Johannes Vermeer
About 35 paintings, a fortune's worth of ultramarine, and a widow left in debt.
- Lived
- 1632–1675
- Paintings
- About 34 universally accepted
- Signature pigment
- Natural ultramarine
Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) spent his life in Delft painting quiet rooms full of daylight, like the kitchen of The Milkmaid. He worked slowly, perhaps a few paintings a year, and only about 34 are universally accepted as his today. He also dealt in art, and when the war of 1672 wrecked the Dutch art market he stopped selling. He died at 43; his widow was left with 11 children and debts.
His great extravagance was color. No other 17th-century painter used natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli and at times as costly as gold, so lavishly or so early in his career. He used it not only for blue things but under other colors: beneath the shadows of the red dress in The Girl with the Wine Glass, a layer of ultramarine gives the red a crisp, slightly purple coolness.
In The Milkmaid the blue cloth is ultramarine, the bodice a bright lead-tin yellow, and the white wall is built from lead white, umber and charcoal black. In Girl with a Pearl Earring the turban is natural ultramarine and lead white, and he even put ultramarine in the shadows of her yellow jacket. Its near-black background was once a green glaze, made with indigo and a yellow dye, weld, that have faded.
After his death he was nearly forgotten for two centuries, until the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger championed him in the 1860s and nicknamed him 'the Sphinx of Delft'. His pairing of clear yellow with ultramarine blue is now one of the most recognizable in Western painting (see value for how his light works).
Swatches
- Ultramarine · turban, apron (approx.)
- Lead-tin yellow · bodice (approx.)
- Lead white · walls and light (approx.)
Colors
Sources
- Mauritshuis, The Hague. Girl with a Pearl Earring: research project (2018).
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Milkmaid: technical notes.
- National Gallery, London. The altered appearance of ultramarine in the paintings of Vermeer.
- Wikipedia, 'Johannes Vermeer'.
- Delaney, J. K., Dooley, K. A., van Loon, A. & Vandivere, A. (2020). Mapping the pigment distribution of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Heritage Science 8: 4.
- Essential Vermeer, 'The Girl with the Wine Glass' (after Wheelock 1995): ultramarine under the shadows of the red dress.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.