Let's Learn about: Vermeer!

Believed to be a self portrait of Johannes Vermeer.  

This is the Art History Paper I wrote about Dutch Golden Age Painter Johannes Vermeer and his painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring."  For more information about Vermeer, please link to n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer




From a smoky shadow, a youthful woman of indeterminate age turns to meet our gaze, illuminated by an intense, yet diffuse light.  Perhaps it is late in the evening, or at sunrise, but time seems immaterial at this, the first moment of our encounter.  Her clothing offers no clue as to the hour, or even the location of our meeting.  A greenish golden robe, shadowed and modeled in the dusk, is draped loosely around delicate shoulders, hiding the barest glimpse of a snowy collar.  It is impossible to tell if the robe is opened, closed, or in a dual stage of invitation.  Her hair is wrapped in an ultramarine turban, which is tied over the crown of her head with a spill of yellow silk.  From her left earlobe hangs a shimmering pearl of improbable size.  But these adornments are not what catches our eyes; our focus, like a moth flying fearlessly toward the light, is drawn directly into the luminescence of her soulful gray-blue eyes.  The three quarters profile that we see her in softly highlights her straight nose, high cheekbones, and perfectly proportioned chin.  Her long neck, hidden partially by the collar, is held just between the light and shadow, intensifying the delicately shimmering movement of the pearl as she turns. Her ripe mouth is held barely open, pursed on the edge of forming what must surely be a welcoming word of invitation.  She is Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Painted in 1665 in the City of Delft, this work, which has been called the Dutch Mona Lisa, has become one of the most beloved of all of the paintings produced during the Dutch Golden Age.  And, like the Mona Lisa, it is not a large, significant History or Religious painting.  It serves no didactic purpose, or any purpose other than the enjoyment of the viewer.  It is essentially nothing more than an extremely lucky snapshot - had it been rendered during our own time, it would doubtless have been a profile picture.  But that is the intimate charm of these visages (of both the Dutch girl and the Italian woman); they are each mementos, requerdos of girls we thought we once knew.  

Despite her great importance in our own age, Art Historians believe that Vermeer painted this unknown young woman as a "tronie" (Dutch word for "head), which was essentially a painted sketch, typically of an unknown or purely imagined model. Many of the Dutch figure painters rendered these tronies, as a way of working out how best to capture a specific facial expression or character. The figures in tronies are typically dressed in an exotic, unknowable fashion; their clothing is the imagined fantasy of the artist.  The first to utilize tronies extensively was Rembrandt, who painted a number of them throughout his career, using himself as a model.  Combined, they offer us a life portrait of his growth and decline, both artistically (in terms of contemporary popularity) and within the confines of his own mortality.

Perhaps because it was considered to be little more than a sketch, the Girl with a Pearl Earring did not always exist in the sheltered protection and adoration which envelops the work today.  At the time that Vermeer was painting, the Dutch mercantile economy was thriving, but Vermeer was not.  Making his sparse living primarily from income as an innkeeper and art dealer, Vermeer died insolvent at the age of 43, leaving behind a wife in debt, 11 children, and a catalogue of only about 36 paintings which he had produced and sold throughout his career.  The Girl had vanished until 1881, when she surfaced at an auction and was sold for two guilders and a buyer's premium of thirty cents.  The buyer, Arnoldus des Tombe, was a serious art collector, and he often invited like minded friends to view the collection in his home.  There, the painting was admired by Abraham Bredius, who would become the director of the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague.  Upon his death in 1902, des Tombes' estate plan left the Girl and 11 other paintings to the Museum, which catalogues the work as one of the most important of it's collection.

Vermeer was known as the painter of quiet, contemplative, radiant light, and he had an unsurpassed ability to render a softened, tender, and impossibly beautiful world.  Shade and shadow melt exquisitely in his cinematic paintings, which reveal the mythic Dutch Golden Age of Vermeer's imagination.  The Girl with a Pearl Earring is surely Johannes Vermeer's most enduring and transcendent dream. 

Sources:  

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis, Edited by Lea Van Der Vinde, with contributions by Quentin Buvelot, Emilie S. Gordenker, Petira Noble, Lynn Federle Orr, and Ariane Van Suchtelen, Published by Fine Arts Museums of San Fransisco - Delmonico Books - Prestel

ART - EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GREATEST ARTISTS AND THEIR WORKS by Susie Hodge, Published by Quercus 

I was so inspired by my study of this work that I made my own "Girl with a Pearl." (crewel embroidery on black velvet.)