Woman Holding a Balance

Woman with a Balance provides us not with a warning but with comfort and reassurance; it makes us feel not vanity of life but its preciousness. Against the violent baroque agitation of the painting behind her, the woman asserts a quite, imperturbable calm, the quintessence of Vermeer's vision.

Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979

No signature appears on this work.

c. 1664
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1663-1664
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The support is a fine, plain-weave linen with a thread count of 20 x 16 per cm². The original tacking edges are present. The canvas has been glue lined.

The ground is a warm buff color containing chalk, lead white, black and an earth pigment.

The layer structure of the paint is varied, creating different effects and textures, from thick impasto to thin glazes and scumbles. The edges of forms are rarely hard, but overlap only slightly or do not quite touch, allowing the ground to show through. Almost all areas were painted wet-in-wet. In selected areas of the painting, especially in the blue jacket, a dark, reddish-brown undermodeling is visible, particularly the shaded folds. A gray-green underpaint is found in many shadowed areas. The vanishing point of the composition is visible as a small, white spot on the x-radiograph, to the left of the hand holding the balance. The balance was enlarged, as can be seen in the infrared reflectogram. The ground and paint are in a good state of preservation.

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

literature

Owing to the intimate nature of Vermeer's art, there has been an inclination to link the painter's family members to the sitters of his paintings, some of which seemed to have posed more than once. The economic advantage of employing sitters from the artist's family circle willing to pose long hours without pay would be obvious. Some Vermeer scholars, including Arthur Wheelock of the National Gallery, believe that Vermeer's wife Catharina posed more than once and may be a candidate for this picture. The same woman also posed in the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (bottom left) and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (top left).

She has the same high brow, straight nose and wide-spaced eyes and also appears to be pregnant in the Rijksmuseum work. Perhaps she is the most lovely of Vermeer's models who have never been held to be beauties in the conventional sense of the word. Their beauty derives from the way they are painted.

Catharina, who was one year older than her husband, would have been approximately 32 years old when the Woman Holding a Balance was painted, if we are to agree with the painting's generally accepted date of c. 1664. However, there are no surviving images of her and therefore we cannot make any comparison. After having lost a child in 1660, Catharina bore her first son Johannes, about three years later, c. 1663-1664. In the years that followed, she must have spent most of her time pregnant since she bore Vermeer 15 children before the artist died in 1675.

Although to modern viewers it seems quite obvious that the young woman is pregnant, there exist sound reason to believe this it not the case. Marieke de Winkel, an expert of the history of costume, offers substantial evidence in regards in her essay, "The Interpretation of Dress in Vermeer's Paintings." According to De Winkel, pregnancy "was not a common subject in art and there are very few depictions of maternity wear. Even in religious paintings such as the Visitation, where depictions of pregnant women is required, the bodies of the Virgin and Saint Elizabeth were usually completely concealed by draperies." De Winkel further argues that "to my knowledge there are no examples of pregnant women in Dutch portraiture, an interesting fact considering that many women were painted in their first year of marriage, a time when they could have been with child."

Arthur Wheelock also believes that the young woman is not pregnant but for a different reason. He observes from numerous paintings by Vermeer's contemporaries, that Dutch fashions in the mid-17th century seemed to have encouraged a bulky silhouette. The impression of the short jacket worn over a thickly padded skirt in Vermeer's painting in particular may create just such an impression.

The Moneylender
Gerrit Dou
1664
29 x 23 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

While generally accepted as an allegory, Woman Holding a Balance has been interpreted in many ways. Early authors assumed that the pans of the woman's balance contained gold or pearls. Consequently, the painting was described until recently as either the Gold-weigher or the Woman Weighing Pearls. Thus the Last Judgment was seen as a warning that the woman should not be distracted by weighing earthly goods and focus on eternal values. In this interpretation the woman is associated with of the iconographic tradition of the goldweigher and its consequential Vanitas connotations (see left). In addition, some contemporary authors speculate that the woman is pregnant while others conclude that her costume reflects a style of dress current in the early to mid-1660s. Others interpret the painting theologically, viewing the woman as a secularized image of the Virgin Mary, who, standing before the Last Judgment, assumes the role of intercessor and compassionate mother.

One scholar argues that the image of a pregnant Virgin Mary contemplating balanced scales would have been understood by a Catholic viewer as an anticipation of Christ's life, his sacrifice, and the eventual foundation of the Church. Vermeer expert Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. noted that the scales are in fact empty and thus, she is portrayed in the act of balancing rather than weighing. According to Wheelock, who correlates the mood of profound serenity of the picture with this fact, believes that "the essential message is that one should conduct one's life with temperance and balanced judgment. Indeed this message, with or without its explicit religious context, appears in paintings from all phases of Vermeer's career and must, therefore, represent one of his fundamental beliefs. The balance, an emblem of Justice, and eventually of the final judgment; denotes the woman's responsibility to weigh and balance her own action."

The Woman Holding a Balance is perhaps Vermeer's most successful composition. In no other work does composition so effectively compliment the theme and emotional setting of the painting. The pervasive yet unobtrusive geometry, the interplay of verticals and horizontals against the diagonals, mass against void, and light against dark, create a balanced but subtly dynamic composition. The geometrical center (the point where the two white lines converge) of the painting falls very near the upheld hand of the young woman, almost at the pivot of the balance, the painting's thematic heart. Moreover, the vanishing point of the work's perspective system, which is derived by extending the converging orthogonal lines of the table, mirror and floor tiles (pink lines), falls very near the same point. Thus, the thematic (the act of balancing), the geometric and the perspective centers of the painting coincide unifying its diverse realities. The composition of the Woman Holding a Balance is all the more admirable because it is achieved with such subtlety that it in no way interferes with a naturalistic reading of the painting.

This work is almost certainly the first painting listed in the 1696 Amsterdam sale of 21 paintings by Vermeer: "A young lady weighing gold, in a box by J. van der Meer of Delft, extraordinarily artful and vigorously painted. " It sold for 155 guilders, second to the Milkmaid at 175 guilders. The two paintings were, and still are, considered among the finest works by the artist's hand. Even the monumental View of Delft, many times larger, fetched only 35 guilders more. Moreover, the Woman Holding a Balance is the only Vermeer that can be traced back in an unbroken line to the 17th century.

A Woman Drinking with Two Men (detail)
Pieter de Hooch
c. 1658
73.7 x 64.6
National Gallery, London

The left-hand corner represented in this painting cannot be identified with any other of Vermeer's interiors since the structure of the window, which furnishes the most significant means for identification, cannot be seen. However, it was most likely similar to ones represented in Vermeer's other interiors. Such windows were typically composed of four casements. The bottom two casements had shutters on the outside (see the detail of Vermeer's Little Street) and at times, two upper shutters attached on the inside (see detail left). The shutters controlled incoming light and air flow. In Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance it seems that only the top shutters were left open. Presumably, the window faced north. Painters have always preferred a northern exposition for their studios since the cooler northern light is relatively constant throughout the working day. Dutch paintings of the time predominantly represent the left side of the room. The origin of this compositional formula may be linked to the fact that artists usually painted with the light source coming from their left, so that the shadow projected by their own hand did not disturb their work.

A string of pearls with a yellow ribbon closure lies between the smaller container and the container of the balance and weights. Vermeer's women are often associated with the pearls eleven of them wear, so much that his oeuvre itself has become synonymous with the pearl. In 1908 Jan Veth articulated a widespread sentiment while observing Girl with a Pearl Earring: "More than with any other VERMEER one could say that it looks as if it were blended from the dust of crushed pearls." In the seventeenth-century pearls were probably an extremely important status symbol. In 1660 Samuel Pepys (an English diarist) 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. Pearls are linked with vanity but also with virginity - a very wide iconographic spectrum.

Johann Sebastian Bach
BWV 639, organ prelude to chorale Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, (I call to Thee Lord Jesus Christ) [3.91 MB]
http://www.lastfm.de/music/Ton+Koopman/_/Chorale+-+%22Ich+ruf+zu+dir,+Herr+Jesu+Christ%22+BWV+639+(Studio)

A Dutch silver ducat.

Although the painting's earlier titles indicate that the woman is weighing pearls or gold, recent microscopic examination has shown that there is nothing on the pans of her scales. Thus, Vermeer has chosen to portray the moments when the scales comes to balance. The only things on the table that could be weighed are coins.

Using the five coins as a starting point, historian Timothy Brook opens a window out of Vermeer's painting onto the globalization of the world. In the 17th century, coins were much softer than they are today and were also clipped by thieves. The real value of a coin was determined by the weight of its precious metal rather than its face value. Thus, a diligent household periodically weighed all its coins to establish their effective worth.

Brook has conjectured that the large silver coin near the four stacked gold coins is a ducat and not a guilder. There were various types of silver coins in circulation but the most common was the ducat. In Europe, two silver ducats were worth one gold ducat.

Vermeer lived in a time, also known as the silver century, when silver had become available in enormous quantities. All over the globe, business transactions were done in silver. Although the practical use of silver was confined to decorative purposes, silver had become the universal measure of wealth. Principal suppliers of silver were Japan and South America. The Chinese accumulated huge amounts of silver since they were not interested in making transactions with European goods but accepted silver payemnts for the porcelain, silk clothing and other exotic goods they produced and had become the rage in Europe. Furthermore, in China, one unit of gold could be bought for six units of silver instead of the twelve in Europe.

Although there were some silver mines in Germany and Austria, the great bulk of silver which reached the ports of Amsterdam and London came from Spanish mines in Peru. Much of it came from the desolate boom town of Petosí. Founded in 1546 as a mining town, it soon produced fabulous wealth, becoming one of the largest cities in the Americas and the world with a population exceeding 200,000 people. In Spanish there is still a saying, valer un potosí, "to be worth a potosí"" (that is, "a fortune").

Midway in the 17th century, paintings had become so common in Dutch households that they themselves became a subject to be included into paintings. These paintings are now referred to as pictures-within-pictures. In the last fifty years this minor but quintessentially Dutch motif has been the object of intense scrutiny by the iconographic school of art history which assumes that interior painters purposely introduced pictures-within-pictures with symbolic meaning in order to influence the reception of the work as a whole. In regards to pictures-within-pictures in Vermeer's oeuvre, many of the interpretations have been contested.

Amidst the dispute, however, little attention has been paid to how, in effect, Vermeer actually went about the more "mundane" chore of depicting these little replica works of art.

First of all, evidence suggests that Vermeer's pictures-within-pictures were copied from real works which were either part of his mother-in-law's art collection or works in which the artist dealt in to provide supplementary income. For example, a large-scale Cupid, which appeared four times in his oeuvre (painted out by the artist in the early Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window) was listed in the upstairs backroom of his house among other items including "two tapestries, a long low wicker basket with a high back, in which the mother can nurse her baby and a painting of a tronie."

The only surviving work which was a subject of Vermeer's compositions is a Dirck van Baburen's Procuress (or a close copy) that can be seen in the backgrounds of The Concert and the later Lady Seated at the Virginals. Vermeer's version is accurately represented in drawing and dimension. This example should not encourage us to believe that Vermeer unthinkingly adhered to the reality of his studio setup. The cabinet-sized Finding of Moses in the background of The Astronomer makes a second startling appearance in almost mural-like dimensions in the later Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid. The Cupid too, whatever its original dimensions may have been, was crunched or inflated with manifest artistic license according to the compositional necessities.

Allegory of Painting (detail)
Gerrit van Honthorst
1648
138 cm x 113
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento

When depicting pictures within-pictures the vast majority of Dutch painters took a somewhat nonchalant attitude adopting analogous style and level of detail in depicting the picture-within-a-pictures as the work in which they were inserted. This oversight occasionally gave rise to some rather amusing effects. For example, in a portrait by Gerrit van Honthorst, a consumate technican, the face of the picture-within-a-picture sitting on the easel glares out at the viewer and seems no less real than the that of the painter herself (see image left) with the consequence that both confusedly vie for the viewer's attention. Although Dutch painters excelled in the description of appearances, and especially textures, we have the impression that they did not fully grasp that fact that observation and unfaltering attention to detail does not necessarily guarantee the most natural effect in all cases. While they did question themselves how to produce accurate portrayals of the brilliance of shiny metals or the opaque roughness of a lemon peal it seems that the essential visual quality of a painting-with-a-painting, its flatness, had substantially escaped their attention.

Instead, in his artistic maturity Vermeer seems to have been well aware of the picture-within-a-picture's characterizing structural quality and experimented with various techniques to make this clear to the viewer. First of all, he drained the pictures-within-pictures of their color by painting them in tones of ochres and brown (see detail left). But most importantly, he obliterated continuous modeling of light and shade (a technique that would have gone against the grain of any self-respecting Dutch realist) and drastically reduced the range of chiaroscural values. The original image is broken down into a sort of pictorial puzzle where each piece sets firmly along side the other on the picture plane annulling the sensations of light and depth, the raison d'être of the original work. What was initially an illusionist image has been condensed into pattern seamlessly integrating itself into Vermeer's intended image.

A Woman Weighing Gold
Pieter de Hooch
c. 1664
Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

The origins of this work has been traditionally linked to Pieter de Hooch, whose Gold Weigher which matches Vermeer's work very closely. Since neither of the paintings are dated, critics have hypothesized who infuenced who on the basis of stylistic concerns. Arthur Wheelock tentatively attributes the original idea to De Hooch who was at the time living and working in Amsterdam. But it is probable that De Hooch, who had lived in Delft for some years where he was a member of the artist's and artisan's guild of Saint Luke along with Vermeer, did not make the break to the more promising Amsterdam permanently but continued to frequent Delft during where the two painters could have presumably met, exchanged views and shown each other examples of their current work.

Wheelock believes that, given De Hooch's composition originally contained a second figure seated on the far side of the table, "it seems unlikely that De Hooch would have introduced the figure of the man, and then removed it, had he derived his composition from Woman Holding a Balance. De Hooch probably out the second figure before Vermeer saw the painting." However, Walter Liedtke argued: "That De Hooch considered adding a seated figure in the background hardly suggests, as has been said, that his composition must precede Vermeer's."

Recently, Adriaan E. Waiboer has reexamined the problem and offers good reasons for challenging Wheelock's position. He writes: "The direction of influence is suggested by the fact that single-figure scenes are exceptional in De Hooch's oeuvre, not in Vermeer's. Moreover, De Hooch's painting includes an open window in the left foreground and a bundled up tapestry on the table, two elements new to De Hooch, but previously explored by Vermeer." Although Waiboer admits that Vermeer's art had no comparable influence to that of the most influential Dutch artists of the time, his impact has nonetheless been underestimated. "He may not have had a large group of younger followers, but several key Dutch genre painters after 1660 responded to Vermeer's work, even if it was only once in their career. Vermeer's art enjoyed more than a short-lived hype and even provided an example for a handful of artists at the end of the century. It would take another 250 years, though, before Vermeer's impact became a global phenomenon."