"Working-Up" or Body Color

After Vermeer had defined his composition and the basic lighting scheme through the underpainting, he proceeded to the next stage called "working-up." Working-up in Dutch was called "opmaken" which means to finish. "During the working-up the main concern was to give everything its correct coloring, to render materials appropriately, and to fix the final contours of the forms." ¹ Each distinctive area of the painting was executed as a separate entity and finished in one or two sessions. "Whenever it was necessary to achieve strong, bright colours, (for red, yellow, and blue robes and the like), the passage concerned was clearly executed within carefully delineated contours in accordance with fixed recipe, involving a specific layering or fixed type of underpainting."²

The technique of completing paintings one area at a time evolved when water based tempera, which is technically even more limiting than oil paints, were primarily used. An example of this procedure can be observed in Michelangelo's unfinished Manchester Madonna.

The are essentially two reasons for painting one area at a time. The first is that painters in Vermeer's age had to produce their paints by hand each day before working.³ Neither the vast number of pigments, nor the pre-prepared paint in convenient metal tubes existed until the mid nineteenth-century. Since hand grinding is a laborious and time consuming chore, artists had learned to limit the number of costly paints necessary for the day's work by painting in a restricted area. Each pigment presents itself its own inherent possibilities and limitations. Permanence, workability, compatibility and drying qualities could differ so strongly from one pigment to another that is was normal to use pigments in the purest form possible or mixed with a very limited number of other pigments. In fact, representations of artists at work generally show them holding very small palettes with few colors.

The second reason for completing one area at a time was that paintings were generally more complex in their composition and far more detailed than they are today, this was even more so when this method of working was being perfected in the centuries before by artists such as Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer. In effect, each area of the painting corresponded to a distinct visual experience which required a different degree of concentration and technical approach in order to render the illusionistic visual experience as convincingly as possible. The luxurious sheen of silk or satin could not be rendered with the same technique used for the rough texture of the bark of an ancient tree. For example, Vermeer most likely used a stiff bristle brush to work of the heavy impasto of the bright white passage of the white-washed wall in the Art of Painting Vermeer. The rough texture of the paint surface imitates the texture of the white-washed wall and in addition catches the light and sparkles with life. In the same work, the softness of the artist's hair was worked with a very thin layer of muted ochers and smoothed imperceptibly with the aid of a badger brush.

Although the working-up method would seem to be in direct contrast to the extraordinary pictorial unity prevalent in Baroque painting, the difficulty in harmonizing each separate passage with the others was largely offset by the unifying effect of the monochrome underpainting.

Once relatively cheap, ready-to-use, mutually compatible industrial manufactured paints in tubes became available and detailed, rendering of naturalistic effects was no longer artistically desirable, this method of working vanished.

Working-Up in Vermeer's Painting

Recent study of Vermeer's paintings indicates that the artist most likely used the standard working-up method. In his mature work many passages are completed with only one or two pigments. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that in the working-up stage sittings occurred a long time from one and another. Rather than a being a slow painter, Vermeer may have been a more meditative one who was not forced to produce for the market but was able to concentrate fully on one area at a time.

One would expect that a painting constructed in such a manner would most likely appear like a mosaic whose parts are clearly distinct one from the other. How then was Vermeer able to achieve such an unprecedented pictorial unity for which his art is known? Vermeer used few pigments, perhaps no more than 20 in all, while only a dozen or so were used with any regularity. The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter was most likely painted with white lead, ultramarine blue, one or two earth colors (raw umber and/or yellow ocher), black and a red limited to the backing upholstery of the right hand chair. Some traces of red may also have been found in the face which most likely have faded with time.

The pictorial unity of Vermeer's compositions was also sustained by the monochrome underpainting in which the artist fixed the basic forms, the relationship of darks and lights taken as a whole. Once the underpainting was dry, the artist superimposed layers of colored paint. The chiaroscural values of the underpainting helped the artist to match the darkness or lightness of the subsequent colored paint layers. While the lighter areas were generally rendered with full body color consisting in one or two pigments mixed in varying proportions, shadows were often painted in very thin semi-transparent layers of paint leaving the warm toned ground to transpire acting as a unifying agent. The warm brown underpainting in the robe of the Girl with a Red Hat can been seen through the irregular brushstrokes of the layer of natural ultramarine paint which lies over it.

In any case, it remains very difficult to understand the sequence in which Vermeer worked up each separate passage. Ernst van der Wetering has hypothesized that Rembrandt worked from "the back to the front" of his pictures by analyzing the system of overlapping areas of pigment. No such study has been conducted in regards to Vermeer's painting. However, one might reason that the background white-washed walls, which play such an important role in the artist's pictorial conception, may have been among the first areas to be completed in the working-up phase. More than any other pictorial element, these walls determine the amount and quality of light which will be represented in a given painting. Analogously, landscape painters often depict the sky first in order to properly gauge the correct colors of the rest of the painting. For it is obviously the sky which influences the tone of the landscape itself and not vice versa. After having defined the various tones of the wall, perhaps Vermeer then worked-up the larger areas of color such as the various costumes worn by the models which usually play a decisive role in the chromatic harmony of the painting.