Johannes Vermeer 'The Guitar Player' (circa 1672)

The painting above is done by Johannes Vermeer. He was a Dutch Painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. During his time, music was the food of love. His art is realistic and precociously modern, and yet the musical instruments in his paintings and their association with amorous encounters draw on images and conventions rooted deep in the Renaissance period. In Vermeer's art, these associations of music and desire play out in silently cinematic ways. Music-making is flirtation, suggests Vermeer. He worked slowly, and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for 'cornflower blue' and 'yellow'. There is no other seventeeeth century artist who early in his career employed, in the most lavish way, exorbitantly expensive pigment like 'lapis lazuli', or natural 'ultramarine'. The earth colours 'umber' and 'ochre' were used a lot in his paintings, as they depicted warm light within a strogly lit interior. Vermeer's works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. I find his work outstanding, and I think I will feature some of these other exceptional artwork in later posts. Along with a lot of his painitings, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can be found in his work.
A collection of his paintings will be exhibited in the National Gallery, London from 26th June until 8th September 2013.


Andrew Ioannidis