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Ceiling frescoes in the nave of the Sanctuary of St. Maria Loreto in Westheim |
The Martyrdom of St. Venantius of Camerino |
Daily edification of a true Christian |
Mark the Evangelist writing |
The Holy. John I. and the Gothic King Theodoric |
Drawings of Bible pictures in Historia veteris (ac novi) Testamenti Iconibus Expressa |
References |
Further reading |
Bruno Bushart, Friedrich Kaess: monastery Bergen Neuburg an der Donau and its frescoes by Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner . 1981 |
Peter Stoll and Heide-Maria Krauthauf: "Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner and the 'Holy Albert of Trapani' in the former Carmelite Schongauer". In: The Welf: Yearbook of the Historical Society Schongau - town and country 10 (2008/09), S. 177-194. |
Peter Stoll: Anton Winter Gerst copied Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner . University Library, Augsburg 2013 (full text) |
External links |
Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner |
Johannes Vermeer (; Dutch: [vərˈmeːr], see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful p... |
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for making masterful use of light in his work. "Almost all his paintings", Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decor... |
The modest celebrity he enjoyed during his life gave way to obscurity after his death. He was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists, published 1718) and, as a result, was omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for... |
Pronunciation of name |
In Dutch, Vermeer is pronounced [vərˈmeːr], and Johannes Vermeer as [joːˈɦɑnəs fərˈmeːr], with /v/ assimilating to the preceding voiceless /s/ as [f]. The usual English pronunciation is , with , with a long first vowel, occurring in the UK. is also documented. Another pronunciation, , is attested from the UK. |
Life |
Relatively little was known about Vermeer's life until recently. He seems to have been devoted exclusively to his art, living out his life in the city of Delft. Until the 19th century, the only sources of information were a few registers, official documents, and comments by other artists; for this reason, Thoré-Bürger ... |
Youth and heritage |
Johannes Vermeer was baptized within the Reformed Church on 31 October 1632. His mother, Digna Baltens (c. 1596–1670), was from Antwerp. Digna's father, Balthasar Geerts, or Gerrits (born in Antwerp in or around 1573), led an enterprising life in metalworking, and was arrested for counterfeiting. Vermeer's father, name... |
Marriage and family |
In April 1653, Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic woman, Catharina Bolnes (Bolenes). The blessing took place in the quiet nearby village of Schipluiden. Vermeer's new mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was initially opposed to the marriage as she was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who ins... |
Career |
It is unclear where and with whom Vermeer apprenticed as a painter. There is some speculation that Carel Fabritius may have been his teacher, based upon a controversial interpretation of a text written in 1668 by printer Arnold Bon. Art historians have found no hard evidence to support this. Local authority Leonaert Br... |
On 29 December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear that Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war, and economic crisis; Vermeer was not alone in experiencing difficult financial circumstances. In 1654,... |
The influence of Johannes Vermeer on Metsu is unmistakable: the light from the left, the marble floor. (Adriaan Waiboer, however, suggests that Metsu requires more emotional involvement of the viewer.) Vermeer probably competed also with Nicolaes Maes, who produced genre works in a similar style. In 1662, Vermeer was e... |
In 1671, Gerrit van Uylenburgh organized the auction of Gerrit Reynst's collection and offered 13 paintings and some sculptures to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. Frederick accused them of being counterfeits and sent 12 back on the advice of Hendrick Fromantiou. Van Uylenburg then organized a counter-assessm... |
Wars and death |
In 1672, a severe economic downturn known as the Rampjaar struck the Dutch Republic, after French troops led by Louis XIV invaded the country from the south during the Franco-Dutch War. At the same time, troops from Münster and Cologne invaded the country from the east, causing more destruction. Many people panicked; c... |
On 15 December 1675, Vermeer died after a short illness. He was 43 years old. He was buried in the Protestant Old Church on 15 December 1675. In a petition to her creditors, Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures, and described his death as follows: |
... during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadenc... |
Catharina describes how the collapse of the art market had damaged Vermeer's business as both a painter and an art dealer. She had to raise 11 children and therefore asked the High Court to relieve her of debts owed to Vermeer's creditors. Pioneering Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city c... |
Vermeer had been a respected artist in Delft, but he was almost unknown outside his hometown. A local patron named Pieter van Ruijven had purchased much of his output, which kept Vermeer afloat financially but reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Several factors contributed to his limited body of work. Vermee... |
Style |
Vermeer may have first executed his paintings tonally like most painters of his time, using either monochrome shades of grey ("grisaille") or a limited palette of browns and greys ("dead coloring"), over which he would apply more saturated colors (reds, yellows, and blues) in the form of transparent glazes. No drawings... |
There is no other 17th-century artist who employed the exorbitantly expensive pigment ultramarine (derived from natural lapis lazuli) either so lavishly or so early in his career. Vermeer used this pigment in not just elements that are naturally of this colour; he also used it early in a work, beneath subsequent earth ... |
An example of Vermeer using ultramarine as an underpaint is in The Girl with the Wine Glass. The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and, owing to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearanc... |
Even after Vermeer's evident financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in Lady Seated at a Virginal. This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector and would coincide with John Michael Monti... |
Vermeer's works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy h... |
Painting materials |
One aspect of his meticulous painting technique was Vermeer's choice of pigments. He is best known for his frequent use of the very expensive ultramarine (The Milkmaid) and also lead-tin-yellow (A Lady Writing a Letter), madder lake (Christ in the House of Martha and Mary), and vermilion. He also painted with ochres, b... |
In Vermeer's oeuvre, only about 20 pigments have been detected. Of these, seven principal pigments that Vermeer commonly employed are lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, madder lake, green earth, raw umber, and ivory or bone black. |
Theories of mechanical aid |
Vermeer's painting techniques have long been a source of debate, given their almost photorealistic attention to detail, despite Vermeer's having had no formal training and despite only limited evidence that Vermeer had created any preparatory sketches or traces for his paintings. |
In 2001, British artist David Hockney published the book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which he argued that Vermeer (among other Renaissance and Baroque artists including Hans Holbein and Diego Velázquez) used optics to achieve precise positioning in their compositions, and ... |
Philip Steadman published the book Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces in 2001, in which Steadman specifically claimed that Vermeer had used a camera obscura to create his paintings. Steadman noted that many of Vermeer's paintings had been painted in the same room, and he found six of Vermeer... |
Supporters of these theories have pointed to evidence in some of Vermeer's paintings, such as the often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings, which they argue are the result of the primitive lens of a camera obscura producing halation. It was also postulated that a camera obscura was the mechani... |
In 2008, American entrepreneur and inventor Tim Jenison developed the theory that Vermeer had used a camera obscura along with a "comparator mirror", which is similar in concept to a camera lucida but much simpler and makes it easy to match colour values. Jenison later modified the theory to simply involve a concave mi... |
Several points were brought out by Jenison in support of this technique. First was Vermeer's hyper-accurate rendition of light falloff along the wall. Neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, in an interview with Jenison, notes that human vision cannot process information about the absolute brightness of a scene. Another was th... |
This theory remains disputed. There is no historical evidence regarding Vermeer's interest in optics, and the detailed inventory of the artist's belongings drawn up after his death includes no camera obscura or any similar device. However, Vermeer was in close connection with pioneer lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek,... |
Works |
It is believed Vermeer produced a total of fewer than 50 paintings, of which 34 have survived. Only three Vermeer paintings were dated by the artist: The Procuress (1656; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden); The Astronomer (1668; Musée du Louvre, Paris); and The Geographer (1669; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). |
Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil on canvas The Procuress (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cool... |
A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come The Allegory of Faith (c. 1670; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The Love Letter (c. 1670; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). |
Legacy |
Originally, Vermeer's works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to then better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris. The Delft master's modern rediscovery ... |
Upon the rediscovery of Vermeer's work, several prominent Dutch artists modelled their style on his work, including Simon Duiker. Other artists who were inspired by Vermeer include Danish painter Wilhelm Hammershoi and American Thomas Wilmer Dewing. In the 20th century, Vermeer's admirers included Salvador Dalí, who pa... |
Han van Meegeren was a 20th-century Dutch painter who worked in the classical tradition. He became a master forger, motivated by a blend of aesthetic and financial reasons, creating and selling many new "Vermeers" before turning himself in for forgery to avoid being charged with capital treason for collaboration with t... |
On the evening of 23 September 1971, a 21-year-old hotel waiter, Mario Pierre Roymans, stole Vermeer's Love Letter from the Fine Arts Palace in Brussels, where it was on loan from the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition Rembrandt and his Age. |
To mark the 26th anniversary of the opening of an exhibition at Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art featuring Vermeer's work, Google honored Vermeer with a Google Doodle on 12 November 2021. |
A 2023 exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam featured 28 of Vermeer's works, the most ever shown together. More than 650,000 people visited the exhibition, making it the museum's most visited exhibition. Coinciding with the exhibition, the documentary film Close to Vermeer was released the same year. The film foll... |
In popular culture |
Vermeer's reputation and works have been featured in both literature and in films. Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) and the 2003 film of the same name present a fictional account of Vermeer's creation of the famous painting and his relationship with the equally fictional model. |
Many artists are inspired by the famous painter. For example, culinary photographer Aimee Twigger draws on Vermeer's chiaroscuro for her gustatory journeys through recipes. |
Gallery of selected works |
Notes |
References |
Sources |
Further reading |
Kozloff, Max (2011). Vermeer: A Study. Rome: Contrasto. ISBN 978-88-6965-279-0. |
Kreuger, Frederik H. (2007). New Vermeer, Life and Work of Han van Meegeren. Rijswijk: Quantes. pp. 54, 218 and 220 give examples of Van Meegeren fakes that were removed from their museum walls. Pages 220/221 give an example of a non–Van Meegeren fake attributed to him. ISBN 978-90-5959-047-2. Archived from the origina... |
Liedtke, Walter (2009). The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer. New York, USA: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-1-58839-344-9. |
Liedtke, Walter A. (2001). Vermeer and the Delft School. Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-87099-973-4. |
Schneider, Nobert (1993). Vermeer. Cologne, Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag. ISBN 3-8228-6377-7. |
Sheldon, Libby; Costaros, Nicola (February 2006). "Johannes Vermeer's 'Young woman seated at a virginal". The Burlington Magazine (1235) (vol. CXLVIII ed.). |
Singh, Iona (2012). "Vermeer, Materialism and the Transcendental in Art". from the book, Color, Facture, Art & Design. United Kingdom: Zero Books. pp. 18–40. |
Steadman, Philip (2002). Vermeer's Camera, the truth behind the masterpieces. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280302-6. |
Wadum, Jørgen. Contours of Vermeer. In Gaskell, Jonker & National Gallery of Art (U.S.) 1998, pp. 201–223 |
Wheelock Jr., Arthur K. (1988) [1981]. Jan Vermeer. New York, USA: Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-1737-8. |
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