Johannes Vermeer: genre paintings
Johannes Vermeer was untypical in that he did not specialise in one type of painting. He began his career as a history painter, and then moved on to genre scenes, but also painted two outdoor scenes - The Little Street and View of Delft - some portraits (or are they "tronies"?), and pictures of characters: The Astronomer and The Geographer. This was quite a varied output, although it must be remembered that genre painters often painted other types of picture as well. Gerard ter Borch and Nicolaes Maes, for example, also painted portraits, and Jan Steen also painted some religious paintings.
Vermeer's varied output would seem to indicate ambition and yet, perhaps surprisingly, he was content to remain in Delft, and did not seek to improve his fortunes by moving to Amsterdam - unlike Pieter de Hooch. This may be because Vermeer had some other sources of income from his business as a picture dealer and from his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, with whom Vermeer and his wife lived. It is true that many Dutch painters had additional sources of income: Jan Steen, for example, was an innkeeper, and Jan Van der Heyden designed an early fire-engine. But, more than most, Vermeer can be considered a "gentleman painter" who painted partly to please himself. Vermeer probably painted a mere two or three pictures per year, but sold them for high prices or used them to pay his debts. Again untypically, Vermeer appears to have had one main patron - Pieter van Ruiven - rather than a multitude of customers (Montias chapter 13).
Vermeer would never have described himself as a "genre" painter, because this is a French term first used in the late eighteenth century. The Dutch had no general term for paintings of everyday life, but had terms for individual subjects, as Christopher Brown explains:
A merry company scene "was known by contemporaries as a 'geselschappje' or a 'conversatie', while an outdoor scene of a similar type was a 'buitenpartij'. A brothel scene was a 'bordeeltjen' and a scene of soldiers in their guardroom a 'cortegaerdje' or a 'soldaets kroeghie'" (Brown 9).
The kinds of painting listed above were most commonly found in the first half of the seventeenth century, which had a taste for scenes of boisterous subjects like peasants drinking in taverns (Brouwer), tric-trac players (Duyster), debauchees in brothels (Pot), and dandies flirting with their ladies (Buytewech). After about 1650, a new generation of genre painters - Vermeer, De Hooch (when in Amsterdam), Ter Borch, Metsu, Netscher, Ochtervelt - developed a more genteel style of genre, often depicting fashionably dressed people in elegant interiors.
Vermeer's subjects - domestic tasks, letter-writing, music-making, wine-drinking - are the same as those of his contemporaries, but, as we will see, Vermeer handles these themes in interesting and often unusual ways. Vermeer is commonly - and rightly - compared with De Hooch, because both were Delft painters who excelled at placing figures in three-dimensional interiors. But Vermeer is in some ways closer to Ter Borch, as both liked to depict quiet scenes of letter-writing, music-making, and domestic tasks. The greater range of subject matter in the second half of the century meant that there were not enough terms to describe the new kinds of painting. The clerk who wrote the catalogue for the 1696 sale of Vermeer's paintings had to write individual descriptions of each painting:
"A young lady weighing gold . . . A young lady playing the clavecin in a room, with a listening gentleman . . . A drunken, sleeping maid at a table" (Blankert 153).
This "drunken, sleeping maid at a table" is now usually described as A Girl Asleep at a Table, because it is not certain that she is drunk. Indeed, the whole subject matter of the painting is full of problems and ambiguities. The painting may have been inspired by works like The Idle Servant by Nicolaes Maes, which depicts a servant who has fallen asleep in the middle of her duties, with a pile of dirty dishes on the floor. Here the subject is clear and unambiguous, although modern critics have overemphasised the moralising element in a painting intended to be humorous. Vermeer's painting of A Girl Asleep at a Table seems at first glance to be about a similar subject. The girl's posture, the empty wine glass, and the wine jug would all seem to indicate that she is drunk. Arthur Wheelock, however, suggests she is suffering from melancholy (Wheelock 40) (and drowning her sorrows?), which could also be indicated by the black shadow above her head. The picture on the wall behind seems to contain a naked leg (of Cupid?) and a mask. Does the mask indicate that the girl has been deceived by her lover? Or does it refer to the girl's sleeping state, since truth is revealed in dreams? It is not even likely that she is a servant since, as Wheelock points out, she is dressed in fine materials and wearing pearl earrings. Her neckerchief has fallen open, perhaps revealing more than is proper, although we must remember that she is sitting at home, not in a tavern.
Someone else may have been drinking with the girl, because - as many commentators have noticed - there appears to be a glass goblet lying on its side. Another feature - one that commentators seem to have missed - is the long object (a man's stick?) lying on the table. The open door could indicate that the girl's companion, if she has one, has left the room. Has he deserted the girl, hence her melancholy? Or has he left the room temporarily, perhaps to answer a call of nature after drinking all that wine? One could go on fantasising in this way for ever. In fact, that is probably what the owners of many Dutch paintings did. But we need to remember that what we are looking at is oil paint on canvas, not a real girl, the details of whose life could be known. X-rays of this painting reveal that Vermeer originally included a man and a dog, seen through the open door, but then changed his mind and deliberately painted them out. Did he do this to make the painting's meaning harder to find? Or to make it deliberately ambiguous? Perhaps more than any other Dutch painter, Vermeer problematises the meaning of his work.
This can be seen again in a mysterious and haunting painting often called A Woman Holding a Balance. It depicts a lady holding a pair of scales. On the table before her lie some pearl necklaces and pieces of gold. On the wall in front of her is a small mirror, and on the wall behind is a picture of the Last Judgement. This combination might seem to indicate vanity (the mirror) and avarice (the jewels), to be weighed in the scales of the Last Judgement. But, as Martin Bailey points out, that may be too superficial a reading:
Vermeer's varied output would seem to indicate ambition and yet, perhaps surprisingly, he was content to remain in Delft, and did not seek to improve his fortunes by moving to Amsterdam - unlike Pieter de Hooch. This may be because Vermeer had some other sources of income from his business as a picture dealer and from his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, with whom Vermeer and his wife lived. It is true that many Dutch painters had additional sources of income: Jan Steen, for example, was an innkeeper, and Jan Van der Heyden designed an early fire-engine. But, more than most, Vermeer can be considered a "gentleman painter" who painted partly to please himself. Vermeer probably painted a mere two or three pictures per year, but sold them for high prices or used them to pay his debts. Again untypically, Vermeer appears to have had one main patron - Pieter van Ruiven - rather than a multitude of customers (Montias chapter 13).
Vermeer would never have described himself as a "genre" painter, because this is a French term first used in the late eighteenth century. The Dutch had no general term for paintings of everyday life, but had terms for individual subjects, as Christopher Brown explains:
A merry company scene "was known by contemporaries as a 'geselschappje' or a 'conversatie', while an outdoor scene of a similar type was a 'buitenpartij'. A brothel scene was a 'bordeeltjen' and a scene of soldiers in their guardroom a 'cortegaerdje' or a 'soldaets kroeghie'" (Brown 9).
The kinds of painting listed above were most commonly found in the first half of the seventeenth century, which had a taste for scenes of boisterous subjects like peasants drinking in taverns (Brouwer), tric-trac players (Duyster), debauchees in brothels (Pot), and dandies flirting with their ladies (Buytewech). After about 1650, a new generation of genre painters - Vermeer, De Hooch (when in Amsterdam), Ter Borch, Metsu, Netscher, Ochtervelt - developed a more genteel style of genre, often depicting fashionably dressed people in elegant interiors.
Vermeer's subjects - domestic tasks, letter-writing, music-making, wine-drinking - are the same as those of his contemporaries, but, as we will see, Vermeer handles these themes in interesting and often unusual ways. Vermeer is commonly - and rightly - compared with De Hooch, because both were Delft painters who excelled at placing figures in three-dimensional interiors. But Vermeer is in some ways closer to Ter Borch, as both liked to depict quiet scenes of letter-writing, music-making, and domestic tasks. The greater range of subject matter in the second half of the century meant that there were not enough terms to describe the new kinds of painting. The clerk who wrote the catalogue for the 1696 sale of Vermeer's paintings had to write individual descriptions of each painting:
"A young lady weighing gold . . . A young lady playing the clavecin in a room, with a listening gentleman . . . A drunken, sleeping maid at a table" (Blankert 153).
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| Johannes Vermeer, A Girl Asleep at a Table, Metropolitan Museum, New York |
This "drunken, sleeping maid at a table" is now usually described as A Girl Asleep at a Table, because it is not certain that she is drunk. Indeed, the whole subject matter of the painting is full of problems and ambiguities. The painting may have been inspired by works like The Idle Servant by Nicolaes Maes, which depicts a servant who has fallen asleep in the middle of her duties, with a pile of dirty dishes on the floor. Here the subject is clear and unambiguous, although modern critics have overemphasised the moralising element in a painting intended to be humorous. Vermeer's painting of A Girl Asleep at a Table seems at first glance to be about a similar subject. The girl's posture, the empty wine glass, and the wine jug would all seem to indicate that she is drunk. Arthur Wheelock, however, suggests she is suffering from melancholy (Wheelock 40) (and drowning her sorrows?), which could also be indicated by the black shadow above her head. The picture on the wall behind seems to contain a naked leg (of Cupid?) and a mask. Does the mask indicate that the girl has been deceived by her lover? Or does it refer to the girl's sleeping state, since truth is revealed in dreams? It is not even likely that she is a servant since, as Wheelock points out, she is dressed in fine materials and wearing pearl earrings. Her neckerchief has fallen open, perhaps revealing more than is proper, although we must remember that she is sitting at home, not in a tavern.
Someone else may have been drinking with the girl, because - as many commentators have noticed - there appears to be a glass goblet lying on its side. Another feature - one that commentators seem to have missed - is the long object (a man's stick?) lying on the table. The open door could indicate that the girl's companion, if she has one, has left the room. Has he deserted the girl, hence her melancholy? Or has he left the room temporarily, perhaps to answer a call of nature after drinking all that wine? One could go on fantasising in this way for ever. In fact, that is probably what the owners of many Dutch paintings did. But we need to remember that what we are looking at is oil paint on canvas, not a real girl, the details of whose life could be known. X-rays of this painting reveal that Vermeer originally included a man and a dog, seen through the open door, but then changed his mind and deliberately painted them out. Did he do this to make the painting's meaning harder to find? Or to make it deliberately ambiguous? Perhaps more than any other Dutch painter, Vermeer problematises the meaning of his work.
 |
| Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, National Gallery, Washington |
This can be seen again in a mysterious and haunting painting often called A Woman Holding a Balance. It depicts a lady holding a pair of scales. On the table before her lie some pearl necklaces and pieces of gold. On the wall in front of her is a small mirror, and on the wall behind is a picture of the Last Judgement. This combination might seem to indicate vanity (the mirror) and avarice (the jewels), to be weighed in the scales of the Last Judgement. But, as Martin Bailey points out, that may be too superficial a reading:
"The woman does not appear to be tempted by the precious objects before her, and she shows no interest in the mirror which can just be seen on the wall in front of her. Unlike most of Vermeer's women, she wears no jewellery" (Bailey 72).
Mirrors in Dutch paintings can sometimes serve to indicate self-knowledge rather than vanity - it all depends on the context. Another element to consider is Vermeer's use of shadow, which helps to give A Woman Holding a Balance its mysterious and religious aura. We feel that something important and awesome is being shown in this painting, even if we cannot fully define what it is. The painting has provoked a bewildering variety of interpretations. For example, one writer claimed that the woman is pregnant and pondering the future of her unborn child. Another thought that she represents the Virgin Mary, who intercedes for us with Christ - and Vermeer was a Catholic. My own reading is that the lady is an ordinary Delft housewife, but that her action, juxtaposed to the picture of the Last Judgement, serves to remind us that our deeds will be judged in the life to come. To a seventeenth-century person, everything - even a housewife holding a balance - could act as a reminder of something spiritual. Rembrandt's etching of The Three Trees recalls the three crosses on Calvary, and the poet Henry Vaughan was reminded of Christ's Passion while walking one day in his garden: "I walk the garden and there see/ Ideas of His agony" ("The Search").
Vermeer's scenes of men and women drinking together are also somewhat untypical. The Officer and the Laughing Girl may depict a soldier trying to seduce a girl, but the usual clues - a bed in the background or a coin in the soldier's hand - are absent in this case. As Lawrence Gowing says, the painting's intention "might well escape us if we had not his [Vermeer's] prototypes" (Gowing 48), although it may be that the painting's content is again deliberately ambiguous. Vermeer's intentions are much clearer in The Glass of Wine and The Girl with Two Men, both of which depict men persuading women to indulge in wine. The subject matter owes a lot to Pieter de Hooch, although Vermeer differs from De Hooch in several respects. In paintings like A Woman Drinking with Two Men and A Woman Drinking with Soldiers, De Hooch shows us more of the house interiors than Vermeer does. In fact, De Hooch used to paint the rooms first and add the figures later. De Hooch's people are also jollier and more exuberant. The lady in A Woman Drinking with Two Men is raising her glass and may be singing to the men. The girl in A Woman Drinking with Soldiers is sticking her feet out and raising her glass for a refill. Vermeer's drinkers are more restrained, but also less "human". The man in Vermeer's The Glass of Wine appears to be a cold seducer, gazing intently at the lady as she drains her wine.
Music goes with wine and love, and was a common subject for painters. Vermeer's treatment of the theme is again rather unusual. The couple in The Music Lesson have stopped playing music. The conventional interpretation of this painting is that it is about love. John Nash says that Vermeer's couple "are held in the thrall of love" (Nash 78), and Daniel Arasse says that "the gaze of the young man, seen in profile, is a look of love" (Arasse 38). But if one studies the body language of the lady, one can see that she has stood up and is turning away from the man. The closest parallel might be Judith Leyster's Unwelcome Proposition. In Vermeer's painting, the man - who resembles the man in The Glass of Wine - is staring hard at the lady, while on the table is the familiar wine jug. Thus there is evidence that this painting might be about sexual harassment rather than romance and music.
Vermeer also painted pictures of solitary musicians. The Woman Tuning a Lute is a moody, mysterious work, not at all like the merry lute players usually found in paintings. Vermeer's lutenist is sitting in a shadow-filled room and staring intently out of the window, but we do not know at what. A parallel might be another painting by Judith Leyster, The Young Flute Player, which depicts a rather pensive little boy gazing at something outside the picture.
Gazing out of the window is one way of referring to the world outside the painting. Other methods used by Vermeer include the maps hanging on the walls of his interiors and the letters written or received by his female figures. Vermeer painted six pictures showing ladies writing, receiving or reading letters. As one would expect, Vermeer's paintings on this theme tend to be mysterious. In A Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Vermeer had originally included a picture of Cupid on the wall, but had then painted over it, so that we are no longer certain that the letter is a love letter. Most writers, including Blankert (54), say that the seascape hanging in the background of The Love Letter proves that this letter is a love letter; but the sea is not stormy and it hangs below an ordinary wooded landscape. Vermeer's paintings of letters received do, however, contain anecdotal elements, inviting comparison with Ter Borch. In The Love Letter, the maidservant - who has just delivered the letter - looks knowingly at her mistress, hinting that she has guessed the contents of the letter. In Mistress and Maid, Vermeer may have been attempting to imitate the style of Ter Borch sice, unusually for Vermeer, the figures are shown against a dark background. In all their "letter writing" paintings, Vermeer and Ter Borch show great skill in depicting the expressions on the faces of the readers and writers. In Ter Borch's Curiosity we see a girl intent on peeping over her friend's shoulder to see what she is writing, and in Ter Borch's The Letter even the page boy is listening to the letter that his employer is reading out. Vermeer's A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is a study of concentration, and his Lady Writing is looking round the room as if thinking what to put.
These letter-writing paintings illustrate Vermeer's vision of home life. Two other paintings - The Kitchenmaid and The Lacemaker - depict domestic tasks, another popular theme in Dutch painting. Vermeer's depiction of domestic life differs in some ways from that of other genre painters. His Kitchenmaid looks homely and hardworking, and may be a portrait of a real person, Tanneke Everpoel, who worked for Maria Thins (Montias 196). She is worlds away from the saucy servants of Dou, Maes, Steen, and Van Mieris, who are sometimes placed next to mounds of suggestive sausages and phallic-shaped vegetables. Similarly, Vermeer's Lacemaker is simpler in style than Netscher's treatment of the same subject. Vermeer's girl is leaning forwards over her work in intense concentration. We see blurred tangles of threads and a sharply defined white thread which the lacemaker is concentrating on at that moment:
"The difference of visual perception and definition that distinguishes the one working white thread from the mass of resting threads suggests that we are looking at what the lacemaker is looking at, that we even look at it as she does" (Arasse 68).
Another observation that can be made is that Vermeer, who probably used a camera obscura, has here anticipated the effect of photography; the single white thread is seen "in focus", while the bunches of threads are "out of focus", since the eye and the camera can only focus on one plane at a time.
The most important aspect of Vermeer's art is not his actual subjects or the way he handles them, but his actual painting technique. It is this that most differentiates him from other Dutch painters. The blurred tangle of threads in The Lacemaker is a good illustration of this. Objects in the real world do not have lines drawn round them, and Vermeer knew that. The edges of his forms are blurred, as they appear in reality. A famous example is the bridge of the girl's nose in Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is barely suggested at all and blends in with her cheek. Another example is the back of the lady's tunic in A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which casts a blue shadow upon the wall behind. By giving slightly blurred edges to his forms, Vermeer creates light and atmosphere. He also makes frequent use of flat areas of paint to create the effect of light hitting the object. Some areas of his canvas are in shadow, but others are brightly coloured, where light is falling. Vermeer also puts in white highlights where light is hitting shiny objects such as chair knobs and jewellery. Perhaps more than any other Dutch painter, Vermeer creates the illusion that we are looking into a real interior. It is true that other painters from Delft, with its trompe d'oeil tradition, and Leiden, with its fijnschilder painting, also created works of great illusionism. But these other painters - Dou and the still-life painters are good examples - created realistic impressions of individual objects, whereas Vermeer excels at filling the whole room with light.
The painter to whom Vermeer owed the most was not De Hooch, Ter Borch, Maes, or Dou, but Carel Fabritius, who, paradoxically, was not primarily a genre painter at all. Fabritius began as a pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, and then moved to Delft, where he worked for about two years, until his life was cut short by the explosion of the Delft gunpowder magazine in 1654. As many writers have noted, Fabritius' technique of painting anticipates that of Vermeer. If we look at Fabritius' The Goldfinch, we see the same blurred outlines and dabs of bright colour. The gradations of light falling upon a bare wall - as in The Kitchenmaid - was a favourite subject for Vermeer, and in The Goldfinch we notice the same kind of fuzzy shadow on a bare wall that we see when a window opens in a Vermeer interior. The bare wall as a subject - also found in the background of Fabritius' Self-Portrait (?) - may perhaps be a legacy of Rembrandt. In the National Gallery there is a wonderful painting by Rembrandt (?) called A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, showing bright light streaming into a dark room and casting a pattern of strong shadows on the bare wall.
Not only Fabritius' style but also his subject matter has a vague similarity with certain paintings by Vermeer. As Arthur Wheelock points out, the solitary figures shown by Vermeer in paintings like A Girl Asleep at a Table and A Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window have an affinity with solitary figures in paintings by Fabritius like A View in Delft with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall and The Sentry:
"The fascination of these paintings is due in part from the fact that Fabritius does not place his figures within a narrative. He does not explain who they are, why he has depicted them, or what the future has in store for them" (Wheelock 43).
The Sentry provides one instance of a direct source used by Vermeer: the charming dog in Vermeer's early painting Diana and Her Companions has been adapted from the little dog in The Sentry. The mysterious, poetic feeling in many paintings by Vermeer and Fabritius has an affinity with certain Italian paintings, which is a subject that deserves further study. For example, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring was surely inspired by a painting known as Beatrice Cenci by Elisabetta Sirani(?).
Vermeer takes the same subjects used by his contemporaries - letter-writing, music-making, wine-drinking - and refines upon them by reducing the number of figures and reducing the clutter of objects in the room. He arranges his compositions with fastidious care and creates magical effects of light. He reuses the same rooms, the same pieces of furniture, and the same models, but rearranges them with skilful variation. As many writers have noted, he uses the squares and rectangles of windows, pictures, and virginals to create compositions which anticipate the abstract paintings of Mondrian. For some people, perhaps, Vermeer's world is almost too perfect, and it lacks the dogs and children which enliven the works of other genre painters. But the Dutch are a very house-proud people, who take great care in the arrangement of their homes, and Vermeer's paintings are a characteristic product of their culture. One of the small pleasures of visiting Holland is to walk down the street and glance discreetly through the curtainless windows of the houses to admire the decoration of the rooms within. This is a legacy of Vermeer's time that has come down to us today.
Works Cited
Arasse, Daniel, Vermeer: Faith in Painting, translated from French by Terry Grabar, Princeton: Princeton U.P. , 1994
Bailey, Martin, Vermeer ("Colour Library of Art" series) London: Phaidon, 1995
Blankert, Albert, Vermeer of Delft, London: Book Club Associates, 1978
Brown, Christopher, Scenes of Everyday Life: Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London: Faber, 1984
Gowing, Lawrence, Vermeer, London: Faber, 2nd ed. 1970
Montias, John Michael, Vermeer and his Milieu, Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1989
Nash, John, Vermeer, London: Scala Pubs., 1991
Sutton, Peter, and others, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984 (exhibition catalogue)
Wheelock, Arthur, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, New Haven: Yale U.P., 1995
Vermeer's scenes of men and women drinking together are also somewhat untypical. The Officer and the Laughing Girl may depict a soldier trying to seduce a girl, but the usual clues - a bed in the background or a coin in the soldier's hand - are absent in this case. As Lawrence Gowing says, the painting's intention "might well escape us if we had not his [Vermeer's] prototypes" (Gowing 48), although it may be that the painting's content is again deliberately ambiguous. Vermeer's intentions are much clearer in The Glass of Wine and The Girl with Two Men, both of which depict men persuading women to indulge in wine. The subject matter owes a lot to Pieter de Hooch, although Vermeer differs from De Hooch in several respects. In paintings like A Woman Drinking with Two Men and A Woman Drinking with Soldiers, De Hooch shows us more of the house interiors than Vermeer does. In fact, De Hooch used to paint the rooms first and add the figures later. De Hooch's people are also jollier and more exuberant. The lady in A Woman Drinking with Two Men is raising her glass and may be singing to the men. The girl in A Woman Drinking with Soldiers is sticking her feet out and raising her glass for a refill. Vermeer's drinkers are more restrained, but also less "human". The man in Vermeer's The Glass of Wine appears to be a cold seducer, gazing intently at the lady as she drains her wine.
Music goes with wine and love, and was a common subject for painters. Vermeer's treatment of the theme is again rather unusual. The couple in The Music Lesson have stopped playing music. The conventional interpretation of this painting is that it is about love. John Nash says that Vermeer's couple "are held in the thrall of love" (Nash 78), and Daniel Arasse says that "the gaze of the young man, seen in profile, is a look of love" (Arasse 38). But if one studies the body language of the lady, one can see that she has stood up and is turning away from the man. The closest parallel might be Judith Leyster's Unwelcome Proposition. In Vermeer's painting, the man - who resembles the man in The Glass of Wine - is staring hard at the lady, while on the table is the familiar wine jug. Thus there is evidence that this painting might be about sexual harassment rather than romance and music.
Vermeer also painted pictures of solitary musicians. The Woman Tuning a Lute is a moody, mysterious work, not at all like the merry lute players usually found in paintings. Vermeer's lutenist is sitting in a shadow-filled room and staring intently out of the window, but we do not know at what. A parallel might be another painting by Judith Leyster, The Young Flute Player, which depicts a rather pensive little boy gazing at something outside the picture.
Gazing out of the window is one way of referring to the world outside the painting. Other methods used by Vermeer include the maps hanging on the walls of his interiors and the letters written or received by his female figures. Vermeer painted six pictures showing ladies writing, receiving or reading letters. As one would expect, Vermeer's paintings on this theme tend to be mysterious. In A Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Vermeer had originally included a picture of Cupid on the wall, but had then painted over it, so that we are no longer certain that the letter is a love letter. Most writers, including Blankert (54), say that the seascape hanging in the background of The Love Letter proves that this letter is a love letter; but the sea is not stormy and it hangs below an ordinary wooded landscape. Vermeer's paintings of letters received do, however, contain anecdotal elements, inviting comparison with Ter Borch. In The Love Letter, the maidservant - who has just delivered the letter - looks knowingly at her mistress, hinting that she has guessed the contents of the letter. In Mistress and Maid, Vermeer may have been attempting to imitate the style of Ter Borch sice, unusually for Vermeer, the figures are shown against a dark background. In all their "letter writing" paintings, Vermeer and Ter Borch show great skill in depicting the expressions on the faces of the readers and writers. In Ter Borch's Curiosity we see a girl intent on peeping over her friend's shoulder to see what she is writing, and in Ter Borch's The Letter even the page boy is listening to the letter that his employer is reading out. Vermeer's A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is a study of concentration, and his Lady Writing is looking round the room as if thinking what to put.
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| Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, The Louvre, Paris |
These letter-writing paintings illustrate Vermeer's vision of home life. Two other paintings - The Kitchenmaid and The Lacemaker - depict domestic tasks, another popular theme in Dutch painting. Vermeer's depiction of domestic life differs in some ways from that of other genre painters. His Kitchenmaid looks homely and hardworking, and may be a portrait of a real person, Tanneke Everpoel, who worked for Maria Thins (Montias 196). She is worlds away from the saucy servants of Dou, Maes, Steen, and Van Mieris, who are sometimes placed next to mounds of suggestive sausages and phallic-shaped vegetables. Similarly, Vermeer's Lacemaker is simpler in style than Netscher's treatment of the same subject. Vermeer's girl is leaning forwards over her work in intense concentration. We see blurred tangles of threads and a sharply defined white thread which the lacemaker is concentrating on at that moment:
"The difference of visual perception and definition that distinguishes the one working white thread from the mass of resting threads suggests that we are looking at what the lacemaker is looking at, that we even look at it as she does" (Arasse 68).
Another observation that can be made is that Vermeer, who probably used a camera obscura, has here anticipated the effect of photography; the single white thread is seen "in focus", while the bunches of threads are "out of focus", since the eye and the camera can only focus on one plane at a time.
The most important aspect of Vermeer's art is not his actual subjects or the way he handles them, but his actual painting technique. It is this that most differentiates him from other Dutch painters. The blurred tangle of threads in The Lacemaker is a good illustration of this. Objects in the real world do not have lines drawn round them, and Vermeer knew that. The edges of his forms are blurred, as they appear in reality. A famous example is the bridge of the girl's nose in Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is barely suggested at all and blends in with her cheek. Another example is the back of the lady's tunic in A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which casts a blue shadow upon the wall behind. By giving slightly blurred edges to his forms, Vermeer creates light and atmosphere. He also makes frequent use of flat areas of paint to create the effect of light hitting the object. Some areas of his canvas are in shadow, but others are brightly coloured, where light is falling. Vermeer also puts in white highlights where light is hitting shiny objects such as chair knobs and jewellery. Perhaps more than any other Dutch painter, Vermeer creates the illusion that we are looking into a real interior. It is true that other painters from Delft, with its trompe d'oeil tradition, and Leiden, with its fijnschilder painting, also created works of great illusionism. But these other painters - Dou and the still-life painters are good examples - created realistic impressions of individual objects, whereas Vermeer excels at filling the whole room with light.
The painter to whom Vermeer owed the most was not De Hooch, Ter Borch, Maes, or Dou, but Carel Fabritius, who, paradoxically, was not primarily a genre painter at all. Fabritius began as a pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, and then moved to Delft, where he worked for about two years, until his life was cut short by the explosion of the Delft gunpowder magazine in 1654. As many writers have noted, Fabritius' technique of painting anticipates that of Vermeer. If we look at Fabritius' The Goldfinch, we see the same blurred outlines and dabs of bright colour. The gradations of light falling upon a bare wall - as in The Kitchenmaid - was a favourite subject for Vermeer, and in The Goldfinch we notice the same kind of fuzzy shadow on a bare wall that we see when a window opens in a Vermeer interior. The bare wall as a subject - also found in the background of Fabritius' Self-Portrait (?) - may perhaps be a legacy of Rembrandt. In the National Gallery there is a wonderful painting by Rembrandt (?) called A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, showing bright light streaming into a dark room and casting a pattern of strong shadows on the bare wall.
Not only Fabritius' style but also his subject matter has a vague similarity with certain paintings by Vermeer. As Arthur Wheelock points out, the solitary figures shown by Vermeer in paintings like A Girl Asleep at a Table and A Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window have an affinity with solitary figures in paintings by Fabritius like A View in Delft with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall and The Sentry:
"The fascination of these paintings is due in part from the fact that Fabritius does not place his figures within a narrative. He does not explain who they are, why he has depicted them, or what the future has in store for them" (Wheelock 43).
The Sentry provides one instance of a direct source used by Vermeer: the charming dog in Vermeer's early painting Diana and Her Companions has been adapted from the little dog in The Sentry. The mysterious, poetic feeling in many paintings by Vermeer and Fabritius has an affinity with certain Italian paintings, which is a subject that deserves further study. For example, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring was surely inspired by a painting known as Beatrice Cenci by Elisabetta Sirani(?).
Vermeer takes the same subjects used by his contemporaries - letter-writing, music-making, wine-drinking - and refines upon them by reducing the number of figures and reducing the clutter of objects in the room. He arranges his compositions with fastidious care and creates magical effects of light. He reuses the same rooms, the same pieces of furniture, and the same models, but rearranges them with skilful variation. As many writers have noted, he uses the squares and rectangles of windows, pictures, and virginals to create compositions which anticipate the abstract paintings of Mondrian. For some people, perhaps, Vermeer's world is almost too perfect, and it lacks the dogs and children which enliven the works of other genre painters. But the Dutch are a very house-proud people, who take great care in the arrangement of their homes, and Vermeer's paintings are a characteristic product of their culture. One of the small pleasures of visiting Holland is to walk down the street and glance discreetly through the curtainless windows of the houses to admire the decoration of the rooms within. This is a legacy of Vermeer's time that has come down to us today.
Works Cited
Arasse, Daniel, Vermeer: Faith in Painting, translated from French by Terry Grabar, Princeton: Princeton U.P. , 1994
Bailey, Martin, Vermeer ("Colour Library of Art" series) London: Phaidon, 1995
Blankert, Albert, Vermeer of Delft, London: Book Club Associates, 1978
Brown, Christopher, Scenes of Everyday Life: Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London: Faber, 1984
Gowing, Lawrence, Vermeer, London: Faber, 2nd ed. 1970
Montias, John Michael, Vermeer and his Milieu, Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1989
Nash, John, Vermeer, London: Scala Pubs., 1991
Sutton, Peter, and others, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984 (exhibition catalogue)
Wheelock, Arthur, Vermeer and the Art of Painting, New Haven: Yale U.P., 1995
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