- Good evening.
I'm Ian Wardropper, Director
of the Frick Collection.
I'm delighted to welcome you
all to a lecture this evening
by Arthur K Wheelock, Jr,
titled "The Making of an Icon,
"How the Girl with a Pearl
Earring Gained Its Fame."
As we've watched the
record number of people
streaming in the doors of
the Frick to see the current
exhibition, we've had time
to reflect on the magnetic
draw of one painting.
There are in fact 15
masterworks from the Mauritshuis
on display and together
they make a compact, yet
satisfying account of the genius
of Dutch 17th century art.
But undeniably, one painting
resonates in the public
imagination, the title of
this exhibition when it was
shown in San Francisco and Atlanta was,
"The Girl with the Pearl
Earring, Dutch Paintings
"from the Mauritshuis."
We chose to title this
here "Vermeer, Rembrandt,
"and Hals, Masterpieces of Dutch Painting
from the Mauritshuis," to emphasize
that the show is not
just about one painting
but represents some of the best artists
from the Dutch Golden Age.
Nonetheless, the popularity of the show
when it was in Tokyo, where
it had the highest attendance
of any exhibition in the world last year,
prompted us to acknowledge the star power
of one painting.
We decided to give it its own gallery
and asked the Mauritshuis
to lend us a few more works
to fill out an adjacent gallery
which they generously did.
I can think of no better
person to assess the phenomenon
surrounding the painting
than Arthur Wheelock,
Curator of Northern Baroque Painting
at the National Gallery in Washington.
Of his many publications,
just to name those
centered on this artist,
are Jan Vermeer, 1981,
Vermeer and The Art of Painting, 1995,
not to mention Perspective
Optics and Delft Artists
around 1650 which he published in 1977
which naturally concerned the artist too.
Of his exhibitions,
Johannes Vermeer in 1995,
we all remember and The
Public and the Private
in The Age of Vermeer of 2000.
But, he has written
about and organized shows
on many other Dutch artists
including Gerrit Dou,
Gerrit Terborch, Frans van
Mieris, Wilhelm Van Elst,
I just learned that he's
working on a show on (mumbles).
As well as other broader themes and indeed
on the entire period of Dutch
and Flemish Baroque art.
All of these achievements have been widely
recognized, for example, he was appointed
Knight Officer in the
Order of the Orange-Nassau
by the Dutch government in 1992
and Commander in the
Order of Leopold the First
by the Belgian government in 2006.
I'm happy to say that tonight's
lecture will be filmed
and is available as we
speak for those of you
who couldn't enter the room tonight
and in the future on our website.
Please welcome Arthur Wheelock.
(applause)
- Thank you very much,
Ian, and I am so happy
to be here.
Back on actually this
podium where I think I first
spoke here in 1971, or
something like that.
It was a long time ago.
Anyhow, it's a very special
room and a very special
museum and a very special
occasion to be here
with this wonderful group of paintings
from the Mauritshuis and
particularly this lady
that we are all here to celebrate.
I don't normally write lectures out
and read them and I apologize but tonight,
somehow, I felt like
it was appropriate to do so
because most of you are
here because you have
heard of this artist
and most of you are here
because you know this painting already
so I figured if I'm going
to talk about something
about it, I've got to figure out something
I've got to figure out about, so anyhow,
so I worked hard to try
to figure out something.
(laughter)
I still want to start
with a couple disclaimers
and that is the first is that
I'd rather not be at this
podium at all, I'd rather
be looking at The Girl
on my own and standing in front of it.
That's partly because you don't need me.
It's a painting that you
can respond to very directly
on your own and there's little
I can do to really enhance
that experience.
This is one painting
that really in some ways
doesn't need any explanation
beyond just the joy
of being in front of it.
Of course this is an issue
for all Vermeer paintings,
this one in particular but
certainly it's something
we respond to in all of his paintings.
They are meant to be seen
quietly and personally,
perhaps with a friend or a loved one
but to capture the
fullness of that experience
in a large lecture hall is pretty tough.
For the most part, I think
what you can expect tonight
is a little background
information to help you
frame your own personal
relationships with this painting.
And the second disclaimer
is that I now realize
that my title is fundamentally flawed.
And that's not a great thing to figure out
while you're preparing a lecture
but that's the reality.
It turns out that the Girl
with the Pearl Earring
was far more of an icon
throughout the course
of the 20th century than I had realized
as a consequence, I have
tried to focus this evening
on varied ways that this
painting has effected
art lovers since it first
appeared at a sale in the Hague
in 1881, at which time was purchased
for about two guilders, a
pittance then as well as now.
Seeing how earlier viewers
responded to this work
is quite revealing and can
help us guide in our own
understanding of
Vermeer's artistic genius.
That said, I would like
to explain why I thought
the title was a good one
when I was first asked
to provide it last spring.
The question of how
this painting had become
such an icon came to me
after seeing the catalog
and I realized that the
exhibition title here
is different than the
catalog but the catalog
is what I saw, what I was sent,
reminded me of an earlier
traveling exhibition
from the Mauritshuis when the
Girl with a Pearl Earring,
which was then called Head
of a Girl came to America
for the first time.
And that was a show in 1982
that was open by Queen Beatrix
at the National Gallery
which celebrated the 200th anniversary
of Dutch-American relations
which is the longest
running relationship we
have with another country
so it was very special.
Much as today, that show
was possible to organize
because the Mauritshuis
was being renovated.
Strinkingly, while the face of
the girl graces both catalog
covers, the titles of these publications
are quite different.
In 1982, the exhibition
was called, "Dutch Painting
"of the Golden Age from
the Royal Picture Gallery
"Mauritshuis," and now,
as Ian just mentioned,
"Girl with a Pearl Earring," big and bold
and if you look really hard, you can see,
"Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis,"
that's very small.
So anyhow, the painting has
now taken pride of place
and by dent of text, color
and scale, the Mauritshuis,
as well the other Dutch
paintings in the show
have taken a very back seat.
Even more striking, the name of the artist
who painted the girl is entirely absent.
Vermeer, Who's he?
The painting's become larger than museum
and its maker has been entirely omitted.
Fascinating.
So what happened between 1982 and 2013
that helped elevate this
painting to such an iconic level?
One important moment in that trajectory
was, of course, the Vermeer exhibition
at the National Gallery and
the Mauritshuis in 1995, 1996.
Witnessing the extraordinary
response to that event
was an unforgettable experience.
Vermeer lovers both new
and old stood quietly
and reverentially before
his luminous works,
sometimes spending three to four hours
in the exhibition viewing
the 21 masterpieces
assembled from around the world.
Day after day, young
and old who had traveled
long distances from Maine to California
and even from the Netherlands, lined up
patiently in hopes of
procuring an entrance ticket
and during below freezing
weather, snowstorms,
and rain.
Those standing in line,
which often wrapped
entirely around the National Gallery,
I don't know if you can make this out,
but there they are going down the street
and way back here on the other side.
In fact, at the end of the show,
because I did a Charlie Rose show that was
an all night thing, I know
for a fact that the show
ended and we had an ability
to keep the show open
until 9:00 PM and the first people in line
at the end of the show
were there at 9:30 PM
for the next morning.
So those standing in
line, they brought tents,
matresses, chairs, chess
games, lots of hot coffee,
as they waited patiently
sometimes up to 12 hours
before the exhibition
would open in the morning.
So I have often wondered
why this exhibition
evoked such an emotional cord, one unique
in the history of American museums.
Vermeer was, at that
time, certainly revered
but I had assumed that
his works would appeal
to a rather narrow
segment of the population.
We had anticipated large crowds but not
the enormity of the public response.
To some degree, I credit this painting
which was there, for the first time,
given the title, "Girl
with a Pearl Earring,"
for the high level expectation
that greeted the show.
The painting had been especially restored
for the exhibition and it had gained
enormous luminosity in it's appearance.
Smithsonian Magazine, in its wisdom,
placed its image on the cover of an issue
featuring the exhibition
an issue that arrived
at newstands just prior to the opening
and even though the painting was not even
mentioned in the article
inside, the visual appeal
of the cover was so great that the issue
was read by more than 8.5 million people
and that's what the
advertisement on the right,
Smithsonian advertisement,
the best selling issue
in the magazine's history.
The Girl's visual appeal also persuaded
the National Gallery, like
the Frick today, I should say,
to feature it on one
of their outdoor signs
and it quickly became
the face of the show.
The story of the Vermeer
exhibition has, of course,
become part of museum lore.
The exhibition was the
victim of two government
shutdowns and a blizzard
that virtually closed
Washington for a few days in January
and, as a result, the
exhibition became front page
news across the country.
Nearly every magazine as
well as television and radio
ran stories about the exhibition's status,
often featuring the
girl in their coverage.
A number of influential editorials decried
the exhibition's closing,
arguing that even during
a federal government shutdown, the Vermeer
exhibition, a once in
a lifetime experience,
should be kept open.
The exhibition was
exhilerating and exhausting
for all of us at the
gallery, both for the crowds,
they're there for three
or four hours in that show
and for the extra demands
that the political
controversies had on our staff.
As a thank you for
everyone's yeoman efforts,
the gallery arranged a staff
party after the closing
at which time we all received this pin
as a memento of this
unforgettable experience.
(laughter)
And I'm sure the girl
felt very much the same
sense of relief.
The outpouring of public enthusiasm during
the Vermeer exhibition is
particularly remarkable
when one considers that it
was not until the writings
of the French critic Troy
Briget in the late 1860's
that Vermeer's name was
known beyond a small
group of collectors and amateurs.
The artist's fame spread quickly.
So much so that by 1892,
when Tori Briget's own
collection was auctioned
in Paris, the sales catalog
for this painting, The Concert,
which Isabella Stuart
Garnder then acquired,
describes how Vermeer's rare works were,
"considered as classics
and worthy of ornamenting
"the finest cabinets of paintings."
So, how does one reconcile
that glowing assessment
with the fact that only
11 years previously
in 1881, The Girl with
a Pearl Earring had sold
for only two gilders?
And then what has happened since the time
of Tori Briget to elevate Vermeer today
to such a cultural phenomenon?
Vermeer's life story would
hardly seemed to have
encouraged this response.
Unlike a Rembrandt, or a
Gauguin, that 17th century
painter from a small
provincial city did not call
attention to himself
through outrageous behavior.
On the contrary, the
few documents that exist
indicate that he led a responsible life,
caring for his family
while working as a painter
and art dealer.
The fact that he died penniless in 1676
seems to have been less his own fault
than due to the collapse of the art market
after the invasion of
the Netherlands in 1672
by troops of Louis the XIV.
Finally, his quiet, intimate
scenes of domestic life
are unremarkable in subject matter.
Hardly the type of image
that would seemed to have
excited a late 20th
century, early 21st century
society that all too often
craves the new, the exotic,
and the unusual.
So why did people stand
in line in snow and ice
for hours outside the
National Gallery to see
this small group of masterpieces?
To judge from the sentiments expressed,
and I'm not exaggerating,
the hundreds of letters
and poems sent to me at
the gallery at the time
of that show, most viewers
came to the exhibition
because of the special
human qualities that pervade
these works.
One letter expressed a common thread among
those who wrote, "I too was
first attracted to Vermeer's
"work because of his
perfect composition and
"the harmony of his
colors but as I grew older
"and matured, I began
to sense that his work
"could help me understand
my life experiences."
A poem about The Girl with a Pearl Earring
focused on the young
woman's enigmatic gaze
and the question it raises
about how well we can
fathom another person's thoughts.
See how she turns to greet what comes,
suprised but untroubled,
not quite welcoming.
She looks askance at one who has unmasking
disturbed her solitude.
Her greeting concedes what it must
but she remains turned
to purposes of her own.
The mystery of this young girl who is open
and welcoming and yet
simultaneously reserved
and unknowable is one of the fascinations
of this masterpiece and, not surprisingly,
has engaged the attention of viewers
from the very moments that it arrived
in the Mauritshuis collection in 1902.
Among the first foreign
visitors to respond
to this newly discovered Vermeer
was the English novelist and poet,
E.V. Lucas, whose book,
A Wanderer in Holland
was published in 1905.
"The painting," he wrote,
"is one of the most
"beautiful things in Holland.
"It is, however, in no sense Dutch.
"The girl is not Dutch.
"The painting is Dutch
only because it is the work
"of a Dutchman, no other Dutch painter
"could compass such liquid clarity,
"such cool surfaces,
indeed none of the others
"seem to have tried.
"A different ideal was theirs.
"Apart, however, from
the question of technique
"the picture has, to me,
human interest beyond
"description.
"There is a winning charm
to this simple Eastern face
"that no words of mine can express."
"All that is hard in the
Dutch nature dissolves
"beneath her reluctant smile.
"She symbolizes the fairest and sweetest
"things in the 11 provinces.
"She makes Holland sacred ground."
This account, written by a travel writer,
rather than an art critic or a collector
suggests how directly
The Girl spoke to this
early 20th century
generation of art lovers.
It fascinated viewers
because of Vermeer's luminous
painting techinque and
because it could not be
precisely defined and described.
It was Dutch but not quite Dutch.
It was exotically Eastern
and had a human interest
that was beyond description.
Lucas pointedly recognized
that Vermeer's genius
lay in his ability to fuse
the specifics of Dutch realism
with the universal and the spiritual.
With such an enthusiastic response already
coming its way, how is it that
The Girl with a Pearl Earring
has sold for only two gilders in 1881?
Go back to that question.
It turns out that the
exceedingly low price
was a bit of luck and
old fashioned collusion.
Vermeer's paintings had by then in fact
already achieved great reknowned thanks
to Troy Briget and they
were avidly collected
both in the Netherlands and abroad.
The full scope of Vermeer's erv, however,
was still being defined and collectors
were searching hard
for undiscovered works.
As luck would have it, in
this instance, only two
individuals recognized that
The Girl, in poor condition
and unattributed was by Vermeer.
One of the them, on the left here,
was the powerful Victor de Stures,
influential head of the
Department of Arts and Sciences
in the Netherlands who
was intent on preserving
the country's artistic heritage.
The other was a wealthy
collector from the Hague,
A.A. de Tombe.
Apparently, the two men secretly agreed
that they would not bid against each other
with the understanding that de Tombe
would eventually bequeathe
the painting to the state.
Indeed he did so and it entered
the Mauritshuis's collection
at his death in 1902.
An x-radiograph, and you
have an image outside
of the painting during
the restoration but now
the x-radiograph, which
shows you the build up
of the paint.
For those of you who
don't know much about,
you can see this gray area.
That shows lead white and
these black areas are losses.
in the paint.
So the x-radiograph shows
you that the painting
actually has numerous losses, paint losses
all throughout and throughout
the face in particular.
So we can imagine, we
don't know what it looked
like then but we can
imagine that its appearance
had been seriously
compromised by its condition.
After acquiring the
painting, de Tome immediately
sent it to a restorer in Antwerp who seems
to have succesfully unified
the modeling of the face.
The discovery of Vermeer's monogram
greatly enhanced the painting's
value and at the time
of his bequest, it was
valued at 40,000 gilders
so that went from two gilders to 40,000
in a matter of just a few years.
A few years later this monetary assessment
was more poetically
expressed by the Dutch artist
Doren Van Yecht, who wrote, "More than any
"other Vermeer one could say that looks
"as if it were blended
from the dust of crushed
"pearls."
The excitement generated by the arrival
of a new Vermeer in the Hague in 1902
was shared by collectors on both sides
of the Atlantic, including as mentioned,
Isabella Steward Gardner
who greatly prized
her Vermeer, "The Concert."
Like de Tome and de Stures,
many of these collectors
felt a social obligation
to share their treasures
with a broader public.
Mrs. Gardner began building her museum
at Fenway Court in 1900
while other American
collectors and wealthy
individuals supported
the country's fledgling
symphonies, libraries,
and museums, among them
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Remarkably, in 1888,
one year after acquiring
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,
Henry Marcon donated to the Met the first
Vermeer to enter an
American public institution.
The public debate, excuse me,
the public debut, let's try that again,
the public debut of
collecting of Dutch art
in America occurred at the
Hudson Fulton Celebration
an exhibition of 150
paintings held at the Met
in 1909.
Villa Valentine, a great
authority on Dutch art,
organized the exhibition.
He wrote in the catalog that the range
and quality of the
paintings in that exhibition
would astonish European art circles,
particularly the 37
paintings by Rembrandt,
20 paintings by Frans Hals,
and remarkably, he says,
six paintings by Vermeer, including
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,
A Woman Writing, which was then owned
by J.P. Morgan, and Girl
Interupted at a Music,
here at the Frick which
was owned at that point
by Henry Clay Frick.
Valentina was right, the
exhibition did astonish
and it brought Vermeer to the awareness
of a broader American public.
One reporter raved, "The
rare and incomprable
"artist Vermeer might
be called a revelation
"and the bright particular
star of this grand collection."
For him, the Young Woman
with the Water Pitcher
was, "one of the immortal productions
"of the art of Holland, a
gem of purest ray serene."
Throughout the course of the 20th century,
art lovers have struggled
to articulate the balance
Vermeer was able to
establish in his paintings
between abstraction and reality,
and between psychological perception
and emotional reserve.
The difficulty of maintaining
this delicate balance
is already evident in
Valentina's assessment
of Vermeer's superiority over other Dutch
genre painters.
Superiority is a term he used.
Echoing E.V. Louis's
observation about The Girl,
Valentina argued that Vermeer was unique
"in his rejection of all detail
"in which his contemporaries
had delighted."
Valentina asserted that Vermeer's power
is concentrated in obtaining
a perfection of surface
as well as in the wonderful play of light,
the way he blended the
few colors he employed
into a "perfect harmony."
Importantly, Valentina
emphasized the aesthetic
qualities of Vermeer's
paintings rather than
their mysterious character.
For him, Vermeer's
paintings have a "purely
"aesthetic modern spirit," which he felt
was intimately bound
together with the emotional
detachment of Vermeer's figures who seemed
to exist in a realm
apart from joy or sorrow.
In 1913, shortly after the
Hudson Fulton exhibition,
Phillip Leslie Hale, a Boston
painter who had carefully
studied Vermeer's The
Concert at Fenway Court,
published the first American monograph
on the Dutch master.
A 389 page tome about
the man he considered,
"the greatest painter who has ever lived."
Hale wrote that for him,
as well as for other
Boston painters, "to paint like nature
"is to paint like Vermeer
and in this sense,
"we artists are his followers."
Like Valentina, Hale
was struck by Vermeer's
modernity but as a painter himself,
he went even further than had Valentina
in celebrating the
aesthetic over the human
qualities in Vermeer's works.
"No other master," Hale
explained, "had ever
"attempted to arrive at tone
"by an exquisitely just
"relation of color values.
"An idea," he continued,
"that lies at the root
"of all really good modern painting.
"Significantly," Hale
asserted, "if ever a man
"believed in art for
art's sake, it was he.
"Vermeer anticipated the modern idea
"of impersonality in
art, he makes no comment
"on the picture.
"One does not see by his composition
"what he thought of it at all."
Portrait of a Young Girl
was as Hale called it
epitomized Vermeer's modernity.
There is no other head
that one could think of
that is rendered more purely or simply
by just light and shade than this.
No painter ever made anything more
by simple light and shade
than are the eyes, nose,
and mouth of this head.
Simply, the mouth is
made light where it came
light and dark where it
was dark and there is no
handling visible.
"One cannot in any way see
how the color was floated on.
"The form is simply
there, perfectly rendered,
"the means of its making quite concealed."
And it's interesting that
almost as an afterthought,
the last sentence of his
account says about The Girl,
"Viewers, please note in
parting the marvelously
"painted ear pendant."
In the early 20th century,
much of the appeal
of Vermeer's paintings
lay in their perceived
modernity and their aesthetic qualities.
One must remember that the judgments
of Valentina and Hale were being expressed
just when Pete Mondrian
was beginning to paint
his abstract images of nature.
For these writers, Vermeer's paintings
were like treasured jewels, radiant
and harmonious in their parts
yet emotionally cool and removed.
This approach came to dominate Vermeer
studies for the next 50
years, not only because
his painting had little
anecdotal detail or obvious
narrative content but
also because Vermeer's
life story remained shrouded in mystery.
Unlike assessments of Rembrandt's works,
analyses of Vermeer's paintings were often
separated from biographical
considerations.
It was frequently noted that when Vermeer
came to paint his self-portrait
in The Art of Painting,
he turned away from the viewer.
After World War II, a
new strain of scholarship
entered into Vermeer studies and interest
in the apparent accuracy of his images.
This was really stressed
by the Dutch art historian,
P.T.A. Swillens, who was
fascinated with Vermeer's
use of perspective.
And was convinced that
the artist carefully
and precisely depicted
the world about him.
In his 1941 monograph, Swillent famously
devised perspective
constructions to calculate
the exact shape and size
of the artist studios
in the rooms he depicted.
Constructions that have spawned many
subsequent theories about Vermeer's uses
of lenses and camera obscuras.
Interesting, Swillen's
conviction that Vermeer
only painted reality also
spilled over into the realm
of biography, particularly in regard
to The Girl with a Pearl Earring.
In his discussion of The Girl's Head
which was his title,
Swillens wrote at length
about the girl's possible identity,
speculating that she might
have been one of Vermeer's
daughters.
Finally, had to reject his
thesis since as he rightly
concluded, none of the
daughters would have been
the right age for the model when Vermeer
painted this work in the mid-1660's
but whomever the model,
Swillens fully believed
that the artist had not
attempted to beautify, his term,
or improve on her appearance.
Every element of the
image for him was accurate
and explainable, including her expression.
He wrote that the girl's
eyes, "follow the painters
"work and perhaps the half open mouth
"is the result of her interest.
"She is thinking of nothing
else than being painted."
Rather than being mysterious or eastern,
Swillens asserted that her
blue yellow headcovering
was a special children's
dress which helped explain
the paintings, "simplicity and naivete."
Little did he know that
the author Tracy Chevalyay
who is not as concerned
about reality as was Swillens
would later come up
with a perfect solution
but more on that development later.
I mention Swillens at
length because of his
influence on Vermeer's scholarship
when I was a student in
the 1960's and the 1970's.
His factual and descriptive approach
and his emphasis on
artists realistic portrayal
of the world about him
overrode the earlier
assessments of Valentina and Hale
which emphasized Vermeer's modernity
and in particular the
aesthetic and emotional
restrained character of his paintings.
In retrospect, it is
striking that both approaches
overlook one of the
most compelling aspects
of Vermeer's work for
contemporary viewers,
the mystery and emotional intensity
of his paintings.
Something that E.V. Lucas and other early
observers of Girl with a Pearl Earring
had found so compelling.
So what does this overview
of earlier 20th century
approaches to Vermeer's
work tell us about his
paintings and how does
it help us with our own
encounters with Girl with a Pearl Earring?
One conclusion is easily
reached is that the lust for
the painting has not dimmed
since it was discovered
in 1881 but that each
generation has found it
compelling in very different ways.
That quality I feel strongly is testiment
to the timeless character of this image,
something that Vermeer
instilled in so many
of his paintings, even as with
The Girl in Blue Reading
a Letter, they seemed
drawn from everyday reality.
The timelessness of Vermeer's images also
have helps explain, I
think, why people stood
so long in line to view
Vermeer's paintings
in the 1995/1996 exhibition.
Although they carefully
admired his carefully
conceived, aesthetically created works,
the apparent realism of them,
and the apparent realism of them,
they were primarily there
because these paintings
satisfy some fundamental need.
The letters and poems
written by these visitors
frequently focused on the
inner peace and serenity
that they felt before one
of Vermeer's paintings.
The subtle, understated
dramas of his images
whether the nature of
the text being read by
this lady in blue or that
being written by the young
woman writing the letter
here were captivating
and compelling.
One visitor wrote of The
Girl with the Red Hat,
"The unexpected contact
of her gaze startles,
"time dissolves and we
are part of her world."
Vermeer is a far different figure today
than he would have been for art lovers
in the early 20th century.
More accessible yet more complex,
stories such as his
conversion to Catholocism
because of his love for a young woman
are now known and belie the idea
that he was unemotional and detached.
The early 20th century art lover moreover
had yet to witness the dramatic issues
of theft and forgery that have followed
the artist's rise in popularity.
Stories that highlight
the emotional, monetary,
and political value
with which his paintings
have been invested.
Indeed, all of these components enter into
our appreciation of his paintings today.
Contemporary viewers also have a comfort
level with Vermeer's paintings that stems
in part from familiarity.
Vermeer's paintings are so distinctive
that once seen they are never forgotten
and that is true with his works as varied
as Girl with the Red
Hat, The View of Delft,
and The Girl with a Pearl Earring.
With knowing one, there
is this powerful urge
to see another and yet another for one
can never tire of the beauty
of his light and color
or the sense of peace
that his works bring.
As they're only about 36 known paintings,
it is easy to build a
repertoire of these images
in one's mind and even
to imagine undertaking
the sort of pilgrimage first
traveled by Tori Briget
in the 1860's to see them all.
It was partly to fulfill that
pilgrimage that many braved
the Washington ice and
snow to see the exhibition
I'm sure that has also
been part of the reason
the exhibition here has
been so incredibly popular.
Finally, the enormous appeal
of Vermeer's paintings
is partly due to the
fact that they reproduced
remarkably well.
While reproductions
cannot capture the impact
of scale and texture, they
can effectively convey
the clarity of his compositions,
the purity of his light,
and his distinctive yellows and blues.
None reproduce better than this painting.
This familiarity has also
been enhanced throughout
the 20th century by museum visitation,
travel abroad, art history
courses, the publication
of monographic studies
beginning with those
by Phillip Leslie Hale
and P.T.A. Swillens.
More recently the visual
power of the artist's
paintings have been
appropriated by book cover
designers and images of his paintings
now also grace novels and books of poetry.
By the late 1980's, filmmakers also began
to appropriate Vermeer's images as evident
in this still from the 1983 movie Witness.
It is in the realm of the novel, however,
that Vermeer and his work have had
their broadest impact in popular culture.
For an artist who shunned narrative scenes
and whose life story lacked drama,
Vermeer would seem to
offer few possibilities
for fiction.
Nevertheless, the mystery surrounding
his artistic career and
the dramatic changes
in the appreciation of
his paintings have proven
to be fertile ground for writers.
J. P. Smiths, The
Discovery of Light in 1992
uses The Woman Holding a Balance
as a point of departure for
a story about the ambiguities
of life and the difficulty
of truly understanding
the thoughts of a beloved.
The story travels back and forth
between an imaginative
account of Vermeer's life
in Delft, particularly his relationship
with his wife, Katerina
Bones and the narrator's
own conflicts with his loved ones.
The novel that has done
the most to elevate
The Girl with a Pearl
Earring to iconic status
is, of course, Tracy Chevalier's book
of the same title published in 2000.
After visiting the Vermeer exhibition
when it was in the Hague,
she became entranced
by this painting.
She constructed a moving
story about its genesis
and created a scenario
where the artist's relation
to his family and models come alive
and where the enigmatic
image of this young girl
derive from human needs and concerns.
The novel's popular
success and its subsequent
movie adaptation which Scarlett Johannson
portrays Vermeer's model, Griet,
firmly placed this
painting within the realm
of popular culture.
Partly, I suspect, because
it seemed an answer
at least on a fictional
basis one of the mysteries
surrounding this work,
like who is this woman?
So what can I now add to this discussion
other than to say that I do not believe
that Griet was Vermeer's model
to try to explain why
Girl with a Pearl Earring
has such an allure for
each succeeding generation?
I would like to start by
returning to E.V. Lucas's
fascinating observation that
the painting is in no sense
Dutch.
I am sure that he wrote these
words because at that time
in the early 20th century,
partly through the writings
of Tory Briget, the
excitement of Dutch art
was precisely that it accurately recorded
every aspect of 17th
century life, warts and all.
This painting was somehow very different.
However the real girl
seemed in her winning
charm, he wrote that,
"all that is hard in Dutch
"nature dissolves beneath
her reluctant smile.
"She makes Holland sacred ground."
Indeed, Lucas was right,
set against a dark
undefined background
and dressed in an exotic
costume, this striking young woman cannot
be placed in any specific
context, certainly
not Dutch.
She seems to exist in a different realm,
somewhat beyond the
constraints of time and place.
She does not even hold
an attribute that might,
for example, identify her
as an allegorical figure
perhaps a muse or a cybil.
Almost certainly this
very absence of historic
or iconographic framework helps this image
be so accesible to all of us
viewing her over the years.
Her half open mouth and
liquid eyes impart immediacy
to her presence yet her
purity and her evocative
costume give her a lasting
quality that remains
forever embedded in our consciousness.
Dating this remarkable image has proved
difficult.
Not only because the
costume has no parallel
in the contemporary
Dutch fashions but also
because the absence of
a spacial environment
differs from Vermeer's
interiors genre scenes
of late 1650's and 1660's,
as in Woman with a Balance.
Nevertheless, the way the artist created
his softly diffused
flesh tones by layering
a thin, flesh colored
glaze over an opaque layer
is characteristic of
his paintings techniques
from the mid-1660's and that technique,
you probably cannot make
it out from the slide,
but believe me is how the face of the girl
and The Woman with the Balance is painted.
Also similar is the way
he captured the effect
of light falling across
her face and turban.
Two small white dots on either side
of the girl's mouth echoing the highlights
in her eyes and liven her half smile.
Subtle shadows modulate her left cheek
and reflected light from
her white collar animates
her pearl earring, if it's pearl.
We're not going to get into that one.
Finally, as Vermeer often
did in the mid-1660's,
he painted the shaded portion
of the girl's blue turban
by freely applying broad
glazes of natural alterene
over a dark under paint, thereby creating
a deep residence to those dark blues.
To understand the quiet,
mysterious character
of this image, however,
one needs to turn briefly
to the artist's early career.
His foundation as a history
painter in the mid-1650's
profoundly effected both
the stylistic character
and the thematic focus
of his subsequent works.
Although these paintings, among them
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha,
on the left, and Diana and
Her Companions on the right
are hard to reconcile with
the artist's later works.
They show that he possessed a broadness
of vision and of
execution unlike any other
genre painter of the period.
Whereas, for example, the Leiden artists,
Frans van Mieris painted
in a refined manner
and on a small scale
and this is misleading
because it's a small
little copper about so big.
Vermeer's training as a painter of large,
Biblical, mythological
scenes meant that he was
primarily concerned
with the overall impact
of his image and less
with recording carefully
individual textures and
materials such as did van Mieris.
This is a detail of
the van Mieris painting
where you see how he
rendered in beautiful colors
but how carefully the
materials and fabrics
are rendered and that
broad, application of glaze
on the Vermeer turban where you have these
broad, very broad strokes.
That is entirely
different in the mentality
of how one creates the
semblance of material
in a painting.
Those artistic origins of
painting large paintings,
mythological scenes, Biblical scenes,
helped free him from the focus on detail
that characterizes the genre paintings
of so many of his contemporaries.
When Vermeer turned his attention
to genre scenes and
cityscapes in the late 1650's,
his painting techniques
became more refined
as he sought to emulate the appearance
of reality.
But they always maintained the capacity
to suggest rather than to
describe form and texture
as here in the wonderful
painting in the Frick,
The Officer and the Laughing Girl.
This he sought to do by
capturing the effects
of light in the world about him.
In the Frick painting,
for example, brilliant
sunlight passing through the open window
and the translucent panes of glass creates
shimmering specular highlights
on the yellow stripes
of the woman's sleeves.
On the other hand,
Vermeer's softly modulated
strokes on the map of Holland suggest
the petina of age for in the late 1650's
when Vermeer painted this work, the map
was almost 40 years old.
Thematically, Vermeer's history paintings
depict quiet, brooding
moments that emphasized
the meditative side of life.
This concern is implicit
in Diana and Her Companions
where one of the maidens
with almost sacramental
gravity tenderly touches
the foot of the goddess
in a manner not unlike representations
of Mary Magdalene cleansing
the foot of Christ.
These concerns underlie
the distinctive character
of Vermeer's apparent (mumbles) scenes
of the 1660's which have a seriousness
of purpose that has virtually no parallel
in Dutch painting at the time.
This quality is particularly
evident in Vermeer's
paintings that focus
on a woman in the midst
of her daily activities.
In such quiet moments of contemplation
when one gazes outward but looks inward,
Vermeer discovered a window into
that individual's spiritual nature.
Here, a woman stands
transfixed near the corner
of a room as she gazing into a mirror
holds the ribbons of her pearl necklace
tautly in her hands.
The scene is a familiar one
yet it transcends the common
occurrences of daily life.
All movement has stopped
as though the young woman
has just seen herself in the
mirror for the first time.
The gesture, the mirror,
the pearls together
form a positive sense of
wholeness, truthfulness,
and purity.
While The Girl with a Pearl Earring shares
a fundamental relationship with Vermeer's
other paintings, it is
nevertheless different
in many respects.
As mentioned, the girl's head is situated
against a dark background,
is larger and closer
to the picture plane than
in any of his genre scenes.
While Vermeer may have
arrived at this compositional
solution on his own, stylistic connections
with a painting of Michael
Sweerts are so striking
the possibility of contact
between these two artists
should be raised.
Although though Sweerts
was a native of Brussels
and had lived for a
number of years in Rome,
where he had been associated with the
Academia de San Luca,
he lived in Amsterdam
in the early 1660's.
Vermeer had contacts in Amsterdam
and the two artists could
have met at that time.
And this painting as many
of you know is in Hartford
in the Atheneum and this is one of many
of these types of heads that he painted.
So Sweerts was also
Catholic, devout Catholic.
And shared with Vermeer the ideal
of investing scenes of daily
life with classical dignity,
an ideal that has its origins
in the Italian traditions
even more so than in Dutch.
Much as with The Girl
with a Pearl Earring,
Sweerts busts are used
with similar pure profile,
set against dark undefined backgrounds
also stare out of the picture
plane with wet, lucid eyes
and at least one wears an exotic turban.
No document links these two artists
but their shared interest
in creating a timeless
sense of beauty and harmony in their works
is compelling.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
is in many respects,
the purist expression
of Vermeer's classicism,
a stylistic characteristic
that unifies his entire
(mumbles) from his earlier
Biblical and mythological
paintings to his late genre scenes.
The balance, harmony, and timelessness
epitomize his work is here
distilled to its very essence
where every stroke,
however freely rendered
and every contour,
however natural its forms
is placed with intuitive
sense of purpose and place.
Indeed, the process by
which Vermeer achieved
these effects can never be fully explained
for his classicism is uniquely his own,
seemingly created without
careful mathematical
or geometrical underpinnings.
Vermeer's classicism is
not just compositional,
it is thematic as well.
His images inevitably explore
realms of physical beauty,
moments of moral choice and expressions
of spiritual belief that
probe to the very essence
of the human experience.
Here in an image that is
both physically beautiful
and spiritually pure,
Vermeer has captured an ideal
that fully bridges the
realm between the public
and the private where
the individual stands
for ideals that are enduring and shared
by all humanity.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
