A Lady Seated at a Virginal

This wedge of curtain, in reality a costly tapestry, bears a certain resemblance to the ones seen in Vermeer's Art of Painting. A detail of the curtain of the Allegory of Faith which shows two vertically aligned medallions, one with a fleur-de-lys and another above with a simple, four-lobed flower form, compares very well to the same detail in the present work.

As in the other pictures it functions as a repoussoir devise which serves to heighten the illusion of three-dimensional space by placing a large figure or object in the immediate right-hand foreground.

Although the curtain does introduce a note of sensuality in the rectilinear scheme of the composition, it fails to create a measurable sensation of depth. The floral pattern gives the impression of a detached exercise of brushwork unrelated to the form and substance of the weightless curtain. Even the presence of the hallmark pointillés, or spherical dots of light-colored paint meant to imitate an optical effect of the camera obscura, seem to be scattered randomly with little conviction.

In fact, this painting is frequently indicated as one of the artist's final pictures and not a few experts in it perceive signs of artistic decline, which was presumably brought on by economic and personal hardships due to the war with France which had destroyed the art market. Vermeer died a few years later and left his beloved wife Catharina with 11 children and enormous financial debt.

The Procuress
Dirck van Baburen
1622
102 x 108 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This low-life brothel picture by Dirck van Baburen most likely belonged to Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, who had patrician connections in Delft and a discreet art collection of the so-called Utrecht Caravaggists.

It portrays a young female lutenist to the left who is a prostitute, a bearded man who is the client and an older woman who is a procuress. The latter points to her opened hand soliciting payment. Although these ribald low-life subjects had lost some of their appeal in the late 17th century, Vermeer seems to have appreciated them not only as a way of introducing comments on the scenes which were represented in his own paintings, but for their technical mastery as well. Although Van Baburen's Procuress has lead some critics to interpret the woman's gaze as an invitation to profane love, it is more likely that her virginal, often employed as a symbol of harmony, had associations with a far more elevated form of love. Thus, the presence of the Van Baburen establishes a thematic contrast between the uncontrolled libido of the bordello scene and the virginal music associated with harmony and moderation.

Van Baburen's painting is now housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and is the only object which materially links us to Vermeer's world other than his surviving 37 paintings. It also appeared in Vermeer's earlier Concert and seems to have a similar thematic function as in the present work even though the golden Italianate frame has replaced the somber ebony one of the Concert version.

This blue curtain, presumably made of velvet with darker blue fringe below, appears only one time in Vermeer's oeuvre. It covers the upper two windows from incoming light and gives a touch of refinement to the scene.

The young lady wears a formal silk multi-colored garment called a tabbaard, a combination of a stiffened gown and a matching bodice called a tabbaardslijft. These bodices were heavily boned making them very uncomfortable and were thus worn only in formal occasions.

Even to the untrained eye, the mass of unruly folds of the blue gown appears to be painted rather crudely and can hardly compare with the incredible delicacy of the silk gown in this work's counterpart, A Lady Standing at a Virginal. Neither the gown's fold nor its texture can be comprehended.

Noting the lack of refinement of the gown's blue overskirt, some writers perceive a decline in Vermeer's artistic powers. However, since in the same painting there are some exquisite passages of painting technique such as the leaning viola and the marbleized surface of the virginal, its approximate rendering could indicate that it was left unfinished.

The lids on the virginals of the Lady Seated at a Virginal and the Lady Standing at a Virginal both display pastoral landscapes which were frequently associated with the beauty of woman or idyllic lovemaking. Although they appear quite normal as regards to their perspective geometry, in truth they are most unusual.

If we reconstruct the image of the landscape as it would be if it were seen frontally, it would appear exaggeratedly stretched out. Vermeer writer and camera obscura expert Philip Steadman observed that such images appear to be related to those anamorphic landscapes that only look realistic when seen very obliquely. They are like those puzzle pictures often concealing politically subversive or pornographic subjects, which became popular from the 17th century, such as the skull in Holbein's Ambassadors which is one of the best-known examples. The explanation for these anamorphoses might be that Vermeer traced the virginals or studied their images as would appear on the screen of a camera obscura and found them disturbingly foreshortened and distorted. He therefore decided to fill in the painted lid ignoring the steep perspective of the real surface of the instrument itself. Indeed, we are not visually disturbed by this mild deception since no Vermeer scholar before Steadman had ever remarked on this anomaly.

The sheet of music is so highly stylized that only a few notes can be made out. Analogous works by Vermeer's colleagues often show sheet music so meticulously rendered that the score can be read.

It is not known if Vermeer was a practicing musician or even the level of his knowledge of music matters but documents reveal that his grandfather was a musician and had owned more than one musical instrument.

The viola da gamba makes four minor, but iconographically significant, appearances in Vermeer's musical theme paintings: the Music Lesson, the Woman with a Lute, the Concert and A Lady Seated at a Virginal. Never once does he portray it being played. In all four paintings it remains quietly unattended, perhaps meant to suggest someone who will gather it up and make music.

Together with the lute, the viola da gamba is probably the most frequently represented instrument throughout the centuries, whether in painting, sculpture or miniature. Its deep tone and unusual stature are associated with the male while the virginals is associated with the female.

Here, it has particular prominence and from a technical point of view is a tour de force of observation and pictorial synthesis. It would be noted that the viola's complicated shape has always been a challenge to correctly render especially when seen from an oblique angle as the case in the present work. Even though this painting fails to compete with other late works, it nonetheless contains some finely-painted passages worthy of the artist's best works. For those who are familiar with the personal tragedy of Vermeer's final years when this work was being completed, it cannot help but resonate with pathos.

A Lady Playing a Clavichord (detail)
Gerrit Dou
c. 1665
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Although none of the sitters of Vermeer's paintings have ever been identified, a few seem to have been repeated and critics often maintain that those were members of the artist's family circle. Curiously, she bears a resemblance to the young musician in Gerrit Dou's composition (see detail left) of some years earlier which no doubt provided Vermeer with the direct inspiration for the present work. Although Vermeer's girl smiles somewhat benignly towards the viewer, it is not given for the observer to fully comprehend her thoughts or emotions allowing each individual to read into the work his own expectations and subjective sensations. While her face is modeled with daring simplicity and delicacy, her lips and eyes are rendered so conventionally that her doll-like countenance may easily lead the observer to look elsewhere in the painting for deeper satisfaction.

Even thought Vermeer's late works have been judged somewhat negatively, they contain some of the most exquisite details that he painted. Vermeer critics have singled out the daring calligraphic brushwork used to portray the fake marbling of the virginals' side panel, perhaps the most daring technical passage of this work. It is also a feat of absolute technical economy.

Vermeer first laid down a rectangle of a warm brown and a gray one below of unmodulated paint. Once dry, he mixed two fluid gray mixtures for the veins and applied them with quick, spontanous brushwork. The wet-over-dry brushwork used to represent the veins is so suggestive that it recalls the almost anarchic spontaneity of Jakuchu's ink drawings of birds and vegetables, but at the same time it miraculously evokes the objective visual impression of veined marble. One author has compared the effect to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.

Perhaps the puffed linen sleeve of the young musician's elegant attire is the most suggestive detail of the work. Even though the exact tuck and fold of the fabric is not clearly defined, its substance and "feel" are perfectly rendered: as critics have put it, suggested rather than described. The bold yet controlled brushwork is worthy of the best 20th-century abstract painter. Although it cannot be seen in reproduction, the white paint is laid on thickly yet fluidly. The Dutch were renowned producers of the only stable white pigment available to oil painters called lead white.

Prepared artificially since the earliest historical times and used until the 19th century, this warm white is very opaque; it possesses outstanding brushing qualities and mixes well with every color on the artist's palette. As the name lead white suggests, it is a by-product of lead, and whatever the form of manufacture used, the purity of the color depends on the purity of the lead. Purifying processes greatly increase the cost of the product. Lead white has always been one of the most important pigments in many painting techniques. In the 1620s, the Dutch greatly increased the availability of lead white and lowered the costs by the extensive usage of the so-called stack process which had already been described in ancient sources by Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius.

In the Old German or Dutch stack process strips of lead rolled up into spirals were placed in closed earthenware jars containing acetic acid, and then the pots were buried under tanner's bark or dung; the heat evolved by fermentation aids in the formation of white lead through an increase of carbonic acid. Very soon a thin coat of the basic lead carbonate forms. This product was scraped off, dried and washed to free it from any impurities.

Often, this lead corrosion product on the plates took the form of thick, curling crusts or scalloped flakes, earning the trade name of schulp white, or flake white which was held as the best quality available. A cheaper mixture of lead white extended with chalk, very common in the Dutch industry, may be the product known as lootwit, and served for less demanding applications, for example in grounds, and was used also for underpaint layers or layers in which translucency was required. The addition of chalk to lead white reduces the opacity of the pigment when used in oil. Dutch painters could obtain a pure lead white called schelpwit (shell white). Lead white is extremely poisonous and must be handled with care.

The young girl's arms have been remarked on by different critics. Some perceive evidence of technical weakness that announce artist's presumed decline. Others, however, note one of the peculiar trademarks of Vermeer's concept of painting, the so-called "optic way," a term coined by Vermeer writer Lawrence Gowing.

Gowing advanced that the basis of the artist's mature style was his commitment to optical fidelity, perhaps bolstered by the use of the camera obscura, a sort of precursor of the modern photographic camera. In Gowing's words, the artist's brand of description "is always exactly adequate, always completely and effortlessly in terms of light. Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light."

Along the same lines, Kenneth Clark was puzzled by Vermeer's "uncannily true sense of tone'" deployed with an "almost inhuman detachment." It is this truth to tonality—not any minute attention to detail—that gives the paintings the "photographic" quality that has fascinated photographers since the mid-19th century and filmmakers in the 20th century.

Whether technical failing or triumph of style, each and every detail of Vermeer's paintings continues to be pondered.

Vermeer writers have variously explained the curious facture of the huge, Italianate gilt frame that adorns the Procuress by Dirck van Baburen. Seen from reproduction or from life, Vermeer's rendering fails to convey the gleam or color of a real object. The details of its intricate carving have been so radically abstracted that what they represent is undecipherable. Fascinating as they may be in their own right, they conjure up more the "dots" and "dashes" of Morse code than a finely carved frame.

Some art historians prefer not to judge the frame's treatment as faulty or incomplete but an intentional stylistic devise. However, even if in his final pictures Vermeer deliberately did abstract form to a surprising degree, the frames in the Guitar Player and the probable pendant of the present work (Lady Standing at a Virginal) leave little doubt that the frame in question may not reflect Vermeer's initial intentions.

While it is true that on close inspection the frames of the Guitar Player and the Lady Standing at a Virginals are executed with an analogous shorthand of flecks and dabs of thick and thin paint, their optical and material qualities are exalted rather than concealed. One has the sensation that no amount of accuracy or descriptive detail could evoke the sensation of gilt frames more than these. By comparison the frame of the Lady Seated at a Virginal seems to express a sort of bizarre lifelessness.

A probable explanation for the questionable quality of the frame is that the picture was not finished. We note an equivalent technical weakness in the blue silk overskirt. Both passages seem blocked in with rudimental attention. In other passages, instead, the viol da gamba for example, the rendering is highly abstracted yet astoundingly successful in conveying its form, color, texture and lighting.

Vermeer writers have variously explained the curious facture of the huge, Italianate gilt frame that adorns the Procuress by Dirck van Baburen. Seen from reproduction or from life, Vermeer's rendering fails to convey the gleam or color of a real object. The details of its intricate carving have been so radically abstracted that what they represent is undecipherable. Fascinating as they may be in their own right, they conjure up more the "dits" and "dahs" of Morse code than a finely carved frame.

Some art historians prefer not to judge the frame's treatment as faulty or incomplete but an intentional stylistic devise. However, even if in his final pictures Vermeer deliberately did abstract form to a surprising degree, the frames in the Guitar Player and the probable pendant of the present work (Lady Seated at a Virginal) leave little doubt that the frame in question may not reflect Vermeer's initial intentions.

While it is true that on close inspection the frames of the Guitar Player and the Lady Standing at a Virginals are executed with an analogous shorthand of flecks and dabs of thick and thin paint, their optical and material qualities are exalted rather than concealed. One has the sensation that no amount of accuracy or descriptive detail could evoke the sensation of gilt frames more than these. By comparison the frame of the Lady Seated at a Virginal seems to express a sort of bizarre lifelessness.

A probable explanation for the questionable quality of the frame is that the picture was not finished. We note an equivalent technical weakness in the blue silk overskirt. Both passages seem blocked in with rudimental attention. In other passages, instead, the viol da gamba for example, the rendering is highly abstracted yet astoundingly successful in conveying its form, color, texture and lighting.