Woman with a Pearl Necklace

Out of the iconography of Vanity Vermeer has fashioned an image of great purity and innocence, and he tenderly cherishes it as such. The moment of happiness of the painting is characterized by an almost complete absence of ego. The woman appears not so much to be admiring the pearls in the mirror as selflessly, even reverently, offering them up to the light: it is as if we were present at a marriage.

Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979

c. 1664-1665
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 21.6 x 15 per cm² The original tacking edges are still present. The top tacking edge is wider than the others and appears to have been folded double. Marks from the original strainer bars are evident along the top and right edges. The support has been lined and placed on a stretcher larger than the original strainer.

Over an off-white ground, black underpainting indicates the shadows of the woman's back. An ocher layer on top of the ground may cover the entire painting. It is not covered by any other paint layers in parts of the figure and in the stained glass window The woman's yellow jacket is underpainted with white, followed by lead-tin yellow in the light parts and two layers of a black and yellow ocher mixture in the shadows. In the flesh colors are various mixtures of white, ocher, and black, well blended into one another. The pearl necklace was painted wet-in-wet white over a gray/ocher layer.

* 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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Although Vermeer could have arrived at his themes and style independently, it is hardly out of question that he had a sort of loose collaboration with his patron Pieter van Ruijven, the rich Delft patrician. In fact, John Michael Montias believes that Van Ruijven and Vermeer had entertained far more than a simple painter/client relationship.

Van Ruijven, like Vermeer, was ambitious. He had paid sixteen thousand guilders, an absolutely astronomical sum to acquire land near Schiedam that brought with it the title of Lord of Spalant in 1669. His acquisition may be considered as a case of "social rising." Van Ruijven may have enabled Vermeer's experimental working mode by keeping the painter on something of a retainer. There was a precedent for such arrangements in the competitive Dutch market for top paintings, and Van Ruijven is almost certain to have had direct knowledge of it from Pieter Spierincx, a distant cousin. Spierincx had sealed the right of first refusal the work's of Gerrit Dou, the most sought-after painter of the time.

Moreover Van Ruijven's wife Maria de Knuijt had brought the far greater share of money to the marriage, and her taste must have been taken into account. Indeed, the domestic scenes of Vermeer's compositions may have been designed to appeal to a woman's gaze at least as much as to a man's. According to the art historian, Lisa Vergara, as a "supporter of the Orthodox wing of the Reformed church, De Knuijt might have found particularly appealing the chaste dignity that informs Vermeer's interpretations of femininity."

With such a backdrop, Vermeer, Van Ruijven and his wife may have discussed art not only in general terms, but in strict relationship to Vermeer's compositions, many of which would have been acquired by the couple.

Young Woman Standing before a Mirror
Frans van Mieris
1670
42.9 x 31.6 cm
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

A woman at her toilette was a popular theme among Dutch genre painters in the 1650s and 1660s. A likely iconographic prototype for Vermeer's work is The Young Woman before a Mirror (c. 1662) by Frans van Mieris. However, Vermeer seems to have purged his composition of the explicit sensuality and gaudy color scheme present in Van Mieris' version.

Arthur Wheelock, one of the most sensitive Vermeer experts, pointed out that in the present work the artist "minimized the apparent physical activity of the figure, portraying her at the moment she has the ribbons pulled taut. Her thoughts may be inward, but they are expressed through her gaze, which reaches across the white wall of the room to the mirror next to the window. The whole space between her and the side wall of the room thus becomes activated with her presence. It is a subtle yet daring composition, one that succeeds because of Vermeer's acute sensitivity to the placement of objects and to the importance of spaces between these objects."

The essential, exquisitely balanced composition we now see was not Vermeer's original concept. Neutron autoradiography has revealed that the artist made some vital changes in the composition. By extending the shape of the great folds of the bluish clothe of the still life he eliminated a number of black and white floor tiles and more of the table's complicated structure. As a result, the viewer's attention is now drawn to the upper, bright part of the composition. Another important modification was the exclusion of a musical instrument, most likely a cittern, which lay diagonally proped up on the foreground chair.

However, the most startling alteration was the exclusion of a large wall map that engulfed the standing girl absorbing her from into the rest of the composition and eliminating the line of her gaze towrds the mirror. The map was very likely the same which appears in The Art of Painting.

According to Wheelock, the "map, representing the physical world, and the musical instrument, referring to sensual love, would have given a context for interpreting the mirror and the pearls negatively rather than positively. Indeed, the sensual, earthy connotations are similar to those associated with "Vrouw Wereld." The Vrouw Wereld (the Lady World) was a well-known allegorical figure dating back to medieval times who personifies worldly pleasures and transience. By removing the map and musical instrument, Wheelock proposes that Vermeer transformed the image into a poetic one evoking the ideals of purity and truth.

From technical evidence, Vermeer seems to have restretched the original canvas over a smaller frame reducing its dimensions to tighten the composition. Subsequent restorers, noting that the painted composition extended over the edges of the stretcher, enlarged the format to what they thought were its original dimensions.

A Young Woman at her Toilette
Gerard ter Borch
c. 1650-1651
47.5 x 34.5 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Although Vermeer could have drawn on a number of Dutch paintings of women absorbed by their own beauty, none is closer in introspective spirit to the present work than Gerard ter Borch's A Young Woman at her Toilette (see left). In Vermeer's work, the young lady puts her last touches on her morning toilette fastening her pearl necklace while Ter Borch's figure ties her chemise. Both gaze in a mirror unaware of their surroundings making the spectator feel ever-so ill at ease as if he had intruded into the privacy of the muted drama.

Before Ter Borch's work, scenes of women adorning themselves in front of mirrors had been interpreted as allusions to vanity, a mode of conduct that the viewer should avoid. Ter Borch, perhaps reflecting positive shift in Dutch attitudes towards women and private life of individuals, subtly transformed the subject by focusing on the simplicity and sincerity of female conduct.

Ter Borch had made an enormous contribution to the development of interior painting in the Netherlands and his works were avidly collected and elaborated upon by scores of artists. He is, perhaps, the only Dutch genre artist who rivals the depth of Vermeer's sympathetic treatment of women. Although Ter Borch may be capable of registering greater expressive nuance in the faces of his women, he lacks Vermeer's sense of pictorial design and above all, the sense of three-dimensional space which in many cases becomes an extension of the figure's interior life.

It is known that among the vast quantities of exoctic Chinese wares, Chinese drawings also found their way to Europe in the time of Vermeer but they had no influence on Dutch painting. Imitations of the Chinese manner of drawing seems to be limited to Delft ceramic painters who copied and elaborated upon imported porcelain for local markets. Nonetheless, early Vermeer writers, who were closer to the popular 18th-century style known as chinoiserie, speculated that some of the inferable atmosphere of Vermeer's paintings may have been influenced by oriental works of art.

Even Marcel Proust evoked the Orient to describe the beauty of Vermeer painting in his famous passage concerning a tiny passage of Vermeer's View of Delft in his À la recherche du temps perdu. He wrote about the last day in the life of a fictitious French writer and art lover, Bergotte: "The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself."

A Girl with a Mirror
Paulus Moreelse
1627
oil on canvas
The Fitzgerald Museum, Cambridge

Mirrors in art carry a variety of different meanings and associations.

The oracle of Apollo at Delphi demanded of the ancient Greek "know thyself," and mirrors have often been used as symbols of wisdom and self-knowledge. But the mirror can just as easily imply vanity, an unhealthy amount of self-regard. The danger of over admiring one's mirror image is encapsulated in the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the beautiful boy who had fallen in love with his reflection in a pool.

In the ancient world, mirrors were made of highly polished metal, usually copper. The Romans are usually credited with developing glass mirrors, but these were not widely used until c.1500 when convex mirrors were produced in Germany. Venetian glass makers developed the kind of flat, silvered mirrors we know today. In those times, no other civilization produced the glass mirror. Renaissance painters are known to have extensively employed the mirror to examine reality more objectively and transform it into painting.

In ancient art, the mirror is often associated with the world of women and does not necessarily carry any symbolic value, although it was an attribute of the Roman goddess Venus.

In Christian art the mirror came to represent the eternal purity of the Virgin Mary. The mirror in art can have other positive meanings. The allegorical figures of Prudence and Truth were often imagined carrying mirrors.

With time the mirror came to be associated with the negative values suggested by the myth of Narcissus. From the Renaissance on, Vanity and Deception were the connotations the mirror carried most often rather than Truth and Prudence. A work by Vermeer's contemporary Paulus Moreelse (see left) typifies this distrust as an allegory of Lasciviousness or Vanity: just as the mirror is dishonest, a carrier of pure illusion, so this girl's beauty is an illusion, as transitory and shallow as her reflection in the glass.

Some painters artfully made use of the mirror to show us something that we would not otherwise be able to see; the reflection of an object or person outside the scope of the painting perhaps. Vermeer showed both the girl's hidden face as well as the artist's easel set at a distance from the scene which unfolds in the Music Lesson. In the Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the Woman Holding a Balance, the viewer can see nothing but a sliver of light, presumably reflected from the illuminated figure.

Mirrors have been potent props in allegories, and are often identified as attributes of various gods and saints, virtues, senses, and vices. When Vermeer used mirrors as props in his own work he was no doubt fully aware that one of the principle function of art as defined by contemporary art theorists was to faithfully mirror nature.

Although Vermeer the artist freely exploited innovative themes and painting techniques from his colleagues, no historical evidence has survived which directly concerns the artist's persona or how he may have interacted with his clients or fellow artists. Certainly, the outward appearance of his painting would suppose a quiet, balanced and contemplative gentleman even though we are warned that there were many cases in which the world depicted by an artist had little or nothing to do with his personal circumstances or known character. However, circumstantial evidence suggests Vermeer's personality indeed did not stray too far from the figure we deduce from his art: he was even-tempered, confident, controlled and likely graced with above-average social skills.

Vermeer was repeatedly elected headsman of the Guild of St Luke (the association which protected and furthered the interests of Delft's artists and artisans). Such a job would have necessitated marked diplomatic qualities as well as esteem and trust on the part of the guild's heterogeneous members. Art historians have repeatedly underlined that he was able not only to live and prosper but to relate positively with his domineering Catholic mother-in-law during the years of his artistic activity. There is not a single shred of evidence that suggests he ever fell out with her. Furthermore, Vermeer was able to secure and maintain a vital relationship with a rich Delft patron who had purchased more than half of the artist's entire output. The same patron granted Vermeer a highly unusual and copious sum of money in his last testament. In any case, it is doubtful that Vermeer filled the bill of the eccentric artist, then as now, in vogue among the public.

Not all artists aspired to the same level of social acceptance as Vermeer. In fact, a popular motif of Dutch "bohemian-type artists" toiling away in their disheveled studios proves that many painters had dropped their noble robes of the pictor doctus and had embraced behaviors that art theorists and the culture at large disparaged. Writers from the second half of the 15th century onward made frequent mentions of artist's eccentricities, foibles and oddities which were equated with nonconformity, individuality, and creative superiority. Biographers reported artists' personal oddities that piqued the curiosity of both readers and viewers while humanizing their otherwise mystifying profession to the public. They allowed viewers to picture the personalities residing behind the brushstrokes.

Tales of the reclusive artist working in seclusion were common in biographies of Renaissance artists' lives. Dutch artistic literature of the 17th century was rife with interesting, often comical anecdotes about artists' personal lives and working methods. More likely, Vermeer aspired to leave an image of himself as the supremely accomplished artist, a genius with a divine gift as conceived in the Italian Renaissance. This aspiration to guarantee himself a place in history can be no better exemplified than in his ambitions Art of Painting, a painted hymn to his profession and extraordinary talent.

The problem of rendering the quality of the edges created by objects is a crucial aspect of pictorial representation. Primitive painters almost universally made, as amateurs still make, their edges too sharp. As a consequence, whatever the merit of their work may be, they tend to appear hard and dry. Leonardo da Vinci was perhaps the first painter to study edges systematically and employ simultaneously hard and soft ones. Many of his followers, and still more the school of Correggio, tended to paint their edges almost uniformly soft.

The best 17th-century Dutch painters studied their edges attentively, and so one thinks less of the hardness or softness of their work than is the case viewing Great Masters of other nations. Their good paintings simply look right in this respect. Vermeer was notably successful in creating something so like the aspect of nature that the spectator takes the edges for granted. It is likely that Vermeer studied at close quarters the works of Gerard ter Borch, who perhaps, more than any other painter in history, understood the necessity of varying contour to accurately evoke a natural sense of form, space and light in painting.

In the present canvas by Vermeer, there is a notable variety of contours. The back edge of the girl's yellow jacket is surprisingly blurred. The naked eye would not have seen it that way. But the painting conveys the idea of incomparable softness of the fabric and roundness of the form. Had Vermeer opted for a sharp contour, the figure of the girl would have been dramatically flattened and closer, almost attached, to the background wall.

The difficulty of understanding how to portray edges in painting is caused by the fact that we do not normally see blurred edges in nature since the human eye is constantly focusing and refocusing in order to guarantee the sharpest, and most comprehensible mental image possible. This is especially true with subjects as close to the viewer as those in the paintings of Vermeer. The painter must subvert, as it were, what he normally sees in favor of what he knows about edges and what results pictorially true.

Interior with a Woman Combing a Little Girl's Hair
Jacobus Vrel
c. 1654/1662
55.9 x 40.6 cm
Detroit Institue of Art, Detroit

Although Vermeer's plain, white-washed walls are often taken for granted, they constitute a tour de force of painting technique and are crucial in creating the quintessential Dutch atmosphere of his interiors. Generally, Vermeer's treatment of the wall motif is linked to Carel Fabritius and of course, Pieter de Hooch, who was the first artist to fully exploit the evocative power of light as it rakes across the uneven wall of a private home. Both links can be considered strong because the two artists lived and worked for some years in the small town of Delft.

However, there exists another painter who delighted in painting simple white-washed walls although his place in art history is presently negligible. Jacobus Vrel, a charmingly idiosyncratic minor-master, had traditionally been linked to both Vermeer and De Hooch so much that some of his canvases bear signatures which had been altered to read as those of the two renowned painters. Vrel's treatment is highly unusual for the Dutch school in that he rejected detailed descriptions in favor of a broad depiction, remarkable for its controlled simplicity.

One would suppose that the provincial autodidacte Vrel must have taken the lead from greater Vermeer or De Hooch. However, Vrel's only dated painting, from 1654, suggests that, rather than following, he anticipated the Delft artists' interest in domestic themes and light effects. The date on his Interior with a Woman at a Window is 1654, and proves that he dated paintings four years before any known dates on De Hooch's Delft-style interiors or courtyards. Art historians generally date Vermeer's first interiors where a white-washed wall comes into play from about 1657. Equally vexing is the fact that Vrel painted a series of simple town views which cannot fail to suggest the unpretentiousness and anonymity of Vermeer's Little Street.

Since we know nothing of Vrel's life, any contact or influence between the two is completely conjectural.

Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto for flute and strings op. 10 no. 4 RV 435, Largo [1.84 MB]
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vivaldi-8-Flute-Concertos/dp/B001LMF1ZK/ref=dm_cd_album_lnk?ie=UTF8&qid=1258623220&sr=1-3