The Complete Interactive Vermeer Catalogue

The signature

Inscribed at left below the upper edge of the virginal: IVMeer (IVM in ligature).

(Click here to access a complete study of Vermeer's signatures.)

Dates

c. 1670
Albert Blankert, Vermeer: 1632–1675, 1975

c. 1672–1673
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., The Public and the Private in the Age of Vermeer, London, 2000

c. 1670–1672
Walter Liedtke, Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008

c. 1672–1674

(Click here to access a complete study of the dates of Vermeer's paintings).

Technical report

The fine, plain-weave linen support has a thread count of 14 x 14 per cm². The original tacking edges have been removed. Cusping is visible along top and bottom and very faintly along both sides. The support has been lined. The double ground consists of a pale gray beneath a pale warm gray buff. The first layer contains lead white, chalk and charcoal black; the second contains lead white, chalk and a red-brown earth.

The flesh color was painted with green earth over a pink layer; the shadows with two additional layers, a mixture containing green earth followed by a deep red shadow. The blue upholstery was underpainted with a gray-blue layer; the highlights were modeled with a blue, then a pale blue layer, and the shadows with gray. The outlines of the tiles at the bottom of the wall were scratched in the wet paint. A pinhole by which Vermeer marked the vanishing point is visible in the paint layer on the sleeve of the woman's dress.

There is some abrasion in the three paintings within the painting, in the lady's right cheek and the dark blue of her tunic, and in the blue upholstery. The ultramarine pigment in the darker blues of the chair has deteriorated.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.)

The painting in its frame

(Click here to access all of Vermeer's paintings in their frames).

Provenance

Exhibitions

The painting in scale

(Click here to access all of Vermeer's paintings in scale).

A pendant?

Not all critics agree that the present painting and the Lady Seated at a Virginal were conceived as a pendant although following Walter Liedtke's reasoning, the National Gallery in London has equipped them with identical frames.

There seems to exist much more evidence that joins the two works than separates them. In favor of the pendant hypothesis, firstly, are their near-identical dimensions. The two young women play music on a finely crafted virginal decorated with faux marble side panels. Both figures perform in the right-hand corner of a room and are dressed in stylish clothing of the day. Both turn to look at the viewer. Both rooms exhibit fine marble flooring with diagonally set black and white slabs. A picture-within-a-picture hangs on the background wall as a visual comment on the scene below.

Obviously, the pendant format does not imply identical treatment of a given motif. In fact, Dutch painters relished the opportunity to reveal opposing qualities of the same subject. Many facts suggest that they represent opposite aspects of a single concept, such as Sacred and Profane Love.

The overall atmosphere and compositional dynamics of each work are markedly different. The standing woman plays erect, her pose recalling the perfection of a classical column, bathed in sunlight which floods the room through an open window. Oppositely the seated woman crouches ever-so-hesitantly over her virginal, shrouded in near obscurity. The blue curtain catches whatever light might have leaked through the closed shutters of the window.

Key indicators of the opposing forms of love are the background pictures. The heads of both paintings occupy the extreme corner of each large-scale painting which reminds the modern viewer of today's cartoon speech balloons. The painting of the Cupid, encased in its austere rectangular frame, is generally interpreted in the light of a 17th-century emblem from Otto van Veen's Amorum Emblemata, advising that one must have only one lover (in Van Veen's version, the Cupid holds aloft a card with a Roman numeral I while in Vermeer's version, the same card is mysteriously empty).

In the other work, a low-life bordello scene painted by the Utrecht artist Dirck van Baburen in a gaudily gilt frame suggests, as Walter Liedtke wryly observes, "something more like one love an hour than one for life." Liedtke further posits that while the seated lady is certainly not a prostitute, her attitude about amorous affairs is illustrated by her relaxed demeanor and the "Arcadian landscape—the easy path—painted on the virginal lid." Her standing counterpart may have chosen the steep and rocky but virtuous road (chosen by Hercules) of the landscape lid.

In Dutch 17th-century painting, the most common subjects for pendants were the five senses and the four seasons which were repeated in endless variations. Portraits of husband and wife were equally created as a pendant, although the portrait category was the most conservative of all and left relatively little latitude for experimentation even in the hands of the most competent masters like Rembrandt or Frans Hals.

Amorum Emblemata & the emblem book

Amorum Emblemata
"Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum"
Otto van Veen
1608
Engraving, Antwerp

The 1531 publication of the first emblem book ever to be published (Emblematum liber), by the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato, launched a literary fashion that would last two centuries and touch most of western Europe. The two 1608 editions of Amorum emblemata were followed by a third in 1659. Emblem books were crucial in shaping the visual and verbal culture of the 17th-century Dutchmen. Professional painters collaborated with the authors of emblem books to produce drawings from which the illustrations could be engraved. Art historians believe that Vermeer occasionally consulted emblem books to refine the narratives of his works.

An emblem is a riddle composed of three parts—a "lemma" or motto, a picture and a following explanatory text, intended to draw the reader into a self-reflective examination of his or her own life in an interesting manner. More complicated associations of emblems could transmit information to the culturally informed. However, the aim of the emblem was to make morality more attractive although emblematic art.

"Silence"
Andrea Alciato
Emblematum liber
Emblem 11

Emblem books were published in vast quantities. Alciato's Emblematum liber was reprinted 49 times, and 90 translations and adaptations all over Europe. Their popularity is often thought to reflect the 17th-century mindset with its tendency to think in analogies and allegories.

From c. 1600 onward, love emblems, mainly Petrarchist in tone and content, were particularly successful in the Netherlands. Typical emblems were half-moralizing and half-playful. The perspective of the male lover is dominant, although his role is that of an ecstatic victim.

Many emblem books were intended for the "courting youth," young men and women in search of a spouse, a topic which obviously made them fecund resources for interior painters who explore ritualized, burger courtship and love letter motifs. Some contained both emblems and songs. Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft's Emblemata amatoria is one example (with 71 pages devoted to emblems and 73 to songs and sonnets).

Eddy de Jongh has shown the major influence of the emblem on Dutch 17th-century painting, and recently the impact of the love emblem on occasional poetry has been demonstrated by P. van Huisstede en H. Brandhorst. The resulting insights into textual and pictorial symbols shared between different art forms make comparative emblem studies useful to scholars in a number of disciplines. Besides this, studying the emblematic tradition provides us with knowledge about concealed aspects of the cultural and mental history of the period.

Vermeer's "love affair" with Cupid

Cupid Preparing His Bow
Jacob Huysmans after Anthony van Dyck
between 1650-1696
Oil on canvas,
Private collection

Cupid, known as Eros in ancient Greek mythology, is the god of desire, erotic love, attraction, and affection. He has been a favorite subject of artists since ancient times. The motif of Cupid was popularly used in Baroque painting, either by itself or in various mythological scenes. In Vermeer's paintings, he appears—either partially or fully—four times as a picture-within-a-picture.

Cupid Holding a Glass Orb
Caesar van Everdingen
c. 1655-1660
Oil on canvas,
Private collection

As has often been noted in Vermeer literature, "a Cupid" could mean either a statue or a painting of the winged god of love. The painting that Vermeer used as a model was first attributed by German art historian Gustav Delbanco in 1928 to Caesar van Everdingen, a Dutch Golden Age portrait and history painter who painted numerous depictions of similarly proportioned naked putti (nude child figures, often with wings). Based on the chronology of Vermeer’s paintings, the inclusion of the same Cupid four times, albeit with slight variations, over a 15-year period makes it highly probably that Vermeer had this work in his home. This is reinforced by the fact that the probate inventory of Vermeer’s estate, compiled in 1676, two months after his death, mentions an artifact "from the upstairs backroom" referred to as “Cupid”, which could be this painting.

Art historians have tried to track Vermeer's Cupid in the vast history of auctions and sales of art, but it has proved impossible to find. Interestingly, based on Vermeer canvases, they tried to estimate the size of the real Cupid painting – it should be approximately 115 x 85 cm, which is quite large.

Another question is: what did Vermeer wish to convey with the now-lost Cupid? Did its meaning change according to its context? Numerous art historians and Vermeer experts such as Walter Liedtke, Aurthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Gregor Weber have attemtped furnish plausable explanations. However, as Weber pointed out, the exact meaning Vermeer intended may be elusive, but the deliberate alterations in how he portrayed the Cupid across different works were likely intended to give a more nuanced meaning to the scene unfolding in the foreground. Perhaps this kind of puzzle would have delighted a 17th-century audience familiar with the similar emblematic images that abounded in emblematic literature.

In A Maid Asleep, although barely visible in reproductions, Cupid strides forth "triumphantly," trampling over two masks cast upon the ground. Perhpas the cause of the "dozing" (tipsy?) maid's condition is in fact, Cupid's working.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
Johannes Vermeer

In the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Cupid tramples on a mask, a motif not seen in the Late Lady Standing at a Virginal. Here, the mask is a readily understood metaphor for deceit. In other words, in matters of the heart, Cupid rejects deceit in favor of sincerity.

In the Girl Interrupted in Her Music, the inclusion of the standing, nude god of love underscores the amorous nature of the encounter between the lady and her company. Because it was overpainted in the past and subsequently restored, the paint layer of Cupid is severely abraded. Originally, it would have been easier to discern how Cupid seems to comment on the man’s seductive wiles from behind the latter’s back. Both the woman and Cupid peer at the viewer, drawing them directly into Vermeer’s painted scene.

A Lady Standing at a Virginal
Johannes Vermeer

In the last depiction, in Lady Standing at a Virginal, Cupid is pictured standing, rendered in lighter, airier tones than in the preceding versions. He holds a blank card, reminiscent of the Cupid in another emblem from Otto van Veen’s popular "Amorum emblemata." However, there, Cupid holds a tablet inscribed with the number "1." Meanwhile, with his foot, he tramples on the numbers 2 to 10 on another tablet. The caption explains that true love can be directed to "one person alone." Strangely, no mask appears at his feet in Vermeer's work.

Scholars have been unable to explain precisely why Vermeer would have included the Cupid so frequently in his own works, especially considering he must have had many other works to choose from that he traded, like many artists of the time, to supplement his income.

Whatever the Vermeer's intentions, the painted Cupid belongs to the pictorial tradition of portraying a full-figure, life-size Cupid alone, combined with symbolic gestures and motifs. Other great painters from this time, such as Rembrandt, who painted Cupid blowing a bubble in 1634, popularized this motif. The little god of love was also often presented with a golden balance, a pair of scales, and, of course, wings.

The final hardships of Vermeer's life

Critics have frequently underlined that Vermeer's late works fail to show even the vaguest trace of the years of disaster that tormented the Dutch Republic, whose long run with good luck finally came to an end. In 1672, Louis XIV overran the lowlands, sending waves of shock throughout the country. The Dutch defense had been poorly organized, and some towns capitulated without firing a shot. In Vermeer's hometown Delft, the citizens rioted. To impede the advance of the French troops, large areas of the countryside were flooded, as had been done against the Spanish years before. This year had been named rampjaar or "year of disaster."

Fortunately, the city walls of Delft were never attacked, although Vermeer's household, with numerous children to support, was severely tested by the collapse of the art market. His wife would later testify that the artist had hardly earned anything from his own work and that he was forced to sell the works of other artists in which he dealt in at a great loss. He may have painted very little in his final years, distracted by his service in the civic guards and his own bad health.

The tiny signature

Vermeer's characteristic monogram was carefully painted with light-toned pigment on the shadowed side of the virginal, as indicated above. However, it cannot usually be distinguished in reproductions.

Of the 35 generally accepted paintings by Vermeer, 25 bear signatures, which, however, vary greatly in state of conservation and, hence, visibility. Four signatures that were once reported can no longer be detected,1 and three paintings once bore the signatures of other artists before they were correctly attributed to Vermeer. Only three signatures are accompanied by dates.3 One painting bears two signatures, one of which is accompanied by a date. Never once did Vermeer accompany a signature with "f[ecit]," a frequent feature that accompanies signatures on numerous Dutch paintings of the period.

Vermeer's signatures are located on almost every area of the canvas. Some signatures float upon a blank area of a white-washed wall or a dark void. Others are positioned deliberately on simple objects, such as a footstool, a picture frame, or a rock, without seeking, except in one or two cases, symbolic or physical identity with the underlying object. Nine are inscribed on patches of bare white-washed wall. A few signatures were once so conspicuous that they may have been intended to contribute to the aesthetics of the work.

A neglected Cupid?

Such is the power of Vermeer's work that each detail, no matter how minute, has been subjected to intense scrutiny by art historians. Like no other artist, he seems to have possessed an almost magical power that allowed him to imbue the breath of humanity in even the insignificant object of his compositions.

The art historian H. Rodney Nevitt singled out the small Delft wall tile to the left of the standing musician's satin gown and has identified it as a fishing Cupid. Such motifs were frequently drawn from popular literary sources. The present Cupid is similar to the fishing Cupid in a print from Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft's Emblemata amatoria which plays on the conventional comparison of courtship to fishing. In Vermeer's tile, the fishing rod is visible, the proportions of the figure are consistent with Cupid, and the dark shape on his back can only be his stubby wings. No doubt, contemporary viewers would have been familiar with such designs on their own walls and would have responded to the Cupid in Vermeer's tile. They may have been amused by the close proximity of Cupid who seems to arouse with a discreet poke the austerely posed lady rather than keeping his mind to his fishing.

illustration from
Pieter Cornelisz. Hooft, Emblemata amatoria
Amsterdam, 1611,
Koninklijke Bibliotheek The Hague

The theme of love seems to concur with the presence of the virginal. One vryerijboek (manual for young lovers) advises young women: "Learn ...to steal hearts / With Clavecimbel-playing."

Considering the confrontational gaze of the lady and the large-scale painting of a Cupid on the background wall, Nevitt, therefore, submits that Vermeer's A Lady Standing at a Virginal "fishes for us, we fish for her, or Cupid fishes for us both."

Meaning in perspective

Without a doubt, A Lady Standing at a Virginal presents the most schematic perspective in Vermeer's oeuvre, in some respects recalling the hollow box-like spaces commonly illustrated in period perspective manuals. In no other work did Vermeer employ linear perspective to control the viewer's attention so explicitly. Coupled with the rigorous recession of the floor tiles, the orthogonals—both to the left and right of the stately figure—draw the spectator into a vibrating but mathematically measured space where they are urged to come to terms with the solitary figure of the musician, set in the dead center of the picture.

On the contrary, the space of A Lady Seated at a Virginal remains comparatively flat, despite the strong orthogonals of the virginal. The perspective, while accurate from a technical point of view, is not as functional to the composition as that of its pendant, A Lady Standing. This is largely because the vanishing point is set behind the figure's shoulder, perhaps too far to the right, creating a large open space that divides the figure from her instrument. In comparison, note how the figure and the virginal of A Lady Standing are sensed as a single, tightly bonded entity.

In 1435/1436, Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura (On Painting), a treatise on proper methods of showing distance in painting in which the basis of linear perspective was codified for the first time. Alberti's breakthrough not only made it possible to construct the illusion of coherent three-dimensional spaces in painting but also to requalify the art of painting, which had been relegated to the mechanical arts from classical times.

The practice of perspective was still highly esteemed in Vermeer's time. One of the few instances his name was mentioned in contemporary writing, he was noted for his skill in perspective.

Listen to period music

Almande De Symmerman [236 KB] very likely Almande The Carpenter (anon.) from The Susanne van Soldt Manuscript (1599)

Malle Symen [236 KB] "Silly Simon"
(Jan Pzn. Sweelinck) from The Leningrad Manuscript (1646)

Courante Daphne [236 KB] The popular melody Daphne as a French "Courante" dance (anon.) also from The Leningrad Manuscript (1646)

* all three music files were kindly selected and performed for the Essential Vermeer website by Joop Klaassen, contributor to the Stichting Clavecimbel Genootschap Nederland.

The Virginal

The virginal (or virginals), together with the harpsichord, has its origin probably in the medieval psaltery with a keyboard applied for playing polyphonic music (i.e. melody with accompanying chords). In c. 1460, the virginal is mentioned for the first time in a treatise by Paulus Paulirinus of Prague. Although limited in its tonal resources, the virginal occupied a crucial position in the musical life in the 16th and 17th centuries because it was smaller, simpler, and cheaper to make than the harpsichord, rarely represented in paintings.

The main center of virginal- and keyboard production was undoubtedly Antwerp, with the renowned Ruckers and Couchet families. Italy was the second most important center. After King Henry VIII purchased five virginals, it enjoyed considerable appreciation in England as well. Until the 18th century, the virginal remained in use both as a solo instrument (even in private circles) as well as for accompaniment of the singing voice or melodic instruments, like the viola da gamba.

The virginal normally had a rectangular case, although polygon forms in various sizes were also built. The metal strings, only in a single choir, run roughly parallel to the keyboard. They are plucked by plectra mounted on jacks. The jacks (one for each key) are arranged in pairs and placed along the line running from the front of the instrument at the left to the back at the right. They pluck in opposite directions so that the pairs of jacks are separated by closely spaced pairs of strings. Each pair of jacks is usually served by a single slot in the soundboard, together with another slot below in a thin guide above the keys. Leather on the soundboard and lower guide provide a quiet bearing-surface for the jacks.

The typical Flemish "muselar" type (probably invented by Hans Ruckers) has the keyboard to the right side, their strings plucked at a point near the center for virtually their entire range, producing a powerful, flute-like tone. Since the jacks and keys for the left hand are inevitably placed in the middle of the instrument's soundboard, mechanical noise from these is amplified. The central plucking point in the bass strings makes repetition difficult because the still-sounding motion of the string interferes with the ability of the plectrum to connect again. Thus, the muselaer is better suited to chord and melody music without complex bass parts.

The spinet virginal has its keyboard placed off-center to the left. The jacks run in a line close to the left-hand bridge; therefore, the point at which the jacks pluck the strings is close to the mid-point in the treble and well away towards the left end in the bass. Thus the timbre of the spinet gradually changes from flute-like in the treble to reedy in the bass.

Double shadows

One of the most curious features of Vermeer's rendering of light is the double shadow. Double shadows are caused by the overlap of two shadows cast by light entering the room through two different windows. The first time they appear in Vermeer's oeuvre is in The Music Lesson where they are plainly visible to the right of the hanging mirror and to the right of the erect virginal lid. Double shadows rarely appear in the works of other artists. Painters were recommended to eliminate them lest they confuse the viewer. However, Vermeer did not adhere blindly to the reality he observed but utilized its most distinguishing aspects to exalt the pictorial and thematic reality of the work at hand. One scholar has noted that compared to the shadows generated by a scale reproduction of the room represented in The Music Lesson, the shadows in Vermeer's painting are notably narrower.

The double shadows in the present work are more clearly defined than those in The Music Lesson, which could be caused either by greater intensity of light or by stylistic considerations. They appear on the right-hand side of the gilt frame and the large ebony framed Cupid. P. T. A. Swillens, who first noted double shadows in his monographic study of 1950, included a diagram which illustrates how the longest shadows are cast by light entering through the window farther from the viewer (the one nearly attached to the background wall) while the second is cast by a second window nearer to the viewer. This second window appears in The Music Lesson but is only implied by the double shadows in A Lady Standing at a Virginal.

In Dutch painting, double shadows were avoided as much as possible because they were thought to create compositions that seem restless and confused. It is an evil against which the art experts of Vermeer’s time and later were always warning artists. Van Hoogstraten writes about this in his Inleyding tot de hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst and De Lairesse devotes a whole chapter to "Van de lichten binnenskamers" (Of Indoor Lighting), which he illustrates with a few examples." Other than those of Vermeer, one of the very few careful portrayals of double shadows in Dutch interior painting can be found in Gabriel Metsu’s A Man and a Woman Seated by a Virginal (c. 1665), which, however, is an emulative composite of certain aspects of Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and The Concert.

The miracle of satin painting in 17th-century

The ability to convincingly depict the different textures of drapery was a major requisite for painters who wished to appeal to the upper tiers of art lovers. And nowhere else than in the Netherlands had satin-painting been so successful-

The Music Lesson
Jacob Ochtervelt
c. 1660–1662
Oil on canvas, 97.1 x 78.1 cm.
City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham

Painters like Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster were among the first to capture the distinct feel of satin with paint and brush, which gave them an incremental advantage over their most competitive peers. However, no one has ever surpassed Gerrit ter Borch in this field, and a significant portion of his immense popularity was based on this skill. No one before or since has ever succeeded in capturing the nuances of satin so convincingly. Some of his renditions of the long satin gowns were evidently so in demand that he painted the same gowns on multiple occasions—one seven times—from the exact same point of view, with the same lighting and folds. Each time, he set it in a different context so that each work would be appreciated as an original piece of art, rather than as a copy. Only in the work of Jacob Ochtervelt, a minor Dutch painter who was aware of Vermeer's presence on the art scene, do we find faint signs of Ter Borch's almost monstrous talent for rendering this precious material.

So when Vermeer included this kind of luxurious garment in his painting, he was well aware that it would be compared to those of the most highly appraised and sought-after painters of the moment.

How did painters learn to paint satin so convincingly? Most artists started their careers as apprentices in the studios of established painters. Here, they learned the basics of painting, including how to mix pigments, prepare panels and canvases and copy masterworks. Over time, they would practice by rendering objects with challenging textures, such as satin.

Painting luxurious fabrics was particularly difficult and time-consuming. Because the folds change with the movement of the body, and painters could not usually finish them in a single session, life-size wooden manikins were dressed with the sitter's most costly clothes. The accurate portrayal of satin relies heavily on understanding how light interacts with the material. Satin's sheen is complex, with soft gradients and sharp highlights. Dutch artists like Vermeer were particularly skilled in capturing how light behaves, and this understanding was essential for rendering the unique way satin reflects light.