Johannes Vermeer Overview

born: 1632 A.C.

died: 1675 A.C.

In 1921 a French critic posed a priceless question: "By what witchcraft did [Vermeer], representing the most daily and commonplace sights, manage to give the viewer so mysterious, so grand, so exceptional an emotion?" Vermeer produced only 36 paintings before he died at 43. Yet each piece blissfully tickles the viewer with the mystery of who he was and how he did what he did -- Vermeer united poetics with the mundane, and intense emotion with visual clarity. "A Girl Asleep," shows a comfortable, dark interior and a girl dozing at a table. Her elbow rests on its surface, where we see the ingredients of an afternoon snack '- fruit and an egg. The white pitcher to her right suggests that she's probably drunk a little too much wine. At first glance, the piece appears purely realistic and lacking in grand narrative. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the path of light sliding across the wine pitcher, fruit bowl, and the face, neck, and breasts of the girl is illogical. Often Vermeer manipulated light and color to induce drama. In this instance he bends light in order to illuminate the crucial, symbolic objects for his story: the food, the wine pitcher, and the sensual young woman asleep under its spell. The fruit refers to the Eve's temptation; the egg is a symbol of lust; the wine, obviously, betokens the young woman's dissipation. Some critics go so far as to call Vermeer's work abstract because of his careful attention to composition and color. The hyper-realism that also marks his paintings may have been inspired by the camera obscura, a tool that presented objects in perfect, three-dimensional perspective. Two hundred years before film was invented, Vermeer commonly blurred foreground details such as the out-of-focus chair in "A Girl Sleeping." This technique probably reflects the way the camera obscura revealed vision, and enhances the photographic quality of Vermeer's work. Equally Vermeer-ish is the focus on ordinary characters in domestic settings. Along with his colleague Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer tirelessly explored interior space. Within quiet, suspended moments Vermeer's figures stitch, pour milk, or strum lutes. He tapped into the uncanny peacefulness experienced when alone with only a small task and one's own heartbeat. The ambiguity of Vermeer's life is as baffling as his symbolic realism. Little is known of his training. His mentor may have been Leonaert Bramer, a Delft artist who was a witness at Vermeer's marriage. Vermeer's wife spent much of her time in pregnancy (the couple had 13 children), yet it is not known if any of the artist's models were members of his family. Vermeer played a small part in the world's first middle-class art market, earning his living as an art dealer and innkeeper in Delft. Despite his artistic achievements, he died young and broke, of unknown causes. [show less]