Officer and Laughing Girl

critical excerpt

No signature appears on this work.

c. 1658-1660
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1657
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

literature

exhibitions

The links between cartography to art are as old as the field itself. The art of painting has always been present within maps, which, in turn have always been regarded as a combination of scientific and artistic skills. One of the most prominent examples of the harmonic duality of maps as scientific tools and objects of culture is witnessed in the Netherlands during the 17th century, when the Dutch were world leaders in the field of cartographic production.

Dutch mapmakers of the time were usually combining more skills: they were surveyors, cartographers, painters of landscapes and even more. On the other hand, many 17th-century Dutch painters such as Hals, Vermeer, Ter Borch, De Hooch, Steen, Ochtervelt, Maes and others, introduced depictions of real maps into their works and decorated their interiors with maps for symbolic or allegorical reasons.

There is a strong Dutch and European custom of using maps as wall hangings even in simple homes. In addition, globes and cartographic artifacts have often been displayed simply because of their own intrinsic beauty. Many maps represent a visual summa of contemporary knowledge, power, and prestige, some of it religious but most of it secular. The map in Vermeer's Art of Painting illustrates an extraordinary example of a map displayed for its great beauty and symbolic statement.

A cover of the Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Vasari
first published in 1550

Although Netherlandish painting is universally admired today, in the past, it had many detractors. Michelangelo once disparaged Northern painters because although they painted with great ability "trees and grass" they were unable to create great compositions. For example, he found Durer's work uninteresting. Flemish painting was equally distasteful, since their work is "expressly to deceive the outer vision ... and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is done truly without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, and without attention to selection or rejection."

Leonardo da Vinci, when speaking about mechanical means of imitating natural effects method (which Dutch painters excelled in), exhorted the artist not to rely on such shortcuts lest he "always remain poor in inventing and composing narratives which is the aim of that art." Later Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses acknowledged the "mechanical excellencies" of the Dutch school but regretted the "vulgar" use frequently made of such skills.

This attitude reflects the theoretical underpinnings of the great art of Europe which originated in Italy. Even though mimesis, or the most faithful imitation of nature, was a cardinal point in Renaissance painting theory, it was not considered an end in itself. Vasari, whose Lives of the Italian painters exerted a lasting influence on the theory of European art, saw the representational skills as a means which always served a main social function — the evocation of a sacred or edifying story, in other words: dramatic narrative. A painting could only be as good as the idea it represented.

In her groundbreaking book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Svetlana Alpers argues that we are still the heirs of this tradition, which did indeed dominate the teaching of art in the academies of Europe. She criticizes in particular the tendency to apply methods originally developed by Erwin Panofsky (and later elaborated on by Eddy de Jongh specifically in regards to Dutch art) for the interpretation of images conceived in the classical tradition searching for hidden meanings with reference to emblem books. According to Alpers, this bias has obscured the principle trait of Dutch 17th-century art, the capacity to explore and understand the world through the eye which was a central means of self-representation and visual experience, a central mode of self-consciousness in which meaning is not "read"' but "seen."

Soldiers Playing Cards
Pieter de Hooch
1657-58
51 x 46 cm
Private collection

Comparisons with Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer are inevitable. Clearly they knew each other's work, but the precise nature of their relationship remains conjectural. It was originally assumed that De Hooch, who was three years Vermeer's senior, was indebted to his more renowned colleague. But it was almost certainly De Hooch who was the true innovator among the two, creating a new type of genre painting with unprecedented spatial order and naturalism. De Hooch's illusionistic integration of figures within a fully rationalized space flooded with natural light was a lesson Vermeer would seize upon and improve after a brief period of "incubation."

In the years in which De Hooch was active in Delft, there is little doubt that in such a small city they would not have known each other. Both were members of the Guild of St Luke, the trade association which protected the rights of artists and artisans of Delft.

As Peter Sutton pointed out, virtually none of the luminous small-scale works of Vermeer can be shown to predate the 1650s, the years in which De Hooch reached his artistic maturity. Moreover, Vermeer's only dated painting of the 1650s was the Procuress of 1656, a large, animated bordello scene in the tradition of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. The work's dark and shallow space has nothing in common with later works and is stylistically incompatible with De Hooch's interiors of the same years.

De Hooch may have very well provided specific models for some of the best works by Vermeer such as the Woman Holding a Balance and the Love Letter.

Perhaps no single clear-cut iconographical interpretation has been given to this work even though its intense contrasts make it one of Vermeer's most vibrant works. What is the nature of the young couple's encounter? Much depends on how each of us respond to the gestures of the two figures. The reassuring frankness of the charming young woman opposes the somewhat disquieting presence of the young soldier. Was this picture a veiled boordeltje (little brothel scene) or a representation of an intimate tête-à-tête between a polite officer and a virtuous mistress?

She opens her hand and invites communion while the young soldier seems to withdraw from her. What significance does the map of the Netherlands have? Does it betray the soldier's desire for territorial "conquest" as some critics have hypothesized or is it merely a symbol of the goodness associated with the Dutch homeland? The cultural distance which separates us from the 17th century prevents us from understanding these few clues in one of Vermeer's most uncomplicated compositions. It has been recently argued that the ambiguity of mid-17th century Dutch genre interiors was intentionally calculated so that the eventual purchaser could read the painting according to his own tastes or interests.

As long ago as 1891, when eyes had not grown accustomed to the camera's way of seeing, photographer J. Pennell was struck by the disproportionate size of the man in relation to the girl. As a photographer, Pennell knew this kind of distortion was imposed by a camera on objects closest to it's lens. Pennell suggested that Vermeer had used some sort of optical device as an aid to his painting. This aid, called the camera obscura, was widely known in Vermeer's time and was used by various Dutch 17th-century artists. The "objective" picture that it creates must have appealed to artists of the age of observation. Other than offering a unique way to study the behavior of light, its image could be traced thereby offering a shortcut to perspective construction.

The Procuress
Gerrit van Honthorst
1625
71 x 104 cm
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

One of the two Dutch paintings most often associated with Vermeer's Officer with a Laughing Girl is Gerrit van Honthorst's Procuress. Van Honthost was an immensely successful artist from Utrechtand inhis own time his reputation rivaled and perhaps superceded both those of Rembrandt and Frans Hals. This composition, which represents a popular bordello scene, is very similar to Vermeer's. A young soldier dressed in red with his back to the viewer, sits on the left-hand side of the picture emerged in shadow. A young woman looks at him directly with an unblushing smile across a table covered with a green clothe.

It is hard to believe that Vermeer was not inspired by Van Honthorst's canvas. However, while Van Honthorst explores the sensual potential of artificial candlelight, Vermeer registers with almost scientific objectivity the cool morning light as it plays upon the scene. Gone is the lute, which in the context of Van Honthorst's scene, would have certainly had an erotic undertone. And gone is the elderly procuress who calls attention to the purse gripped in soldier's hand. Vermeer's ability to invest new and more universal meaning in commonly exploited themes was one of the characteristics of his genius.

The Goldfinch
Carel Fabritius
1654
33,5 x 22,8
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Perhaps the single most overlooked feature of Vermeer's compositions is the superb rendering of the simple white-washed walls set parallel to the picture plane seen in many of his interiors. It is impossible for the non-painter to grasp the technical ability necessary to evoke both their flatness and reflective luminosity with nothing more than shades of drab gray paint. The painter must not only describe the slight irregularities which give each wall its own character and naturalness, he must also be able to account for the gradual weakening of light's intensity as it flows from left to right. Moreover, he must give the proper color to shadows cast by the larger props and architectural features in his compositions.

Even the walls of the best Dutch interior painters seem drab and lifeless compared to the nuanced liveliness of Vermeer's walls. Many experts have been quick to connect The Goldfinch (see right) as a possible starting point for the light gray walls of Vermeer's interiors but only Pieter de Hooch and the obscure Jacobus Vrel seemed so enthralled by the optical presence of a mundane white wall as to make them a continued subject for their invesitagion.

In the present painting, the observer can almost feel the sting of the chilly morning air as it enters through the wide-open window. Many who for the first time see Vermeer's paintings from life are surprised that they are much cooler in tone that those of his colleagues, a fact which is rarely apparent in reproductions. The introduction of ultramarine blue pigment into the wall's deep shadows of the Officer and Laughing Girl produces a sense of sparkling morning light that has no precedent in European painting.

Painters, including Vermeer, used the Dutch lead-white as the principle component of the various gray mixtures for the walls. Various combinations of black and dull brown earth colors, principally raw umber, were used to darken the white and create shadows of different depth and hue. It seems that only Vermeer introduced traces of blue into his grays in order to heighten the intensity of his grays.

A Bordello Scene (detail)
Jacob Duck
c. 1600-1667
41.3 x 54 cm.
Private collection

Whatever the precise reading of this work may be, there can be no doubt that the looming male figure with his sash and swagger represents a military officer, perhaps of the Delft Civic Guard.

Like almost every one of his themes, in this picture Vermeer relied heavily on pictorial precedents although he always injected into them his own personality and profound artistic vision. The present picture draws from one of the most popular and established genre of Dutch painting, the bordeeltje, or little bordello scene. He was likewise familiar with another popular genre called kortegaard, or guardroom scene pioneered by Willem Duyster and Pieter Codde in the 1620s, some fifty years before Vermeer addressed the motif.

Military life was a topical theme in the Dutch Republic in the first half of the 17th century, especially after 1621 when the Twelve-Year Truce with Spain expired and hostilities were renewed. Although much of the actual fighting in these years was confined to the southern border and the eastern provinces, all of Holland's major cities housed garrisons of troops.

Although the Dutch had to face the specter of warfare for much of its existence, surprisingly scarce attention was paid to armed conflict in painting. Violence, bloodshed or pictorial remembrances of victory or military defeat were exceptionally rare. Curiously, in Dutch 17th-century painting we find thousands upon thousands of paintings of soldiers' activities. They depict soldiers in taverns, stables or tents, often attended by tavern hostesses, prostitutes or camp followers. Some show figures fighting over plunder, perusing their booty or taking hostages, while others portray the quieter side of military life, with men merely smoking, drinking or playing a game of cards or trictrac.

Initially, these less than heroic military men were portrayed in realistic settings such as barns or environments which recall the spaces in which soldiers were garrisoned. Decades later their bad manners were spruced up and they were introduced into well appointed interiors politely engaged in letter reading, letter writing or delicate social interaction with some well-to-do, highly attractive young women. The particularity of the initial low-life scenes is that both Duyster and Codde censored common foot soldiers and concentrated on fashionably dressed gentlemen who most likely were meant to represent officers (military uniforms did not exist yet). No doubt, other than the theme, one of the major calling cards of the guardroom scene was the amazing display of painterly technique applied to the soldiers' colorful garments and their armature and the wide variety of expressions and gestures that these pioneering artists had mastered.

In any case, soldiers were associated with an assortment of unwholesome activities such as gambling. Prostitutes were among the most frequent habitués of painted guardroom scenes just as they had been in real life when they trailed behind traveling armies in times of war.

When Vermeer arrived upon the scene, the guardroom genre had been largely domesticated. Gerard ter Borch, who transformed many facets of genre interior painting bringing it single-handedly to astounding heights of realism and poetry, brought to this theme his innate civility and no longer picturing the foibles of the military but the psychological realms of displacement and loneliness.

The analysis of Vermeer's motifs should be approached with caution since we cannot be certain to what extent his pictures were intended to have hidden symbolic or moralizing content if any.

Faced with a total lack of specific historical evidence, art historians have proposed a wide range of theories to explain the relationship between the map of Holland and the quite drama which unfolds in a sunlit room even though none can be called certain. Speculating that the young woman is a tidied-up courtesan, Leonard Slatkes once proposed that the map refers to her "worldly" nature. Another hypothesis, more or less opposite, is that the young girl, "visually bound to the map of Holland, guarded, as it were, by a lion peering over her back and protected by a strong military presence, might be seen as a distant reflection of the Dutch Maiden, the allegorical symbol of the Netherlands." Thus, the scene testifies "the unmistakable pride in the Dutch homeland and the communion between people who live there and enjoy the fruits of peace."

A third reading pivots on the assumption that scene represents a low-key, ritualized courtship. Consequentially, the connection between the map and the tête-à -tête would be that the progress of love requires no less a strategic battle planning than did wars waged between armies. This interpretation would also account for the looming presence of the officer and somewhat aggressive air he projects.

In fact, even if the elaborately illustrated map in this picture was made for interior decoration, one of the original functions of cartography maps was to more effectively plan battles. As with their dominance in the field of map making, the Dutch were justly proud of their military prowess having been able to wage the successful war of independence with Spain, one of the most powerful nations in Europe.

In any case, any Dutchman of the time would have associated the map of Holland map with the vast commercial reach of its growing maritime empire. According to historian Timothy Brook, the officer's felt hat is indirectly connected to Samuel Champlain and his efforts by alliance and conquest to control the beaver pelt trade in the New World. Since Delft was one of the Dutch East India Company headquarters, Vermeer must have been aware of the global expanse of his country through the constant influx of exotic products from all over the globe.

John Dowland
My Lord Chamberlain his Gaillard [836 KB]
from: Greensleeves. Tänze, Lieder und Fantasien der Renaissance
http://www.amazon.de/Greensleeves-T%C3%A4nze-Lieder-Fantasien-Renaissance/dp/B0000249OA