Vermeer’s method

Like some artists of his time Vermeer would start blocking out of his paintings using grey tones to depict light and massing and this would be followed by colour. It seems clear that he used a camera obscura as assistance for many of his paintings(3). It is possible he used it as a compositional tool while moving around his furniture props and adjusting light and for perfecting certain qualities of light and highlights that seem to have the quality of a lens. Additionally some of the compositions have somewhat distorted perspective that would suggest the use of a shifted lens. A close acquaintance of his was a lens maker and pioneer in microscopy(4). It seems clear from Vermeer’s methods and even his subjects, The Art of Painting and The Astronomer for example that he saw a parallel between new advances in scientific ways of seeing and his own innovations in painting. While these innovations allowed the universe and microcosm to be seen more closely and with greater clarity it also distanced the observer, objects of investigation were less experienced and were now ‘seen through’ instruments, a new distance was created, a new enlightenment objectivity that placed the observer in an exacting position (5).

Along with his use of the camera obscura it seems he used his studio as an adjustable lighting tool. The many methods of controlling light through his three windows allowed him to control illumination depending on what part of his paintings he was working on, characters, furniture, walls etc. The three windows in his studio could be adjusted by using internal shutters at high or low level, net curtains or heavy drapes to give a rich variety of lighting types and combinations. The process of recreating his studio space and working through a wide variety of lighting conditions has led us to the tentative conclusion that his paintings are often the result of selective lighting and therefore become a type of montage of subtly different lighting effects, a montage also therefore of different periods of time. This was a common method of landscape artists of the same period. It is clear that the space and the light in each of his paintings is of foremost importance, their realism is central to the viewer’s perception of being peripheral to the space.

But what are the subjects of these quiet paintings? The characters’ circumstances? An event? Or is there a case to be made for his paintings to be simply sophisticated developments of the new genre of interior paintings that had surfaced in Holland within his own lifetime? This was a genre that delighted in atmosphere created by light and shadow and receding volumes, often of church interiors. At first they had incorporated allusions to allegorical scenes and local colour or views of the city, but as with many genres of the time they were being refined during the second half of the 17th Century to a pure form (6). Curiously though most of Vermeer’s paintings feature a window which is being used by characters for illumination, writing, reading, cooking, weighing etc. we never see through windows, they are sources of light rather than frames upon the world outside. This interiority echoes the introspection of the characters, in their minds they are somewhere else. It seems as though Vermeer’s rooms are spaces to imagine and in that we find another paradox that in finding new forms of objective vision they are used to interpret architectural form as subjective experience (7).