Portraits Menu
Famous Artists
Your FAQ's
Extras
FAMOUS ARTISTS - NEW!
Paul Cezanne | Jan Vermeer
Renoir | Gustav Klimt | Paul Gaugin
Modigliani | August Macke | Matisse
Toulouse-Lautrec | Camille Pissarro Monet | Vincent Van Gogh | Manet Degas More
Renoir | Gustav Klimt | Paul Gaugin
Modigliani | August Macke | Matisse
Toulouse-Lautrec | Camille Pissarro Monet | Vincent Van Gogh | Manet Degas More
 Johannes Vermeer 1632 - 1975 The Dutch school of the seventeenth century produced, in effect, a documentary of every aspect of their daily lives. Each painter had his specialty, from tall ships to dead pheasants. Johannes Vermeer was chiefly concerned with interiors and with one room in particular. It features in so many of his carefully composed works, lit from the left by two windows, it has a tiled floor and one map-hung wall. People within this space always seem intent upon what they are doing but in a very detached way. Vermeer's painted tranquil images did not tally with his real life situation; he and his wife had eleven children. However, there is evidence that Vermeer built himself a space into which, in a sense, he could retreat a camera obscura. It stood at one end of the familiar room, and Vermeer arranged his subjects at the other. First advocated for artists in the 1550s, the camera obscura can be made to any size. A simple darkened box, it has a pinhole or - in Vermeer's case - a lens in the side. The image of an object passes through the aperture and appears upside down on a black canvas fixed to the interior wall. Vermeer would oil-sketch the projected image in black and white; X-ray analysis reveals it beneath the colour layers. Then he would emerge from his "camera" to paint slowly and meticulously the finished version in full daylight. In 1675, his mental and physical health deteriorated and died in Delft.
|
