Young Woman with a
Water Pitcher

critical excerpt

No signature appears on this work.

c. 1664-1665
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997)

c. 1662
Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The support is a plain-weave linen with a thread count of 14 x 14 per cm². The canvas has been lined and the original tacking edges have been removed.

The ground is pale gray and contains lead white, chalk, and umber. In the brightly lit areas of the wall is a thin gray layer, slightly paler than the ground, containing some ultramarine. Yellow ocher was added to this layer in the shadows and half-shadows. The left shaded side of the basin has a red underpaint that extends under the adjacent part of her skirt. It is visible as a red outline describing the top edge.

The composition has been altered. There once was a chair with lion's head finials in the lower left foreground and the map on the back wall was located further to the left in line with the left edge of the woman's headgear. The red velvet lining of the jewelry box lid has faded, though the color is still intense where it has been shaded by the frame. Abrasion along all edges and in thin-glazed shadows, as well as scattered flake losses, are present.

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

literature

exhibitions

Woman Washing Her Hands
Eglon van der Neer
1675s
49 x 40 cm
Mauritshuis, The Hague

The meaning of this work has always vexed Vermeer scholars. No convincing explanations have been advanced even though all scholars agree that it is one the most intensely poetic work's of the artist's oeuvre. Furthermore, as of yet, no clear-cut model in Dutch painting for its composition or motif has been identified.

Unlike Eglon van der Neer's Woman Washing her Hands (see detail left) whose symbolic meaning is clear in the context of the complex composition, the central presence of Vermeer's water pitcher is not easily explained. However, Walter Liedtke points out that "a contemporary viewer would have recognized the head and shoulder coverings, the silver-gilt basin and pitcher (with which one would not normally water plants), and the jewelry box as the accoutrements of a well-to-do woman's toilette. That she opens or looks out the window does not disturb, indeed enhances, the sense of unself-conscious activity. Vermeer represents but a moment of private life, and a patrician ideal."

This virtual reconstruction of the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher provides a reasonable hypothesis of the artist's original pictorial concept. The same map which appears today once occupied more of the background and reached behind the standing woman. Today, if one observes carefully, a barely perceptible shift in tone along the original left-hand edge of the map may be noted. Likewise, the silhouette of the back of a Spanish chair with lion-head finial has left an observable pentimento.

The changes in composition most likely were made during an early phase of the painting procedure, called underpainting, before color and detail had been introduced even though the now excluded chair seems to have been brought to a good degree of finish. In its simplest terms, an underpainting is a monochrome version (usually brown or neutral gray) in which the artist fixed composition, created volume and distributed darks and lights in order to produce an overall effect of illumination. With a minimum of time a great part of the artist's pictorial ideas could be quickly envisioned. The parts of the painting which did not match the artist's expectations could thus be observed and corrected with relative ease.

The virtual reconstruction of this work is based on naked-eye observation and infrared reflectograms which reveal hidden levels of dark paint in the case they contain black pigment. The painting can be virtually reconstructed to an acceptable degree since we know the real dimensions of the two objects that Vermeer deleted or altered.

The final composition appears less cluttered and more focused on the central figure of the woman.

Ultramarine blue on canvas.

The use of natural ultramarine in Vermeer's oeuvre could easily constitute a study in itself. Although it can be detected in almost every work by the artists, it is truly surprising to what extent he actually employed this most noble of all pigments. Not only is it found in blue-colored objects, but upon close inspection, we find traces of it in areas where they cannot be perceived by the naked eye: the shaded portions of white drapery, black marble tiles, green foliage, white washed walls and even in the shadows of the brilliant orange gown in The Glass of Wine. A superlative example of the use of natural ultramarine can be seen in the satin gown of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, although it may be slightly less brilliant today due to yellowing of the varnish. The gem-like depth of the wrap in The Milkmaid is another. In this case, the excellent state of conservation of the painting allows us to appreciate in full the chromatic brilliance of the highest grade, pure lapis lazuli.

Vermeer realized early in his career that by admixing discreet quantities of natural ultramarine in the grays (commonly composed of lead white, charcoal black and raw umber in varying proportions) used to depict the shadows of white objects, he could effectively enhance the effect of intense daylight. The technique was to be employed many years later by the French Impressionists.

One of the most remarkable examples of Vermeer's use of natural ultramarine can be found in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. Although, as it might be expected, it was the principle pigment used to depict the folded blue drapery on the table, natural ultramarine was also employed to evoke the incoming daylight passing through the glass panes of the open window. Vermeer applied delicate admixtures of opaque and semi-transparent natural ultramarine and white over the warm tone of the canvas preparation in order to register the varying degrees of intensity of light as it plays on and through the surface of the uneven glass. Observed with care, we can see that even the dark brown lead molding has been painted with ultramarine. The contrast between the bluish glass and the warm-toned sunlit portion of the window frame is absolutely natural. The headdress worn by the young woman presents an even more striking example of this technique. It appears to have been first modeled in shades of white and neutral gray. Once dry, delicate shades of genuine ultramarine and lead white were superimposed over the shadowed areas to render the candid transparency of the starched cloth inundated by sunlight. No other Dutch painter dared so much and yet these passages are striking for their absolute naturalness. Natural ultramarine is even found in the light gray paint of the background wall. The combined effect of the aged varnish and color of the glass which now protects the painting, and the blue produce a subtle green undertone which may not have been the artist's intentions.

The Card Players
Gerard ter Borch
46,7 x 36,8 cm
Private collection

Although scores of scholarly studies have been penned about the symbolic content of Vermeer's motifs, no one has ever addressed the symbolic meaning, if any existed, of color in his art. Did he choose his colors according to purely aesthetic concerns or because they might confer extra meaning to his motifs? Or did he simply paint the real colors of the objects he saw with little or no modification?

In an interesting study of color symbolism, Vermeer expert Arthur Wheelock reported the following.

Color symbolism, which goes back to antiquity, was still very much alive in the 17th century. Two important Dutch artists/art theorists, Karel van Mander and Samuel van Hoogstraten, drawing largely on antique and Italian sources, devoted significant attention to color symbolism. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, an important emblem book well known to Dutch artists, offered detailed advice on how to adopt color in painting to enhance meaning.

Van Hoogstraten noted that white means innocence, purity, and truthfulness. He associated red with highness, courageous and boldness, blue with fidelity and skillful science (the intellect), green with beauty, greatness and joy and black was equated with evilness and melancholy. In his assessment of yellow, for example, he explained how the ancient Greeks used this color in the interiors of temples because of its association with the sun. Yellow, thus, means wisdom, nobility, or high-mindedness. Many of these associations have remain surprisingly stable through the ages and in geographical distribution.

However, the most intriguing example of interest in color symbolism in the Netherlands is a list of color symbols which has been found amidst a large number of drawings, sketchbooks and letters of an important family of Dutch artists, the Ter Borchs of Deventer. This record, compiled in the mid-to-late 1650s by Gerard ter Borch's step-sister, Gesina and her brother Harmen, list a series of colors and their symbolic associations.

In the sheets penned by Harmen, appropriately colored hearts introduce each line. The hearts refer to the types of symbolic associations given to the colors, those related to love. Light blue means constancy, green hope, black steadfastness, grey spitefulness, white pureness, blue jealousy, carnation revenge or cruelty, pink love, yellow gladness or joy, seagreen instability and unsteadfastness, brown discretion, prudence and truth. Finally, ash gray means sorrow and suffering.

Gesina had a very close relationship with Gerard and became his favorite model by the early 1650s. She was an accomplished poetess and draughtsman profoundly enthralled by Petrarchan concepts of love and the complexities, worries and disappointments that accompanied the search for a true and lasting love. It seems certain that the great painter and his step-sister saw artistic matters eye to eye. It seems likely that Gesina very well transmitted, or at least shared, her concerns with Gerard whose delicate interiors paintings constitute some of the most lasting pictorial tributes and subtle variations on the fine points of contemporary love. According to the Dutch art expert Arthur Wheelock, the symbolism of the colors given to the remarkable silk dresses worn by Ter Borch's women seem to directly relate to the narrative scenario being depicted in agreement with Gesina's color list.

Ter Borch's ground breaking treatment of interior themes must have been a direct and profound influence during the course of Vermeer's pictorial evolution. However, since color has a deeply personal and complex function in the art of painting it is uncertain how far-reaching his interest in color symbolism was.

What we do know is that Vermeer generally favored the three primary colors, blue, read and yellow, for the colors of the principle protagonists of his interiors. These colors are perceived as unambiguous and positive and generally communicate strength. Ter Borch, on the other hand, along with the primary colors, gaily experimented with ethereal shades of pale velvety colors combining them in an original and evocative manner that Vermeer never approached.

Woman Washing Hands (detail)
Gerard ter Borch
c. 1655
53 x 43 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

Although art historians are undecided on exactly how to interpret all the components of this work, they generally agree that Vermeer intended to represent a moment of the young woman's morning toilette which was terminated with the washing of the hands. This subject had been previously exploited by other genre painters including one of the most delicate compositions by Gerard ter Borch, a work which would have appealed to Vermeer's sensitivity. In Ter Borch's work (see detail left) a young servant attends with a pitcher and basin (similar to the ones in Vermeer's work) for the final touches of the lady's toilette. In pictorial and emblematic tradition, the wash basin and pitcher evoke innocence purity and cleanliness. The idea of cleanliness is reinforced by the young lady's hooftdoek and nightrail as well as the bright light streaming through the window casting its clear blue light on everything it encounters.

Vermeer evidently attached a particular significance to the act of hand washing. In the Amsterdam Dissius sale of 1696 in which 21 Vermeer paintings were auctioned, there is item no. 5 described as, "In which a gentleman is washing his hands in a perspectival room with figures, artful and rare." This lost composition must have been highly considered since it fetched the handsome sum of 95 guilders or about half the price of the large scale View of Delft and more than double of the Officer and Laughing Girl, today, both retained among the artists finest works.

Curiously, no Dutch picture of a man washing his hands has ever been discovered and one cannot help but wonder how Vermeer conceived and executed such a motif especially if we consider that the man was not alone but "with figures." The washing of hands may have had Biblical associations with the concept of spiritual cleansing. The "perspectival room" most likely refers to a common see-through device Vermeer had first experimented in his early A Maid Asleep and later refined in the late Love Letter.

Interior with a Family and Two Nurses before a Fire
Cornelis de Man
1670s
oil on panel, 52 x 45 cm
Private collection

More than one contemporary visitor to the Netherlands noted that the Dutch prized three things above all else: first their children, second their homes, and third their gardens. From Pieter Brueghel onwards, Netherlandish painters populated their images with children more than any of the European nation. Anyone familiar with Dutch painting is aware of the deeply empathetic treatment which is reserved for children by Jan Steen, who has studied the relations of children with grown-ups with great insight and charm, and, closer to Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch.

Many Vermeer enthusiasts wonder why Vermeer never included his own children in his interiors if his works are truly "slices of daily life." After all, Catharina, Vermeer's wife, gave birth to 15 children and the meticulous inventory of household goods taken after Vermeer's death describes a different picture of the Vermeer household full of cribs and worn furnishings. The simplest explanation is that Vermeer's paintings were never intended to be snapshots of an extant reality. As Vermeer expert Walter Liedtke writes, "In a broad view, the essential subject of Vermeer's mature work is an ideal woman in an ideal home. The image, of the intended male viewer, was an icon of private life and personal feeling, concerns that flourished in a time of postwar prosperity and peace." In his house full of children, it is obvious that Vermeer drew from art and literature for his motifs rather than from his day-to-day life experience.

The scenes that Vermeer depicted were carefully composed in his studio on the top floor of his well-to-do mother-in-law's house away from the bustle of his oversized family. The true appearance of Vermeer's down-stairs household must have been much more similar to a painting by Cornelis de Man (see above).

A Lady Washing her Hand
Caspar Netscher
1657
49.3 x 40.3 cm
The Kremer Collection, Fondation Aetas Aure

Historians have ruled out the possibility that the young woman was watering her plants outside the half-opened window. More logically, these utensils would have been employed at the end of the young girl's morning toilette to wash her hands. Caspar Netscher depicted an analogous scene of hand-washing when he was still working in the studio of Gerard ter Borch (see above).

While the Romans and Greeks associated well-washed hands with clean bodies, in the medieval and Renaissance times there was little interest in washing beyond the wrist.

Monastery cloisters featured a stone trough for hand-washing, and medieval paintings of interiors often show a ewer, a basin and a cloth for drying hands in a corner of the room. Etiquette books ordered hand-washing before and after meals, and people who neglected it inspired scorn. Among the upper class, unless you washed your hands, you had no claim to gentility.

That belief persisted through the 17th century, even as body cleanliness worsened. Doctors assured people that they were more susceptible to the plague if they opened their pores in warm water, and terrified Europeans shunned water and washing, except for their hands. Since forks were not in general use until the 18th century, hand-washing still had a practical function as well as a symbolic one: the Dutch in the age of Rembrandt scandalized French visitors by eating without first washing their hands.

Old Woman with Jug at a Window
Gerrit Dou
c. 1660-1665
28.3 x 22.8
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna

There is good reason to believe that the woman is not watering flowers as has been occasionaly suggested in the past. The gilt silver jug and basin would have been a prized luxury item maladapted for such a mundane task. More likely, a rustic terracotta jug such as the one depicted in Gerrit Dou's Old Woman with Jug at a Window would have been utilized for that purpose.

The theme of giving water to plants is rare in 17th-century Dutch painting prior to Dou's treatment although the many copies and versions of Dou's composition attest to its subsequent popularity. Watering plants most likely had a moral meaning in 17th-century Netherlands. In a French emblem book of 1553, a verse teaches us that "Just as too much water makes plants die / Too much labour destroys many a thing / but, if moderate, brings relief."

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of Vermeer's art is the way light is channeled, diverted, reflected with total logic from one surface to another, infusing space, color, and form with a luminous unity. In fact, although Dutch painters of the Golden Age had distinguished themselves from their European counterparts precisely for their scrupulous rendering of natural appearances, Vermeer took Dutch naturalism one step further. We might say that light itself had become his subject.

Although rarely considered, it is amazing that Vermeer was able to describe with such extraordinary fidelity the light of his interiors. On the average, there are more than three hundred days a year with rainfall in the Netherlands. Furthermore, the natural light that could penetrate into the depths of Dutch homes must have been extremely limited particularly during the long severe winters. Windows were tall and narrow and intense direct sunshine must have been a relative rarity. Thus, we must admire all the more Vermeer's powers of observation and his ability to extrapolate such accurate renderings of a single lighting condition which would have only sporadically presented itself before the artist's eyes.

With Vermeer light is always clear and transparent diffusing itself evenly in the space, lighting everything. He always painted daylight; never once did he succumb to the flicker of a candle or torch or the ghostly moonbeams of night as did so many of his colleagues. It is notable that Vermeer also avoided painting the characteristic patches of direct sunlight on floors or walls as his contemporaries De Hooch and Pieter Janssens Elinga had done.

In the early 1660s, Vermeer turned away from the hollow cube-type painting of Pieter de Hooch and other artists of Southern Holland to a new type of composition which had been successfully pioneered by Gerard ter Borch and Frans van Mieris, both extraordinarily successful in the interior genre.

Vermeer's former preoccupation with three-dimensional space, created by a rather complex orchestration of architectural features, linear perspective and overlap of multiple objects, suddenly gave way to four compositions of the incomparable simplicity. Each of these works presents a single female figure absorbed in some mundane activity captured unaware in a shallow middle ground inundated by natural light. Objects, whether they be animate or inanimate, are treated impartially and stripped of any anecdotal detail which might distract the viewer. Contours are no longer uniformly sharp as in the early works but softly blurred and daringly simplified. The aesthetic result is a luminous tremor unequalled by his contemporaries whose works seem motionless and brittle by comparison. The shapes described by the contours of the individual objects, which Vermeer notable Walter Liedtke eloquently terms "luminous silhouettes," are gauged and aligned one to another on the painting's surface rather than in depth as if they were a part of some grand, meaningful puzzle.

The surface qualities of the motif lose much of their textural presence and assume curious optical character which many experts credit to Vermeer's experimentations with camera obscura vision. Like few other artists, Vermeer was able to progressively adapt his painting technique to the new artistic vision. Gone are the uneven texture of the canvas surface and the frequent knotty build-up of rich impasto paint. To evoke the new uncluttered, optical world, form is slowly built up by applying sequential layers of thin, semitransparent paint. The canvas surface resemble the sheen of the luxurious materials worn by the artists models.

In each of the works, the figure strikes a pose that in reality could be held for considerable length of time in order to avoid coming into conflict with the inherent stillness of the painted reality. However, if carefully observed, the figure in the present work nonetheless leans to the right-hand side of the composition, a bit off balance. Her pose introduces a note of life into the otherwise rectangular composition. The imbalance is properly stabilized by the strong, axial line which runs down from the vertical edge of the map through the standing jug (see left).

That Vermeer's compositions are among the most highly determined in the history of easel painting is rendered more astonishing by the fact that they never interfere with the naturalistic reading of the scene.

Vermeer's sensitivity to pictorial design finds no parallel in Western art. Each and every element of the picture plane is determined with the utmost care in order to create a perfectly balanced, yet subtly dynamic, composition.

One of the highest achievements in composition was the artist's pervasive manipulation of the so-called negative spaces, or those areas of an image between the solid objects that are perceived as empty spaces . Normally, the viewer senses these negative spaces as leftovers. Their presence is not sensed as meaningful. Oppositely, Vermeer lends each one a clear simple, yet interesting shape capable of exerting its own visual power subliminally vying for the observer's attention. For Vermeer the artist, everything component of a painting merits equal attention.

The negative shapes, represented in the present work by the light gray background wall, and the positive shapes (the objects) interlock as if some sort of grand puzzle creating a sense of inevitable pictorial unity lending unsuspected resonance to the temporal gesture of the woman.

Francesco Geminiani
Concerto grosso op. 3 no. 5, Adagio II [1.39 MB]
http://www.amazon.de/Geminiani-Six-Concerti-grossi-Op-3/dp/B001SSDOGA/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1260103552&sr=301-1