A Lady Writing

critical excerpt

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 ground appears to be a single layer of a warm, light ocher color, containing chalk, (plant?) black, red, and yellow iron oxide (perhaps burnt sienna and yellow ocher), and lead white.

The brushwork of the final paint layers is very thin, except in the lighter tones. Thicker paint has been used only in the form of rounded dots for the highlights. Two preparations of lead-tin yellow were used in the yellow jacket: one coarsely ground, and the other more finely ground and paler, used for the highlights on the shoulder pleats. X-radiography and infrared reflectography indicate that Vermeer made an alteration to the angle of the quill and to some of the fingers holding it.

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

literature

Curiosity (detail)
Gerrit ter Borch
c. 1660
Oil on canvas, 76 x 62 cm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Art historian Mariët Westermann points out that in 17th century there was a sudden and unprecedented increase in first person statements in the Dutch Republic. Diaries, journals, soul-searching poems, self-portraits and not the least, private letters. Reading and writing have in common the capacity of independent thought associated with not only men but for the first time with the women who pose in Vermeer's painting. However, it was not Vermeer who pioneered this way of representing the Dutch woman, but Gerard ter Borch in a series of nuanced interiors (see detail left) where women finally began to receive the same intellectual and psychological regard that was hitherto afforded only to the male figure in the visual arts.

Critics have often noted that women in Vermeer's paintings cannot be considered beauties in the conventional sense of the word. Their sublime beauty derives from the way they are painted and from their elegant context. Lisa Vergara wrote that "the qualities that we attribute to Vermeer's work as a whole apply equally to the women they picture: paintings and personages share dignity, equilibrium and an exceptional of both vivid presence and abstract purity. The figures range from girlish to maternal, yet all are youthful, with high curved foreheads, features that evenly balance the individual and the classical, and simple believable postures. Their costuming - its coloring, shapes and associations - contributes so much to bodily construction and expression that the absence of nudes from Vermeer's oeuvre hardly seems surprising."

A page from
Inleyding tot de Hooge
Schoole der Schilderkonst
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Rotterdam, 1678

To comprehend the artistic climate in which Vermeer worked, it is useful to consult prevalent art theory. In those times, it went without being questioned that history and the painting of human figures were the highest forms of art.

Samuel Van Hoogstraten, who introduced the doctrine of the hierarchy of subjects to Dutch art theory in his Inleiding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkunst, wrote that the highest level (the third level, in his scheme) of painting was to show the noblest emotions and desires of rational human beings. In regards to portraiture: "Indeed, those portrait painters who make reasonable likenesses, and imitate eyes and noses and mouths all prettily, I would not wish to place...above the first grade, unless they make their faces overflow with the quality of the intellectual soul."

Art historian Mariët Westermann writes that "this mental ability is figured not merely by the theme of writing and reading or by averted gazes. Vermeer established the seriousness of these women about literate activity with great pictorial subtlety, as it were making his own thoughtful compositions stand for the mental activity of his actors."

This young woman seems to be wearing a glass "drop earring" which has been varnished to look like an immense pearl. Such earrings were currently fashionable in Holland, as we see in paintings by Van Mieris, Metsu and Ter Borch. Artificial pearls were invented by M. Jacquin in France around this time, thin spheres of glass filled with l'essence d'orient, a preparation made of white wax and silvery scales of a river fish called ablette, or bleak, but cultured pearls were also coming in from Venice.

Pearls are linked with vanity but also with virginity - a wide enough iconographic spectrum. In the 17th century, pearls were an 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 (an average Duthc house might cost 1,000 guilders). At about the same time the traveling French art connoisseur Balthasar de Monconys had been shown a single-figured painting by Vermeer which had reputedly been paid 600 guilders and that he considered the price outrageous.

The largest know pearl with a perfect skin or "orient" had a circumference of 4 1/2 inches.

Portrait of Johan van
Beverwijck (1594-1647) in his Study
Jan Olis
c.1640
Oil on panel, 25.7 x 20.5 cm.
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Although the romantic, intimate mood of this work is impressing, its compositional origin does not derive solely from conventional portraiture. Vermeer expert Walter Liedtke points out that Vermeer, "with his gift for creative synthesis, saw that a newly fashionable type of genre picture, which was evidently introduced by Gerard ter Borch, could be modified expressively by adopting an arrangement familiar fron Dutch and Flemish 'scholar portraits' such as Rubens' Caspar Gevartius (see Related Image no. 11), Van Dyck's Lucas van Uffel (see Related Image no. 10) and Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar. The type was well known through prints and had been treated on small scale by several Dutch painters, as seen in Jan Olis's Portrait of Johan van Beverwijck in his Studio (see left), of about 1640."

Although we know not of a single independent still life painted by Vermeer, the informal still life grouping which is considered among the artist's most delicate passages. Vermeer seems to have relegated his concerns about still life painting to the dark recess of the background wall. The anonymous work, which can barely be read today, very likely belonged to his mother-in-law Maria Thins. Most historians would concur that Vermeer would have never included in an arbitrary manner such a large compositional element even though symbolic readings thus far proposed are not unanimous.

It may be of no surprise that Vermeer shunned the still life genre outside of his discreet renditions. According to Samuel van Hoogstraten, who first codified the hierarchical status of subjects in paintings, still life occupied the very bottom tier of subjects. He called still life painters "the foot soldiers in the army of art." Although admirable from a technical point of view, Van Hoogstraten held that still life did not require the artist to exercise his imagination the way history paintings or paintings of figures did.

Notwithstanding theoretical warnings, still life paintings far outstripped in number history paintings which Van Hoogstraten placed at the uppermost tier which "showed the noblest actions and intentions of rational beings."

A Young Woman playing a Harpsichord
to a Young Man (detail)
Jan Steen
c. 1659
Oil on oak, 42.3 x 33 cm.
National Gallery, London

If natural ultramarine blue may be considered the king of Vermeer's palette, lead-tin yellow would justly be called its queen. All of the yellow morning jackets were painted with lead-tin yellow and it was used as an admixture to modify the color of other paints. Lead-tin yellow is a thick grainy paint which brushes well and has great hiding power. It was one of the most common bright pigments (see detail left) being evidently relatively inexpensive to produce.

What is now commonly called lead-tin yellow has had several different names in the past. Italian manuscripts have described a color, giallolino, which is identical to lead-tin yellow. The current name lead-tin yellow is self explanatory. It is a result of heating a mixture of red lead and tin dioxide at about 650 C to 800 C. Warmer hues of yellow appear at the lower temperature, and more lemon-colored hues develop at the higher temperature. This pigment presents a fine uniform particle size with a strong opaque color, which makes it particularly suitable for paintings that demand precise execution. In the Netherlands, it was favored by flower painters as the base color for all yellow flowers. Due to its high lead content, lead-tin yellow is very poisonous. Although lead-tin yellow was used in European painting before 1750, it gradually disappeared after that time although there is no satisfactory explanation for this fact.

Two different preparations of lead-tin yellow were used in the yellow jacket of A Lady Writing. Vermeer seems to have first modeled the strong lights with a coarser variety of lead-tin yellow and then refined the modeling and chiaroscuro with a finer one. Melanie Gifford of the National Gallery points out that Vermeer "textured the underpaint by using granular pigments and strongly marked brush handling. These textured passages of underpaint were used in the final image, where they draw the viewer's attention. The lightest passages are literally the most light-catching parts of the painting."

Vermeer mixed lead-tin yellow with various shades of blue to obtain greens of great delicacy. The green trompe l'œil curtain in the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window was made by combining lead-tin yellow and azurite. The same combination occurs in the green shutter in The Little Street.

When compared to the startling range of paints available today in any art supply store, the 17th-century Dutch painter had to make do with a paltry few. Especially scarce were the so-called strong colors, or bright colors. Even the finest paints of those times cannot compare in brilliancy to the modern cadmium reds or yellows to say nothing of a dazzling array of artificially manufactured greens and violets which were introduced towards the end of the 19th century.

In order to expand the visual effects of their pictures and to enhance color intensity, 17th-century artists like Vermeer had learned to exploit their few paints' natural consistency, coarseness and transparency. A vital role was also played by brushwork.

Painters knew that different paint consistencies evoke different kinds of space. Heavy impasto seems to advance toward the viewer and becomes "more real" while thin, transparent paint tends to recede and evoke atmosphere rather than substance. Thus, the bright passages of a painting, which generally corresponded to the most important motifs, were executed in thick course impasto. Oppositely, the areas of shadows were done with thin diluted paint in order to evoke the immaterial nature of shadow itself. By actively counterposing areas of impasto with thin paint, the picture's surface becomes more stimulating than if it had been painted with a continuous layer of homogeneous paint.

Such a juxtaposition can be noted in the Lady Writing. The yellow satin sleeves are built up with a coarse but pure lead-tin yellow. Brushwork, which defines the patterns of tuck and fold of the fabric is clearly visible. The combined effect of the impasto paint and irregularities of the brushwork creates a slight sparkling effect to which the eye is naturally drawn augmenting the material presence of the garment. Instead, the deep gray of the background wall is painted with unmodulated paint so thinly that it leaves the brown underground peer through here and there.

Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692-1766)
Concerto Armonico no. 2, Andante [920 KB]
http://www.amazon.com/Wassenaer-Concerti-Unico-Wilhelm-van/dp/B00006RHPO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1255264489&sr=1-2

The play of light on a Delft antique shop window

Although the dim illumination of the present picture was certainly not meant as a painted treatise on the light of the Netherlands, it nevertheless reminds us of the difficulties faced by the painter who worked there, in respects, for example, to his southern European counterparts who enjoyed year-round sunlight.

Perhaps, it is precisely because light was such a scarce commodity in the Netherlands that Dutch painters devoted so much of their talents to rendering its innumerable activities. Certainly, of all its practitioners, Vermeer was the Dutch artist who made light itself, devoid of emotional content, one of the principal subjects of his art.

Dutch weather was, and still is, characterized by heavy rain, intermittent drizzle and cloudy skies much of the year. Even on the best days, rapidly passing clouds can dramatically change indoors light within minutes, if not seconds. While the fickleness of northern light did not affect the activities or humors of the working population, it must have deeply conditioned the painter. Both the lighting of his subjects and working area was rarely dependable. By force, the Dutch artist was constrained to develop his powers of observation and visual memory.

Under such circumstances is a quite extraordinary that Vermeer was able to render with such fidelity light's quite activities.

Vermeer writers have recurrently singled out Vermeer's works for their compositional refineries and exquisite aesthetic balance. In a recent paper, art historian Paul Taylor argued that the concept of aesthetic balance, which is a fundamental precept of 20th-century pictorial composition, was simply not available to the 17th-century Dutch artist. Taylor's objection rests on the fact that "contemporary art theoretical texts written in Dutch provide no evidence that 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists tried to achieve an overall balance of design." "In fact I do not know of any use of the idea of compositional balance in any art theoretical text in any language before the 19th century: the earliest instance of the concept's employment that I have been able to find is in the work of John Ruskin."

How then, did Vermeer organize his compositions if not according to aesthetic criteria? Taylor argues that Gérard de Lairesse, an accomplished history painter and most influential art writer of the time, sustained that composition, or ordinantie, "was not a matter of patiently balancing the different shapes and contours of a scene until they pleased the eye. Composition was first and foremost the attempt to tell a story clearly and logically." Particularly relevant to Vermeer's essential mode on organizing the appearance of his interiors is Lairesse's warning that the meaning and emotional power of a painting will be swamped by the extraneous details.

Another concept which Lairesse associated with composition was probability, in Dutch, waarschynelykheid. "Probability is the most important thing to bear in mind when composing a picture." He adds that "one must make it evident not only in the general disposition, but also in each particular object, and attentively reject things which are in conflict with it."

In a sense, Vermeer scrupulously determined the choice and disposition of the various props and models in his paintings much as today's film director prepares his set to enhance and clarify the emotional setting of the narrative of his film.

Vermeer writers have recurrently singled out Vermeer's works for their compositional refineries and exquisite aesthetic balance. In a recent paper, art historian Paul Taylor argued that the concept of aesthetic balance, which is a fundamental precept of 20th-century pictorial composition, was simply not available to the 17th-century Dutch artist. Taylor's objection rests on the fact that "contemporary art theoretical texts written in Dutch provide no evidence that 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists tried to achieve an overall balance of design." "In fact I do not know of any use of the idea of compositional balance in any art theoretical text in any language before the 19th century: the earliest instance of the concept's employment that I have been able to find is in the work of John Ruskin."

How then, did Vermeer organize his compositions if not according to aesthetic criteria? Taylor argues that Gérard de Lairesse, an accomplished history painter and most influential art writer of the time, sustained that composition, or ordinantie, "was not a matter of patiently balancing the different shapes and contours of a scene until they pleased the eye. Composition was first and foremost the attempt to tell a story clearly and logically." Particularly relevant to Vermeer's essential mode on organizing the appearance of his interiors is Lairesse's warning that the meaning and emotional power of a painting will be swamped by the extraneous details.

Another concept which Lairesse associated with composition was probability, in Dutch, waarschynelykheid. "Probability is the most important thing to bear in mind when composing a picture." He adds that "one must make it evident not only in the general disposition, but also in each particular object, and attentively reject things which are in conflict with it."

In a sense, Vermeer scrupulously determined the choice and disposition of the various props and models in his paintings much as today's film director prepares his set to enhance and clarify the emotional setting of the narrative of his film.

Saskia Seated before a Window Looking Up from a Book
Rembrandt van Rijn
c. 1635
16.2 x 12.5 cm.
Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest

A Woman Writing a Letter
Gabriel Metsu
c. 1662-1664
Oil on canvas, 39.4 x 31.1 cm.
Private collection