Notable as well is the conspicuous lack of hearths, cupboards, cradles and beds that would have certainly been present in the artist's living quarters. However, unlike his colleagues, Vermeer represented no families, children or elderly people (except for bit parts in the View of Delft and The Little Street). These painted interiors display women engaged in homemaking, housewifery and nurturing, all fundamental values connected with the virtues of family life. This new household became the responsibility and spiritual realm of the woman while the public world, divided cleanly from it for the first time, belonged to the male. Scenes of Dutch domesticity flourished and women were among the most frequently depicted subjects. Among women of the higher classes, in particular, pockmarks are known to have aroused feelings of shame." 4įrom both an anthropological viewpoint, the home had acquired enormous importance in the second half of the 17th-century Netherlands. Smallpox was a dreaded disease against which all remedies were helpless, and those who survived it were generally left disfigured by pockmarks. The mere fact that the vast majority of faces in 17th-century paintings are smooth and unblemished is enough to make us suspicious, given the prevalence of smallpox epidemics at the time. "Just how drastically cosmetic interventions were applied is hard to say, but it is a fair assumption that not every painted face with regular features, and not every painted peach skin was an accurate depiction of the original. In any case, the women who inhabit Vermeer’s interiors may not have appeared exactly as he artist saw them While it is true that none of them are beauties in a conventional sense, they are not without their own charm, and the artist must have made some effort to improve their appearance. Their costuming-its coloring, shapes and associations contributes so much to bodily construction and expression that the absence of nudes from Vermeer's oeuvre hardly seems surprising." 3 The figures range from girlish to maternal, yet all are youthful, with high curved foreheads, features that evenly balance the individual and the classical, and simple believable postures. " The qualities that we attribute to Vermeer's work as a whole apply equally to the women they picture: paintings and personages share dignity, equilibrium and an exceptional vivid presence and abstract purity. Not all rooms of Dutch homes were equipped with a fireplace. Posing for such a demanding artist like Vermeer must have been hard business, especially during the long, gelid Dutch winters. Other than the obvious economic advantage, most painters would have found that working with family members eased tension and favored the complicated process of determining the exact pose and afterwards holding it for long hours. The great Rembrandt van Rijn cast members of his own family as subjects for some of his most touching canvases. Gerrit ter Borch portrayed his step-sister Gesina a number of times in the most delicate of modes while Frans van Mieris and his wife repeatedly appear in portraits, genre pieces and tronies from their marriage in 1657 onwards. Although there exists no evidence to support this hypothesis, painters often employed family members as models. Unfortunately, while locations of one of the two ladsncapes can be determined with precision ( The View of Delft) not a single sitter has been identified even though critics have been prone to see members of the artist’s family, his wife Catharina and his first daughter Maria, as prime candidates. On the basis of the treatment of his subjects others have psychoanalyzed him as a "person who is afraid of women" or as a "distant father." However, it is far more likely that the unusual proportion of women in the painter's oeuvre reflects a consciously elaborated artistic goal rather than hidden psychological or personal motives although his treatment of them is unmistakably empathetic.Ī medium-size mountain of art historical writing has been formed of attempts to identify the places and people that Vermeer portrayed. One Vermeer writer creatively asserted that "women dominated the life of Vermeer" citing along with the choice of his motives personal conditions such as a strong-willed mother-in-law, a wife, who relentlessly bore the artist a new child after another, a household of daughters and at least one maid. Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (detail)
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