Posted on Saturday 3 April 2004

David Tiley of Barista informs me that a previously unrecognised Vermeer painting, Young Woman at a Virginal, has been recently authenticated. This brings the total of number of known paintings by the artist to thirty six.

I remember seeing some of Vermeer's works at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years back and I was struck by two things about them. Firstly, and most predictably, I was very impressed by their exquisite use of light and the wonderfully realistic way that light is diffused and reflected thoughout the scene. They are like frozen moments from the 17th century, moments of sublime calmness.

Secondly I was surprised by how small they actually were: each canvas was barely half a metre in width. This was surprising to me because, having previously marveled (in reproduction) at the extraordinary amount of detail that Vermeer managed put into his paintings, I had always assumed that these had been painted on much larger canvases.

I'm certainly not the first to notice the almost photographic realism of Vermeer's work but it was Jason Streed who first clued me in on one of the missing pieces in my understanding about this. Vermeer's paintings are so photo-realistic because in a very real sense they actually are photographs.

While little is definitively known about Vermeer's life or his painting techniques, it now seems almost certain that he composed his works with aid of a camera obscura. This device, from which evolved the basic structure of the modern camera, is a darkened room with a small hole in it and a lens which enables light to enter and be projected onto its back wall. The camera obscura had been written about in the 17th century by Johannes Kepler and Athanasius Kircher but had been known about for a considerably longer time than that. It would have enabled Vermeer to project his subject matter directly onto his canvas and this would have allowed him to achieve two things: the accurate reconstruction of the scene's perspective without needing to resort to the geometrical construction approach that was commonly used by his contemporaries. But even more importantly when we consider the most characteristic feature of Vermeer's paintings - their extremely natural depiction of ambient lighting - the camera obscura would have greatly assisted him in accurately assigning tonal shading to different parts of the scene.

When one of Vermeer's paintings was examined using x-rays instead of showing up the lines of a preliminary sketch as would have been expected in the work of other artists, surprising all that was found was another painting, but this time a coarser monochrome version of the scene that had been painted in lead-white. It is thought that despite the advantages of using a camera obscura, Vermeer must also have worked under considerable difficulties (and this may go some way to explaining why he left so few paintings to posterity). Working in a darkened box and painting over an extremely dim image projected on a screen it would have been impossible for Vermeer to accurately match the colours of the scene that he was painting. So instead, it seems likely that he would have initially worked in black and white and only later as he emerged from his dark room could he apply the colours in a more conventional way.

Other factors that point to Vermeer's use of the camera obscura have to do with the unconventional approach that Vermeer took to using perspective. He painted things realistically instead of following the conventions of his pre-photographic era (contrast the perspective of the above painting with one of his Dutch contemporaries, Gerrit van Honthorst). He also reproduced optical artifacts that could only have been caused by his lens such as the slight blurring of some of the foreground objects. A very good examination of these issues can be found at this site.

Vermeer 'The Music Lesson' c.1662-64 oil on canvas

Scale model of 'The Music Lesson'

Anyway, to get back to this "new" painting.

It appears that it in the final analysis it was the type of paint rather than compositional method that marked this work as an original. Vermeer was especially careful to use the very best paints to capture his light and he lavished a particularly expensive paint made from lapis lazuli on many of his works, something that none of his contemporaries were known to have done.

Admittedly, the painting itself is not one of his most inspired works and it looks somewhat like a sketch for one of his more ambitious works. Nevertheless, given that Vermeer's total output spans a mere three dozen paintings, this one comes as a very welcome addition.