Vermeers in their Frames

A young girl taking a digital photograph of Vermeer's Study of a Young Woman.

Frames are an important part of viewing a work of art. They isolate the painting from its environment permitting the viewer to experience the painting's illusionist qualities minimizing distracting elements which immediately surround it. Without a frame many delicate chromatic balances and subtleties of painting technique are less easily perceived. Painters in fact, often keep their paintings in frames to calculate more accurately delicate compositional and chromatic balances. A frame is similar to a window which, instead of allowing us to observe the outside world from within, permits us to observe the artist's inside world from without.

The predilection for frame finishes during 17th-century Netherlands steered away from the opulence of the gold leaf gilded frames in vogue at the time in France and Italy. The Dutch preferred simpler, earthier tones as seen on the frames of Vermeer and Rembrandt . Many of the early, ripple-style frames, however, were actually manufactured in countries such as Germany and Spain and thought of as 'Dutch' because of their extensive use in Holland. Frames were often painted black in a form of ebonizing, due to the limited availability and cost of ebony. Considering the wide use of this approach the finish has come to be known in certain circles as Dutch Black.

The available images of the paintings in their frames are arranged in chronological order above and can be accessed by clicking on their titles.