewer's eye tends to scan the whole painting exploring bit by bit the curiosities of the composition of which the girl's face is but a part. We are artfully guided by the calligraphic yet supremely confident brushwork and the rhythm of the composition. The few facial characteristics the artist permits us to view are reduced to a subtle yet lively pattern of dark and light. The direction of the girl's gaze, the alignment of her fingers with the taught threads all converge on a single point where, knot after knot, her lace is being miraculously produced. We experience the wholeness of lacemaking, something beyond the individuality of the lacemaker herself. She remains visible yet ultimately intangible.

A Woman Cleaning
Geertruydt Roghman
after c. 1640
Engraving, 235 x 187 mm

During the 17th century, the best opportunities for female painters were in the Netherlands. The majority of female painters were daughters of painters. Those who weren't were daughters of intellectuals or minor nobleman with ties to artistic circles. Many were eldest daughters or came from families where there were no sons so their father took unusual interest in their careers. Most women painters either produced far fewer works or stopped altogether painting once they were married although this is also frequently the case when male painters married rich women.

Since women were not allowed to study the male nude, which was considered essential for painting large scale history paintings with many figures partially or completely undressed, women opted for "lesser" categories of painting like still life, genre or portraiture.

The Netherlands boasts two excellent female painters who were in high demand in their own times, Judith Leyster, who painted figures and genre interiors and Rachel Ruysch who produced works for an international clientele. Although in both painters one may note a feminine touch (which we may or may not have noticed had we not been aware they were women) both seemed content to work and prosper within traditional genre framework of symbolism or moralizing allegory, as employed by their male contemporaries. Therefore, we are hardly informed about the real lives of women through pictures painted by women.

Geertruydt Roghman, from an Amsterdam family of artists, is one of the few who depicted domestic tasks from a woman's perspective. She is principally known for her original suite of five engravings, "Household Tasks": sewing, spinning, reading (?), cooking, and cleaning cookware. The two subjects set in kitchens are unusual in that the solitary maids are seen from behind.

Roghman's prints present a sober, altogether unflattering view of domestic life. And her kitchen scenes are remarkable for the figures' complete lack of individuality and appeal. Did Roghman wish to underline the hardships of domestic activities? According to one writer, Roghman depicted women "as self-possessed subjects rather than patriarchally-controlled objects. Hence, women do not perform their chores for the approval of male viewers." Objectively, it is hard to compare Roghman's themes with those of her male counterparts Vermeer and Gerrit Dou. Whatever the interpretation, we must bear in mind that prints were generally intended for a broad audience while Vermeer's work were made exclusively with an individual collector in mind.

In any case, in regards to Dutch art and literature, the home, the family, and the domestic role of the housewife was held sacred and lauded as the foundation of Dutch society in the period after 1650. Domestic labor, as such, was not disparaged. It is hard to imagine a more edifying treatment of female labor that Vermeer's Milkmaid or Lacemaker.

Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692-1766)
Concerto Armonico no. 5 [900 KB], A tempo comodo (con sordino)
http://www.amazon.com/Wassenaer-Concerti-Unico-Wilhelm-van/dp/B00006RHPO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1255264489&sr=1-2