As I have mentioned before in this blog, I have been a fan of the works of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer for years and have two prints of his hanging on the wall in my bedroom, "The Geographer" and "The Astronomer". One fascinating feature of his art is the way he always manages to capture light.
Serene and unnerving, sensuous and disembodied, Vermeer’s paintings continue to confound us. As much as any contemporary figure, this Dutch 17th-century artist, who is traditionally called a “genre” painter, though this is a wildly inadequate term for him, remains a subject of debate and uncertainty. What Vermeer’s actual subject was, how he achieved his results, even whether he should or should not be considered “elusive”- on these and seemingly all other issues there is surprisingly little general agreement.
To look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There is an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself; dies fairly young; and is represented by a remarkably small body of pictures, each of which is somehow a precious link in the story. Some three dozen paintings are now attributed to Vermeer. He is thought to have made about two pictures a year, with the pictures we know representing three quarters of what would have been his total output. You hold his whole career in your head. And this, along with the few, tantalizing facts that we have about his home life and professional associations, ironically makes him an artist who, I think, we wind up half-believing we know as well as we know ourselves.
Described objectively, Vermeer’s world is unusually circumscribed. The vast majority of his pictures are of young women seen in a corner of a delicately lit room. Some, with suspiciously protuberant bellies, are thought to be pregnant. Sometimes they are accompanied by a gentleman or two, sometimes by a maid. They pour milk, read or write letters, or perhaps drink some wine or stand with a necklace or weighing scales before a table, while in a few later pictures they play musical instruments. There are only two pictures by Vermeer of men alone, and both, which I have - appear to show the same model in roughly the same outfit in the same room.
The few known facts about Vermeer certainly indicate that he operated in a sea of women. The painter’s father died when Johannes was 20, and for much of his life he lived close to his mother and sister, his only sibling. His wife, Catharina, came with a mother, a woman who records indicate was a powerful personality. Maria Thins gave Vermeer and his wife their house rent-free and Maria lived with them. And of the hefty number of children Johannes and Catharina had - 11 of 15 survived - the majority were girls. The first five who survived were girls. What with a servant girl on board for good measure, Vermeer was clearly enveloped by the feminine.
Yet the feminine hardly suffices as a label for Vermeer’s concerns. Besides the two pictures of men of learning, only two of his surviving pictures do not feature women in some way: "The Little Street," a view of an everyday site in Delft, and "A View of Delft," a startlingly large overview of the small city from its outskirts. And Vermeer probably would have the same hold on our imagination if he had made only these pictures. Nothing much is happening in either of these cool, gray, overcast scenes, but few other paintings of places, of any era, are as mesmerizing. With their immovably solid designs and unimaginably precise feel for weather, light, and the surfaces of things - brick, mortar, whitewash on a wall, wood shutters, distant wood ships, water, sunlight on faraway spires - they make seemingly all other views of this or that part of a town feel fussy, historical. As with so much of Vermeer’s work, the textures of whatever we see in these pictures are perfectly true to what we know to be the actual textures of those things - and, at the same time, we are made to feel we are looking at nothing other than wonderfully malleable oil paint. We pull ourselves away from a Vermeer reluctantly, sensing that our own world is flimsier and less sensuous.
Even if the townscapes did not exist, though, Vermeer’s deepest subject would seem to be art itself, how an image is constructed. To an unusual degree, Vermeer makes the viewer of his individual painting relive the making of that painting. Ultimate mystery man of art as he is, Vermeer on some level has no secrets at all. Yes, some see his pictures as complex allegories, with the paintings or maps on the wall behind his figures there to make a symbolic connection with those figures. Yet the tenor of Vermeer’s art is strikingly secular and unsymbolic. We rarely believe that there is a story to be deciphered. He presents a clear, seemingly measurable sense of how near or far he is from the table, chair, or carpet that is closest to us in the scene. All he is doing is what we and the people in his pictures are doing: looking.
Vermeer actually seems to take sheer, unstoried looking to a point beyond which few if any artists have gone. Painters had been more sheerly realistic in their methods long before him. Jan van Eyck is only the most obvious example of an artist who, two centuries before the Delft painter, renders what he sees more sharply. But surely no artist before Vermeer made a representation that has soft tones and clear shapes so balanced that you feel, looking at a picture of his, that you are seeing atmosphere itself defining the object of your sight. Though probably unresolvable, Vermeer’s relationship with optical devices remains a lively issue in the writing about him. Yet no matter what your awareness of the debate over optical devices, it is hard not to sense that this artist has an uncanny relationship with photography - even that he, in a quest to nail down exactly the way light is part of how we see, somehow invented photography.
It is the lens-like quality of Vermeer’s art that gives it its otherworldly quality and also its creepiness, its property of being a step away from a photographically derived modern illustration. One of his disturbing pictures is "The Procuress," an early work. Part of what is disconcerting about this large painting is that in its particular combination of an overall fuzzy glow and an underlying razor-sharpness, and in the queer obviousness of the features of the crone especially, it can recall Maxfield Parrish, whose pictures were often derived from his own photographs. Parrish was a first-rate talent; I do not mean to say that his very name connotes degradation in representational art. But "The Procuress" makes you glad that Vermeer quickly gave up making drama-like pictures where people play roles.
As it is, the people in his characteristic mature pictures do not resemble any other 17th-century painter’s idea of what people look like. The faces we encounter in pictures by Vermeer’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries, whether Hals or Rembrandt, Velázquez or Poussin, may have greater force or psychological awareness than his. But the people in their pictures in one way or another have the look of their time about them, whereas many of Vermeer’s people feel like us. They have not been seen through the style of a particular period. You sense that they will always seem contemporary to the era that is looking at them, the way Vermeer’s two Delft scenes mysteriously take place in a perennial now.
And yet, creator of a kind of ground zero in representational art in some of his best-known pictures, Vermeer proceeded, in a career that was as full of zigzags as that of any artist whom we know through a conventionally large number of works, to make paintings of people that feel like the very opposite of unstylized looking. The artist who painted, in "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher", or "Woman with a Balance", or "Girl with a Pearl Earring", some of the most serenely beautiful faces in art gave us in, say, "The Love Letter" a truly homely protagonist, and in "Young Woman at a Virginal" a woman whose looks are so queerly her own she is virtually a fantasy creation.
One of the chief theories of modern biographies about him is that Vermeer used an optical device, a camera obscura, to make his paintings. Reading about how Vermeer might have used such an aid presents an experience that is closer to how we absorb the painter’s intense, spooky, and perfectionistic work.
One biographer was concerned with the various rooms seen in the painter’s work. He wanted to determine if they were one and the same, and his answer came through studying the perspective geometry, which was readable in those paintings - such as "The Glass of Wine" - that included floor tiles. Taking measurements of the furniture of the time and factoring in the way rooms of the period were typically designed and what is known of the possible houses Vermeer lived in, the biographer convincingly and not surprisingly deduced that, in the nearly dozen paintings with the telltale floor tiles, the painter was working in the same space. It was, in all likelihood, his studio, and the generally even light that usually enters through a window or two on the left was north light. Along the way, his concerns shifted to the camera obscura, and his chief effort became a desire to see if Vermeer used one in this room.
For those of us who have never warmed to the issue of how an artist creates, in a given picture, a spatially coherent inner world, one where every figure and everything we see are aligned - where an invisible inner grid allows us to find out where the artist was as he looked into his measured space - Vermeer’s Camera may be slow going at times. We can easily visualize Vermeer himself moving about in this studio. Even those who have rejected the idea that the painter worked with a camera obscura, or any other optical device - some have believed that he got his light-filled, seemingly breathed-on images by tracing what he saw off mirrors - have found themselves thinking of the paintings as stage sets, with Vermeer directing his sitters, shifting his props, playing with the windows, and fussing with the maps and pictures on the wall until he was satisfied with how the light fell on everything.
The words “camera obscura” mean “dark room,” and the device, which could take any number of shapes, including a dark booth that a viewer goes into or a box of some size that is looked down into, is about intensifying - essentializing - what is seen with the naked eye. A hole of some small size in the booth or box by definition pulls the image that is directly outside it, via light rays, into the darkened space. There it is projected, often upside down, but with a shimmering, more deeply color-saturated force, on the booth or box’s other side. The device, which was already in use by astronomers by the mid-15th century and came to be employed more widely in the 16th and 17th centuries, is not a primitive photographic camera. It is closer to a primitive movie-making apparatus-plus- theater in that the image projected into the booth or box, completely dependent on the amount of light that it is sucking in via the small opening, is always, in a way, breathing. What drew early enthusiasts to the gizmo, which initially was often trained from a window down onto a street, was the thrill of seeing people move about on a kind of contained screen.
That Vermeer might have used a camera obscura is not a new surmise. From the 1860s, when he first became known outside Holland, writers referred to the photographic quality of his pictures. While the details of the matter would probably always be buried, Vermeer had to have used a camera obscura for aspects of his work. It was only with the invention of photography and our becoming used to its way of representing reality that Vermeer’s work began to lose its oddness.
Recreating the painting "The Music Lesson" with a scaled-down, doll’s-house-size model, it was determined that if the opening hole - or lens - of a camera obscura was the same place where Vermeer had to have been standing, then the projected image on the back wall of his booth was basically the same size as the finished painting. In short, Vermeer used the image projected onto the back wall of the booth as the very basis of his painting. He might even have traced it or worked on his picture right in his booth, but it is clear that the device was essentially a tool in Vermeer’s arsenal as an artist.
There are plenty of drawbacks to Vermeer’s Camera. Many of the paintings do not include floor tiles, meaning it is impossible to measure the interior space of the work - meaning it is impossible to verify that the artist had such and such a relationship as to what he was looking. If that information is lacking, we cannot be sure if there is a match between the size of the painting and the size of a projected image of it inside a camera obscura. Thus, the stunning small paintings of women’s faces in the National Gallery in Washington cannot be scrutinized in relation to the camera, nor can a good number of paintings of figures where there is no floor. These include such key works as "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" and "Woman with a Balance".
One scholar is certain that the chillingly photograph-like "View of Delft" had to have been done with a camera obscura.
Although some camera obscuras were built so that the projected image was seen right side up, Vermeer might have been working, like certain photographers using plate cameras, with an image inside his booth that was upside down.
Descriptions of the properties of the image produced by a camera obscura dovetail perfectly with the distinctive qualities of Vermeer’s art. What is transfixing about Vermeer’s pictures is the way he seems to think in depth and on the surface simultaneously. Whether or not the issue of optical devices concerns you, you are aware both of how measured the space of his individual picture is as it moves inward - how easy it would be to walk right in - and, flabbergastingly, of how that picture’s elements are so perfectly locked together on the surface that they might as well be flat. "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher", for example, has the force of an abstraction. Every shape can be taken as if it were on the same flat plane, with no depth. Every item appears both as its sculptural self and as a silhouette of itself that has been tacked against the back wall.
Images produced by the camera obscura compress space in the same way.
Furthermore, the camera presents forms exactly as Vermeer painted them, as softly glowing areas of light and shadow. It has been much commented upon that X-ray photography of Vermeer’s paintings shows that he never laid down his shapes with drawn lines. There is no conventional drawing in his work, just masses of dark and light - exactly the information he would get from the projected image of a camera obscura.
Vermeer is the opposite of an isolated, not-quite-knowable, secretive genius. A 17th-century artist giving himself wholeheartedly to working with an optical device would be a violator of that communal spirit.
Vermeer was nurtured and goaded exclusively by Dutch art of his time and by the traditions of his hometown.
Traditionally, Vermeer and Delft, or the School of Delft, have been seen as one and the same. What the school was known for was a new feeling for natural light and atmosphere and a taste for perspective and measurement, for the tricks of illusionistic art - art that draws attention to the ways in which an artwork can be confused with real life.
In the late 1640s, for little apparent reason, first one artist and then another moved to Delft and began, in different ways, to make brighter and spatially more exacting works than had been the norm in Dutch painting.
In the 1570s, Delft found itself headquarters for the then-nascent drive of the Dutch provinces for independence from Spain. When this freedom was eventually achieved, Delft failed to remain Holland’s seat of power. That honor fell to The Hague, which was nearby. Existing in the shadow of power, Delft for the next 100 years remained a center for breweries and potteries and home to a proper, even patrician class of citizens. Though sleepy compared to Amsterdam, its comfy, tradition-minded natives, regularly visited by men of learning and business acumen going to and from The Hague, kept sponsoring pictures and objects that were equally conservative and sophisticated. Delft’s moment of true renown was the period when the various relocating artists began dealing in their work with natural light.
Vermeer reached increased fame outside Holland in the 19th century and on the ensuing battles over forgeries. The painter played a large role in Proust’s life and in his novel, and Vermeer has figured in a large number of other novels - and in two operas - in the past few years.
The paintings mirror the sudden decline of the Dutch Republic in the early 1670s, when the French began attempting a takeover. The Republic kept its independence, but in a short time its maritime and commercial power, along with its thriving art market, evaporated; and the Dutch began a very long phase of absorbing French manners and attitudes. Vermeer’s late pictures are attempts to connect with a newly effete taste, while at the same time we watch the painter go into a tailspin of his own. Vermeer, whose income was never robust and who supported himself, as did other Dutch painters, with art dealing, was at a loss with the collapse of the market. His worries, what with 10 of his 11 children minors at the time, drove him to decay and decadence and his death was a matter of a sudden collapse taking place in less than two days. He was flat broke at the end.
Vermeer was developing his art right to the end. The women in the later pictures tend to a kind of bonelessness. Given their fair complexions, their eyes bulge. They are pneumatic. Yet the faces of Vermeer’s women were becoming balloon-like with light, and increasingly unnaturalistic, all along. Comeliness was becoming iffy even in pictures about which art historians have no reservations.
Vermeer certainly is on thin ice with the late "Allegory of the Faith". Religion was not his strong suit. Yet the darkish, enamel-like, softly gleaming surface of this picture is more than a nicety. And "Young Woman Standing at a Virginal" is a painting that, though I had not known it is considered a flop, I have always loved. The piercing, sun-on-snow white light that beams forth from it make it possibly Vermeer’s brightest picture, and in the seemingly casual yet inevitable way the woman is boxed in by artworks and straight lines it is one of the most genuinely abstract in spirit of all his works. Most exciting of Vermeer’s late pictures perhaps is "The Guitar Player". The darkening blue-gray light that suffuses this image of a young female musician is a wonder. It is no less beautiful than the misty sunniness that envelops the woman with the water pitcher. The sense, furthermore, that we are catching the picture’s bouncing, sideways-looking heroine at a happy, spontaneous, awkward, even goofy moment - that we are looking at a 17th-century snapshot - makes it one of the painter’s most vital works.
Whether or not Vermeer’s feeling for light, space, and composition came from using a camera obscura, he seems, in his last works, to be following his muse of pure light into new terrain. It is conceivable that, had he lived and continued working, he would have gone into a realm of the increasingly unrecognizable. Maybe the real mystery now is less who Vermeer was or how he did it than what he would have done next.
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