A View of Delft by Anthony Bailey

Author:Anthony Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473522060
Publisher: Random House

Judging by the vanishing point in Vermeer’s mature works, only a seated position would account for the lowered level of his viewpoint; he painted them sitting down, as the artist does here. And this may have had other effects: Philip Hale, an American artist and writer of the first half of the twentieth century, thought that sitting down instead of standing to paint produced a mood of ‘quietude’ rather than restlessness. The easel at which Vermeer sat is visible in the mirror he painted hanging over the young woman in The Music Lesson. His low viewpoint is particularly emphasised in that picture by the way the carpet-covered table looms high in the foreground, only just below the painter’s (and viewer’s) line of sight. And we can probably assume that Vermeer did the foundation work on canvas in the way the artist in The Art of Painting did, without any preliminary ‘rubbing-in’ of his design with paint and only a slight sketch of his subject in white chalk. He started painting at the top, with Clio’s laurel wreath, and then moved on down to her face. As for his materials, in the inventory made of his possessions in 1676 are listed two easels and three palettes, ten canvases and six panels, ready to hand in his upstairs studio. He probably bought some of his pigments, including the rare natural ultramarine he so much liked, from Dirck de Cocq’s apothecary shop; but he could have prepared some paints himself in his attic, grinding the pigments and mixing them with linseed oil. The brushes he used were both large square-tipped ones and smaller ones with round tips.

Although Vermeer was a painter who produced a relatively small number of finished pictures, he doesn’t seem to have been particularly slow when he was actually at work. As stated earlier, his brush-strokes indicate that he often painted ‘wet-in-wet’, in other words applying new paint before the underlying paint was dry. It has been noted, moreover, that he was skilful at simplifying shapes and patterns, using a pictorial shorthand to render reflections and the materials of carpets and curtains, and this would speed the process of painting. Although some parts of the earlier pictures have a separateness and solidity that result from the way he applied his paints – like the letter in the Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window (see here), where the white impasto accentuates the effects of the folds and creases in the paper – in The Art of Painting his technique was more seamless. Philip Hale calls it ‘perfect’ and John Nash, who also trained as a painter, writes that, though the application of the paint seems various, the paint ‘is applied with effortless control [and] overall, applied as if invisibly’. Vermeer had an uncanny ability to create the effects of sunlight playing on different textures and surfaces or passing through glass and hair.

The ‘technical description’ in the catalogue of the 1997 Vermeer exhibition, seen in Washington DC and The Hague,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.