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WORK TITLE: Traces of Vermeer
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://tracesofvermeer.com/index.html
CITY: Oxford
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Painter.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Art and Perception.
SIDELIGHTS
A painter of still life and landscapes, Jane Jelley was attracted to the technical qualities of Johannes Vermeer’s works. In her 2017 book, Traces of Vermeer, she asks and answers questions about the methods he might have used. Vermeer’s paintings were sometimes blurred, yet the subjects were exceptionally illuminated, there were shifts in focus, and there is no evidence of preliminary sketches or descriptions of how he worked. A mystery developed as to how he achieved his unique vision. Some in the art world wondered if he used a camera obscura, projecting a scene onto a canvas and painting the image there. Using her knowledge and experience of earlier painting techniques, such as use of lapis lazuli, sheep bones, soot, and rust, Jelley attempted to recreate Vermeer’s work using a camera obscura. Her findings were published in the journal Art and Perception.
In the book, Jelley observes that there appears to be no drawing in Vermeer’s painting and that a projected image from a lens or camera obscura could have been used to create a tonal makeup allowing him to “invent” the subject. Jelley believes this was the first step in his scenes from which he used multiple colors, which he ground himself, captured light, and brought viewers into the action. A Kirkus Reviews contributor said of the book: “Featuring wonderful illustrations, engaging prose, and a deep knowledge of the craft, this is a study in art history and methodology to delight an audience beyond just visual artists.”
In an article by Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor, Jelley commented on Vermeer’s legacy: “The task of an artist is to make his picture something more than the sum of its parts; and very few ever have managed this better than Vermeer.” Donoghue added that all the modern technology and analysis of charcoal dust and lensing gadgets “won’t ultimately bring us usefully closer to understanding why we venerate this painter while forgetting so many of his peers. As Jelley points out, the paintings are more than the sum of their methods and ingredients.”
Commenting on Jelley’s findings and reproductions using the camera obscura, writer Simon Jenkins explained in the Guardian, “To discover that Vermeer used printing to express his message is merely to state that he was an artist of real life. He was the Andy Warhol of his day, the golden age equivalent of Hockney, who uses his index finger as a paintbrush to create pictures on his iPad.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, November 2, 2017, Steve Donoghue, review of Traces of Vermeer.
Guardian, August 10, 2017, Simon Jenkins, review of Traces of Vermeer.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Traces of Vermeer.
'Traces of Vermeer' strives to figure out the actual nitty-gritty of Vermeer's craft
Steve Donoghue
The Christian Science Monitor. (Nov. 2, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Steve Donoghue
Juriaan van Streeck was born in Amsterdam in 1632. He married at 21, had nine children, moved around from job to job, and was for years an extremely accomplished painter specializing in still lifes of remarkable texture and craft. He died in 1687, and today, four centuries later, his name is known only to a few art dealers and connoisseurs of the Golden Age of Dutch painting
Also born in 1632, less than 50 miles away in the Dutch town of Delft, was another painter. He, too, married at 21, had children (15 instead of nine), moved around from job to job, and was for years an extremely accomplished painter specializing in works of remarkable texture and craft - landscapes, still lifes, and scenes of intimate home life. He died about a decade earlier than Juriaan van Streeck, in 1675, but his name is known all over the world. He's more famous in the modern era than he was in his own day, and the last of his paintings to come to auction sold for $30 million. He's Johannes Vermeer, and he's the subject of Traces of Vermeer, a meaty and intensely interesting new book by Jane Jelley.
In a very real sense, almost every book ever written about Vermeer has tried to understand the difference between him and Juriaan van Streeck - or any of dozens of other painters of his time - and this latest is no exception. Jelley is a painter in her own right, and she writes with that hard-won authority: "The task of an artist is to make his picture something more than the sum of its parts; and very few ever have managed this better than Vermeer."
She undertakes the task of figuring out the actual nitty-gritty of Vermeer's craft - the composition of the pigments he used, the feel of the canvas on which he worked, the marvelously shifting play of light, which seems particularly to fascinate her. "Vermeer's subjects seem to be illuminated more strongly than you would expect," she writes, "that they contain more light than they receive through the windows." In her book's best chapter, she not only delves in-depth into the controversial question of whether or not Vermeer used a camera obscura apparatus and merely traced and reversed its projections in order to achieve his results but attempts to re-create the process herself. She notes with finely-controlled irony the impatience of modern-day analysts to solve the mystery of this painter: "How can anything be beyond us? We, who have the technology at our command to project a voice across the world; to tranquilize a tiger; to cure a plague." Surely, she taunts this consensus, the centuries-old work of this one painter shouldn't baffle.
She comes up with her own theories about those oddly, indefinably gorgeous paintings, and having sampled her evidence, readers will no doubt argue vigorously. Through her own understanding of the craft, she comes as close as anybody can to understanding both the mechanics and the inner lives of masterpieces like "A Lady Writing," "Young Woman with a Water Jug," "A Woman Holding a Balance," or "Girl with a Pearl Earring." And she's bluntly honest enough to acknowledge repeatedly that these investigations only reach so far. "The frustration is, that whatever answers we suggest to the puzzles Vermeer left behind, the only certainty is that we will never know if we are right," she writes. "He has left his masterpieces behind; accompanied only by a deep silence."
Along the way, however, Jelley infuses her descriptions of Vermeer's world with a vivid immediacy, taking readers into the hustle and bustle of market day in Delft ("Everywhere there is a throng of people, eager to be out, to share a joke, exchange gossip"), or down the narrow streets in a storm: "The squalls sweep across the cobbled streets, and swirl in arcs across canals; piercing their swollen surfaces with a thousand hissing needles. Water drums against brick, stone, and tiles, it sheets from the steep roofs, and twists in fat, dark streams out of the gutters onto the alleyways." It quickly becomes an immersive reading experience, like an excellent historical novel with 62 pages of fine-type end notes attached to help with further inquiries.
"Scientific analyses can tell us what pigments and oils were on his canvas, and indicate the order in which the paint was applied," Jelley writes. "It cannot tell us what Vermeer actually did." And this is the key concession of her book: that all the analysis in the world of charcoal dust and lensing gadgets and print-tracing won't ultimately bring us usefully closer to understanding why we venerate this painter while forgetting so many of his peers. As Jelley points out, the paintings are more than the sum of their methods and ingredients, which are the only "traces" of Vermeer we can track and duplicate. The rest is magic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donoghue, Steve. "'Traces of Vermeer' strives to figure out the actual nitty-gritty of Vermeer's craft." Christian Science Monitor, 2 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512967473/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f64f4279. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512967473
Vermeer was an authentic artistic genius -- even if he did cheat; Who cares if, as a sensational new book argues, the painter traced and copied to achieve his effects? What matters is that the end results were sublime
The Guardian (London, England). (Aug. 10, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Simon Jenkins
Johannes Vermeer was a cheat. He was a printmaker, a tracer, a copyist. Some might say he was not a real artist at all. So suggests Jane Jelley in a new book, Traces of Vermeer, on the Dutch master. It is borderline sensational.
Related: Vermeer: the artist who taught the world to see ordinary beauty
I was once a Vermeer groupie. I fell in love with his painting The Guitar Player when it was briefly stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead, and set out to discover who this perplexing girl might have been. I hunted down almost all the 36 (or so) Vermeers across Europe and America, and corresponded with the Vermeer pundits John Michael Montias and Arthur Wheelock. In 2004 I went with Tracy Chevalier, author of the delightful novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, to open the bidding in the Sotheby's auction of the last painting to be attributed to Vermeer -- and endured an agonising few seconds until a next bid came in.
Almost nothing is known of Vermeer but that he died at 43 and in debt. Assiduous digging has concluded that he was nothing like Chevalier's moody bohemian with a sexy assistant. He was the son of a Protestant art dealer who trained as an artist but fell in love with a Catholic girl, Catharina, and went to live in her mother's house in Delft's Catholic quarter. The couple were clearly close for the rest of their lives, having 15 children, of whom 11 survived.
Vermeer spent his time trying to earn money from picture dealing and property. He can have had little time for painting. There was no studio or apprentices, no sketches or drawings, and Vermeer's tiny oeuvre, even allowing for losses, suggests painting was virtually a hobby. He painted at home, his subjects were domestic and his models were probably his ever-pregnant wife, daughters (including the girl wearing a pearl earring and the guitarist) and their maid, Tanaka.
Related: Girl With The Pearl Earring: what's the story behind the famous painting?
One thing we do know about Vermeer is that Delft in the mid-17th century was crazy about lenses. After seeing through one, a contemporary wrote: "All painting is dead in comparison." The local lens master was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a known friend and trustee of Vermeer's. Two of the latter's paintings, The Astronomer and The Geographer, depict a man in a similar way to prints of van Leeuwenhoek.
Vermeer must have lived among lenses. Many historians have therefore wondered whether his strangely distorted angles, compositions and perspectives might be the result of the use of a camera obscura, a box or cupboard into which an image is projected on to its far side. David Hockney regards this as the only explanation for some of the paintings, which would be virtually impossible to execute using the naked eye. But hard evidence is lacking, and most experts take the view that Vermeer was too great a genius to have dabbled in fads.
Yet there are puzzles. X-rays of Vermeers show no sign of prior sketching or under-drawing, as is normal in old masters. There are no lines or signs of later correction, only a base layer with a dark shadowy outline of the image, beneath later layers of colour.
Jelley claims to have cracked the mystery by trying, as a painter herself, to use a camera obscura to mimic what Vermeer might have done. She set up a box backed by a sheet of greasy paper, on to which she projected her composed scene through a lens. She then traced over the image in dark paint, and laid it paint downwards on a canvas. When she peeled off the paper, the resulting rough print looked just like a Vermeer under-layer. It had the same distorted proportions and unclear shapes, the same exaggerated foreground and off-centre composition. It explained the lack of corrections: it was a facsimile of real life.
I find it exhilarating to learn that Vermeer might have used a sort of printing in his work
To Jelley, Vermeer's genius lay elsewhere, in his choice of subject and, above all, in what he did next, in adding colour to create his ethereal evocation of light. His pictures are a kaleidoscope of splashed shades, at times impressionistic, at times of Jackson Pollock intensity. He treats colours as if they were his orchestra, with his brush as baton. The dispassionate faces are just that, those of his patient family, dragooned into sitting before his box as raw material for his magic.
I find this revelatory and wholly convincing. Jelley devotes a chapter to the history of art innovation, in a Netherlands that was the California of its day, and explores it in depth. We can understand why Vermeer painted so few pictures, and such intimate ones, and was not a big name in his day. He was not the typical image of an old master, a Chevalier sex god or a Puccini bohemian. He was a hard-pressed but happily married man, an optical nerd popping upstairs to tinker with his secret toy, his camera, much as a modern husband might escape to his train set. Genius was an add-on.
These were times when experimenting was second nature for the Dutch. They were the richest nation in Europe, exploring every corner of the world -- and of science. Everything was new and exciting. Vermeer was no "cheat", no fraud or common artisan, though he does appear to have been secretive about his methods. He was an experimenter as much as an artist.
I find it exhilarating to learn that Vermeer might have used a sort of printing in his work. Jelley takes as her text a Georges Braque quote: "Painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion." To discover that Vermeer used printing to express his message is merely to state that he was an artist of real life. He was the Andy Warhol of his day, the golden age equivalent of Hockney, who uses his index finger as a paintbrush to create pictures on his iPad.
There is a modern cult around what constitutes "authenticity" in art, as if real artists should stand at their easels and use the unaided eye -- or real musicians use only ancient instruments. It puts artists in a purist premier league, with a second division for printmakers, illustrators, craftsmen and landscape designers. It is rubbish.
What matters is what we find beautiful. The more I know of Vermeer -- and I now know a lot more -- the greater my admiration for his work. If someone thinks he "cheated", good for them. I wonder what his contemporary Rembrandt got up to.
* Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
CAPTION(S):
Credit: Photograph: Mauritshuis, The Hague
Detail from Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vermeer was an authentic artistic genius -- even if he did cheat; Who cares if, as a sensational new book argues, the painter traced and copied to achieve his effects? What matters is that the end results were sublime." Guardian [London, England], 10 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500220933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=05c1073e. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500220933
Jelley, Jane: TRACES OF VERMEER
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Jelley, Jane TRACES OF VERMEER Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $34.95 10, 1 ISBN: 978-0-19-878972-7
A painter of still life and landscape shares her theories and re-creations of Johannes Vermeer's artistic methods, primarily whether or not he used a camera obscura.Vermeer's paintings have been meticulously studied and analyzed with inconclusive results; facts about Vermeer the man are equally elusive. The lack of information about the man of Delft who lived in his mother-in-law's house with his wife and more than a dozen children might indicate a man of little import. However, his work was appreciated during his (relatively short) life; only hard economic times dried up his customer base. Any artist will love this book because it shows that art is not just the process of putting paint on a surface. Vermeer used many steps to ready his canvas, from hemming the linen to sizing, stretching, smoothing, and priming, followed by a three-month drying period before creating an image. Grinding paints from natural materials and making only enough for a day's painting before they dried up further elongated the process. The author is justifiably enthralled with Vermeer's ability to capture light, how he draws us in to the action, as well as his perfection of composition. Most curiously, there appears to be no drawing in his paintings, only his tonal plan that constituted the "inventing" of the subject. Thus, the possibility of Vermeer using a lens or a camera obscura develops. The projected image would have been perfect to create the tonal makeup that every picture requires. Jelley makes a convincing case that this was only the first step in his creation, and his glazing of multiple colors atop the tonal invention makes perfect sense. The debate will continue, but the more we learn of Vermeer's masterful use of color and light, the more we can love them. Featuring wonderful illustrations, engaging prose, and a deep knowledge of the craft, this is a study in art history and methodology to delight an audience beyond just visual artists.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jelley, Jane: TRACES OF VERMEER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572586/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6a10d4f. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572586