Details: Vermeer's Painting Methods & Techniques
THE GUITAR PLAYER
c. 1670
oil on canvas
20 1/4 x 18 1/4 in. (53 x 46.3 cm.)
Kenwood,
English Heritage as Trustees of the Iveagh Bequest
green earth
Vermeer's late paintings contain a number of surprises. He continued to search new expressive and technical avenues tirelessly throughout his career. One of the most curious was his use of green earth in the shadows of the flesh tones. The neck of the young girl in The Guitar Player is a fine example. Green earth, which is a dull green pigment made of natural earth from Italy (the best quality comes from Verona), was widely employed by Italian masters in the fourteenth and early fifteenth-century as a uniform base for painting flesh. Its purpose was to neutralize the excessively brilliant white ground necessary to prepare wood panels for painting. Once dry, the true flesh tones were painted over it. his technique fell out of favor with the advent of oil painting and is rarely seen afterwards. However, in various paintings of the Utrecht School we can see green earth once again in the darker tones of the flesh. Some of the painters who belonged to the school had been to Italy to study painting where they may have come familiar with its use, adapting it to their own expressive necessities. Vermeer's utilization of this particular technique would at least indirectly support a recent theory that Vermeer might have served his apprenticeship in Utrecht and not in Delft. What is unexplainable is why he would have used green earth only in his later works rather than in the earlier ones.
