At the height of his career, Johannes Vermeer’s paintings seem to have secured good prices, thanks to an affluent collector in Delft. They also appear to have been a significant influence on others, including Gabriël Metsu.

Music features in several of Vermeer’s paintings, in The Concert (c 1663-66) more particularly than any other. Two ladies are making music, one playing a decorated harpsichord (or similar), the other singing. In the left foreground is a cello resting on its back. Tragically, on 18 March 1990 this and a dozen other works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA, and it remains unrecovered.

Soft edges are obvious in Vermeer’s renowned portrait of a Girl with a Pearl Earring, from about 1664-67. Seen even closer up in the detail below it’s obvious that he has softened most of its edges to some degree, even on highlights such as the white reflections on the pearl itself and the girl’s eyes.

His Mistress and Maid from about 1664-67 also has many soft edges, particularly those of the maid in the left distance, whose head and forearms are blurry. The crispest edges are those of the mistress’s forearms, particularly the left as it crosses her clothing. These also appear consistent with depth of field effect.

Vermeer painted at least two works showing women writing, of which the earlier is A Lady Writing a Letter from 1665-1666. The fur trimmings on her golden jacket confirm this is no country bumpkin, but the lady of an affluent and well-educated house. Rather than looking down at her quill, she stares the viewer out, her faint smile of confidence lit by sunlight coming through the window off to the left.

In Vermeer’s late The Art of Painting from about 1666-68, greatest sharpness is again slightly away from the geometrical centre of the canvas, in the woman holding a wind instrument, as shown in the detail below. The high tonal contrast between the marble tiles on the floor is softened in the foreground, and sharpens as they recede deeper into the picture, as would be expected in depth of field.

They also appear in Vermeer’s late painting of The Astronomer, from about 1668. He is studying his celestial sphere marked with the symbols of the constellations.

In The Geographer, visibly dated the following year, the figure holds a pair of dividers over an unidentifiable chart, with a fine globe tucked away behind and above him.

While there are some instances where Vermeer’s blurring could be consistent with motion, most of these paintings appear to show depth of field effects as might be observed through a lens with a shallow depth. They could also be consistent with his use of an edge hierarchy for compositional emphasis.

Recently, several attempts have been made to explain how Vermeer came to use blurring so successfully. One story that has gained some traction is that he used optical devices such as a camera obscura to lay out the forms within each of these scenes, a theory that has been repeatedly claimed by David Hockney among others. Most recently, though, it was realised that alone was insufficient to explain all the optical phenomena modelled so well in these paintings, and it has been proposed by Hockney and Tim Jenison that the artist coupled a concave mirror with another mirror, a system that took Jenison five years to develop and test.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Vermeer possessed or used a camera obscura or other optical device, although he was a close friend of the pioneer lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, at a time when there was considerable interest in optics.

Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, as the Dutch Golden Age was drawing to an end, and the market for paintings collapsed.

References

Vermeer’s popularity in the last century has ensured extensive supporting material. The following is a small selection of what I think is the very best.

Essential Vermeer, Jonathan Janson’s superb site

Gaskell I and Jonker M eds (1998) Vermeer Studies, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 07521 9.
Liedtke W (2008) Vermeer, the Complete Paintings, Ludion/Harry N Abrams. ISBN 978 90 5544 742 8.
Liedtke W (2009) The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ISBN 978 1 58839 344 9. (Available for download from here.)
Wheelock Jr AK (1997) Vermeer, the Complete Works, Abrams. ISBN 978 0 8109 2751 3.

Alain Jaubert, Palettes DVD: Le siècle d’or des Pays-Bas, Le grain de la lumière, Editions Montparnasse.
Tracy Chevalier’s fictional Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) is also available as a movie under the same title (2003).

During his career in Delft, Johannes Vermeer had been respected as an artist, but soon after his death at the end of the Dutch Golden Age he slipped quietly into obscurity, alongside many hundreds of others. A few connoisseurs maintained an interest in his work, but it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that he was rediscovered. Since then his few remaining paintings have become among the most revered in the European canon.

Vermeer was born in the city of Delft in 1632, where he took over his father’s business as a dealer in paintings. He also trained as a painter, and at the end of 1653 was admitted to the city’s Guild of Saint Luke. The following year Delft was struck by a catastrophic explosion in a gunpowder store, destroying a large section of the city and its occupants.

Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary is his largest surviving painting, and probably one of his earliest, dating from about 1654-56. It’s unusual among them for its religious theme.

By about 1657-58, when he painted Officer and Laughing Girl, he had found form in the compositional approach for which he is most famous. Figures going about their everyday lives are seen in the daylight cast from windows on the left. The map depicted so meticulously has been identified as that made of Holland and West Friesland by Willem Blaeu and Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode. Unfortunately, no other complete copy of that map has survived, but its second edition was published by Blaeu in 1621, and that’s believed to be on display here, as shown in the detail below.

Some of these paintings feature heavy curtains in the foreground, drawn back to reveal Vermeer’s subject behind. Among those is his Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window (c 1658), where its railed curtain gives an air of intimacy, suggesting the viewer is peeping past the curtain and gazing in at real and private life.

The Milkmaid, probably from about 1658-59, is perhaps Vermeer’s first true masterpiece, and introduces the optical effects for which he is now best-known.

A milkmaid is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman (to the right of the mug) a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which the milk is being poured. An ultramarine blue cloth (matching the woman’s apron) rests at the edge of the table.

The woman, seen in three-quarter view, wears working dress: a stiff, white linen cap, a yellow jacket laced at the front, a brilliant ultramarine blue apron, and a dull red skirt underneath. Her right hand holds the handle of a brown earthenware pitcher, which she supports from below with her left hand. Her work sleeves are pushed up to lay both her weathered forearms bare to the elbow. Her strong-featured face and eyes are cast down, watching the milk as it runs into the pot.

More remarkable still is the visible blurring.

Edges and detail are sharpest around her left shoulder and upper arm, and soften as you look away towards her hands and the pitcher. Highlights on that pitcher and the pot below it are also decidedly blurry, suggesting this is intended as a depth of field effect.

Bread and other objects on the table in front of the woman also show controlled use of blurring, most obviously in the highlights on the wicker basket.

At some time around 1660, Vermeer painted a couple of cityscapes that are his only surviving non-figurative paintings.

Above is his view of a street and its occupants in The Little Street, and below is his View of Delft waterfront. A third cityscape of a House Standing in Delft has been recorded but is now apparently lost.

His Woman Holding a Balance from around 1662-64 shows a young woman who is pregnant holding an empty balance in front of a collection of pearls and gold. Its focus is noticeably softer than his earlier paintings. The edges of the tabletop in the centre of the canvas and the woman’s left hand are the crispest, and those further from that are softer, as would be consistent with depth of field effects.

Similar effects are seen in Vermeer’s better-lit Young Woman with a Water Pitcher from the same period. Here the central focus is in the upper chest of the figure, where the edge between the split in her white mantle and the underlying deep ultramarine clothing is crispest, and the reflections on the pitcher and bowl are blurry, again consistent with depth of field. So too is the window, which could indicate motion.

Amazingly, this painting was bought by Henry Gurdon Marquand in 1887 for a mere $800, and became the first of Vermeer’s paintings to enter an American collection.