How Vermeer Painted Light

Vermeer light comes from three habits you can check on any of his interiors. It usually enters through a window on the left; it lands on walls that are painted grey, blue or ochre rather than white; and it is finished with tiny raised dots and single strokes of pale paint that read, from a step away, as gleam. Below, seven paintings looked at one by one, each against its museum’s own record.

There are not many to choose from. The Mauritshuis says that only 36 paintings by him are known, because he spent a long time on each one. Walter Liedtke of the Metropolitan Museum suggests he made perhaps about forty-five in all, of which thirty-six survive, much of his output going to a single Delft collector, Pieter van Ruijven.

Vermeer light starts with a window on the left

Start in New York with Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662, oil on canvas, 18 x 16 inches (45.7 x 40.6 cm), Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889. The Met notes it was the first work by Vermeer to enter an American collection. A woman stands at an open window with a gilt silver pitcher and basin, linen coverings protecting her dress and hair.

On the museum’s audio guide the curator Adam Eaker says that, as far as the surviving evidence goes, Vermeer had a favourite room in his house where the light was particularly good, and that most of his paintings are set in it, at some version of the window we see on the left. Look at what that window does here. The light gilds the edges of the pitcher and basin so they look more solid, and it shines through the linen headdress and collar until they seem almost translucent.

Then look at the bottom left corner, which is dark. The window lights the figure and leaves the nearest part of the room in shadow, so your eye moves from shade to light the way it would in a real room. Vermeer is not lighting everything. He is choosing what the light finds.

The Milkmaid: light as a texture

The Rijksmuseum’s The Milkmaid, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm, shows a maidservant pouring milk from a jug into a pot. The museum’s catalogue description lists what is on the table: a basket with bread and a stone jug. On the left is a window, with a wicker basket and a copper pot. Low on the right-hand wall runs a row of tiles, with a foot-warmer on the floor.

The museum’s own summary puts it in a sentence: Vermeer had an eye for how light, by means of hundreds of colourful dots, plays over the surface of objects. Look at the bread. The crust is not modelled smoothly but built from separate beads of paint, so it catches light like a real crust does. Everything in the picture is still except the stream of milk, which is the one thing the light has to follow.

Woman Reading a Letter: a wall that is never white

The Rijksmuseum’s Woman Reading a Letter, c. 1663, 46.5 x 39 cm, is the clearest lesson in the colour of light. A young woman stands by a table and chairs, reading a letter in the morning light, still wearing her blue night jacket. Behind her a map hangs on rollers.

The museum points to two things. Every colour in the picture is secondary to its lapis lazuli blue. And the innovations are in the shadows: the woman’s skin is rendered with pale grey, and the shadows on the wall with light blue. That is the wall that is never quite white. A plaster wall in morning light is not white at all, and Vermeer paints what it actually is.

Woman Holding a Balance: the pearls that are not there

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664, oil on canvas, painted surface 39.7 x 35.5 cm, Widener Collection, is lit by a window high in the upper left corner, partly covered by a yellow curtain. The light falls on the woman’s face and hands and on the white fur bordering her blue morning jacket. On the table lie open boxes, a blue cloth, gold chains and strands of pearls. Behind her hangs a painting of the Last Judgment.

For a long time viewers assumed she was weighing pearls or gold. The NGA’s catalogue entry, by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., says microscopic examination shows otherwise. Vermeer paints pearls in two layers, a thin greyish layer with a highlight on top. The bright spot in the left pan of the balance is a single layer, a highlight only. Wheelock reads these points as reflections of light from the window rather than objects. The pans are empty.

That finding is a perfect summary of his method. He could make a dot of pale paint stand for an object, or for light on an object, and he knew precisely which was which.

Girl with a Pearl Earring: two strokes

The Mauritshuis in The Hague is blunt about its most famous picture, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665. It is not a portrait but a tronie, a painting of an imaginary figure in exotic dress. The face is modelled with gradual transitions and invisible brushstrokes; the clothing is painted more schematically and enlivened with small dots of paint suggesting reflected light, one of his trademarks.

The pearl, the museum says, is too large to be real, probably an imitation. It consists of little more than two strokes: a bright highlight at upper left and the soft reflection of the white collar on the underside. There is not even a hook. Look closely and you will see that the most famous jewel in Dutch painting is mostly the reflection of a collar.

Outdoors: The Little Street and View of Delft

Vermeer’s light works outside too. The Rijksmuseum’s The Little Street, c. 1658, is a portrait of ordinary houses, now identified as Vlamingstraat 40-42 in Delft. The museum notes that the old walls, with their bricks, whitewash and cracks, are almost tangible. The daylight here is soft rather than dramatic, which lets the texture of the brick do the work.

The Mauritshuis’s View of Delft, c. 1660-1661, is the opposite: a city seen from the south-east across the water, divided into three horizontal strips of water, city and sky. The museum points out that Vermeer bathed the spire of the New Church in full sunshine and moved it a little towards the centre. He painted its sunlit side in a creamy layer of yellow paint.

One more detail from the Mauritshuis is wonderful. The cloudy sky is visible through the open belfry windows because there are no bells in the tower. The bells were hung between May 1660 and the autumn of 1661, exactly when Vermeer was painting, so the light passing through that tower dates the picture.

A novelist’s patch of yellow wall

The Mauritshuis records that Marcel Proust called View of Delft the most beautiful painting in the world. In his novel The Captive, the writer Bergotte, ill, goes to an exhibition because a critic has praised a little patch of yellow wall in the picture. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation calls it Vermeer’s Street in Delft, lent by the Gallery at The Hague; the Hague picture of Delft is View of Delft. Standing in front of it, Bergotte judges his own work:

“That is how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.”

Marcel Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, chapter I

Several coats of paint is exactly right as a writer’s envy. The Mauritshuis describes the spire’s sunlit side as a creamy layer of yellow: paint with body, laid on so that it seems to hold the light rather than merely show it.

What about the camera obscura?

You will often read that Vermeer traced projected images from a camera obscura. Treat that as a debate, not a fact. Liedtke’s essay for the Met puts the balanced view: Vermeer’s preoccupation with light and with effects such as sudden recessions and changes of focus may have been inspired by an interest in the camera obscura, but its importance to him has been greatly exaggerated.

His compositions are mostly invented, Liedtke writes. The spire the Mauritshuis says he moved is a reminder that he rearranged what any lens would have shown him.

Seven paintings at a glance

To practise this kind of looking on any painting, the order in how to look at a painting works well with Vermeer, because his edges and corners are always deliberate. For the novel about the model for the Girl with a Pearl Earring, see novels about painters. For a painter who used light in the opposite way, to express feeling rather than record it, see what Van Gogh painted in The Starry Night, and the wider split in Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism.

Next time you see Woman Holding a Balance, look at the frame of the Last Judgment behind her. The NGA notes that its bottom edge is slightly higher to the left of the woman than behind her back, a small shift that makes room for the balance in her hand.

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, 89.15.21 (object page and audio guide): metmuseum.org
• Walter Liedtke, “Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met: metmuseum.org
• Rijksmuseum, The Milkmaid, SK-A-2344: rijksmuseum.nl
• Rijksmuseum, Woman Reading a Letter, SK-C-251: rijksmuseum.nl
• Rijksmuseum, View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’, SK-A-2860: rijksmuseum.nl
• National Gallery of Art, Woman Holding a Balance, 1942.9.97, entry by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.: nga.gov
• Mauritshuis, Girl with a Pearl Earring: mauritshuis.nl
• Mauritshuis, View of Delft: mauritshuis.nl
• Marcel Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Project Gutenberg Australia: gutenberg.net.au