Author: Anthony Bailey Publisher: Henry Holt and Company ISBN: 9780805067187 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the "golden age" of Dutch culture, the story of one of the world's most beloved -- and most elusive -- painters. In the seventeenth century, industry and commerce thrived in the Dutch city of Delft, as did art and culture. In 1653, the twenty-one-year-old son of an innkeeper, the artist Jan Vermeer, registered as a master painter with the city's Guild. Vermeer married well, had many children, and enjoyed a respectable local reputation as a painter until his death in 1675. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that his genius was widely appreciated. Today, Vermeer's thirty-five paintings are regarded as masterpieces. In Vermeer, Anthony Bailey presents a compelling portrait of Vermeer's life and character, long lost in history. Bailey re-creates the atmosphere of the times, introduces Vermeer's contemporaries, and portrays his domestic life in vibrant detail. Drawing on period documents and his own intense curiosity, Bailey sheds light on the science and artistry behind the glorious, almost mystical, paintings. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Vermeer will stand as the classic work on Vermeer for years to come.
Author: Walter A. Liedtke Publisher: Virago Press ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
The six essays in this book focus upon painting in Delft during the period 1650-1675. Four artists, Carel Fabritius, Gerard Houckgeest, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, are discussed at length. However, these chapters are neither monographic nor int
Author: Anthony Bailey Publisher: Pimlico ISBN: 9781845952068 Category : Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Vermeer has always been considered the most elusive of great artists, but this book tracks him down in his home town. It takes the reader back to seventeenth-century Delft, in a piece of historical writing that does justice to its now timeless subject. Anthony Bailey makes use of the scholarly research that has accumulated in the last century, as well as recent findings, and then reaches beyond these facts to expose the hidden Vermeer. The result is a vivid, convincing portrait of the Protestant innkeeper's son who married a prosperous Catholic girl and had 15 children of whom 11 survived. Vermeer died relatively young and left fewer than 40 pictures. Many of these pictures are indeed masterpieces, and Anthony Bailey examines the scientific expertise which lies behind their calm mystery. He introduces us to Vermeer's colleagues and fellow-citizens, and charts his celebrity as it slowly spread out of Holland and encompassed the world. He examines Vermeer's effect on a range of people as diverse as Proust and Hitler. A View of Delft is a highly original attempt to illuminate Vermeer's life and personality, by setting him imaginatively in the context of Delft, its culture and history.
Author: Philip Steadman Publisher: ISBN: 9780192803023 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Art historians have long speculated on how Vermeer achieved the uncanny mixture of detached precision, compositional repose, and perspective accuracy that have drawn many to describe his work as "photographic." Indeed, many wonder if Vermeer employed a camera obscura, a primitive form of camera, to enhance his realistic effects? In Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman traces the development of the camera obscura--first described by Leonaro da Vinci--weighs the arguments that scholars have made for and against Vermeer's use of the camera, and offers a fascinating examination of the paintings themselves and what they alone can tell us of Vermeer's technique. Vermeer left no record of his method and indeed we know almost nothing of the man nor of how he worked. But by a close and illuminating study of the paintings Steadman concludes that Vermeer did use the camera obscura and shows how the inherent defects in this primitive device enabled Vermeer to achieve some remarkable effects--the slight blurring of image, the absence of sharp lines, the peculiar illusion not of closeness but of distance in the domestic scenes. Steadman argues that the use of the camera also explains some previously unexplainable qualities of Vermeer's art, such as the absence of conventional drawing, the pattern of underpainting in areas of pure tone, the pervasive feeling of reticence that suffuses his canvases, and the almost magical sense that Vermeer is painting not objects but light itself. Drawing on a wealth of Vermeer research and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of the work itself, Philip Steadman offers in Vermeer's Camera a fresh perspective on some of the most enchanting paintings ever created.
Author: Stephan Koja Publisher: ISBN: 9783954986118 Category : Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Johannes Vermeer is one of the most famous works of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Preserved at the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the painting has been restored, in an elaborate process lasting from 2017 to 2021. The removal of a large section of overpainting dating from a later period has profoundly altered the work's appearance and revealed the original composition. To showcase the discovery, the Dresden Gemaldegalerie is now presenting the Girl Reading a Letter along with other masterpieces by Vermeer and a selection of exceptional Dutch genre paintings that reveal parallels and reciprocities between the art of Vermeer and that of his peers. This catalog brings together texts by renowned scholars as they explore not only the restoration of this pivotal work but also fundamental questions on the visual vernacular and essence of Vermeer's painting, his optical realism, his iconography of love, and the lived realities of women in the Dutch Golden Age.
Author: Timothy Brook Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 159691727X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.
Author: John Michael Montias Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691002897 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 486
Book Description
This book is not only a fascinating biography of one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century but also a social history of the colorful extended family to which he belonged and of the town life of the period. It explores a series of distinct worlds: Delft's Small-Cattle Market, where Vermeer's paternal family settled early in the century; the milieu of shady businessmen in Amsterdam that recruited Vermeer's grandfather to counterfeit coins; the artists, military contractors, and Protestant burghers who frequented the inn of Vermeer's father in Delft's Great Market Square; and the quiet, distinguished "Papists Corner" in which Vermeer, after marrying into a high-born Catholic family, retired to practice his art, while retaining ties with wealthy Protestant patrons. The relationship of Vermeer to his principal patron is one of many original discoveries in the book.
Author: Edward T. Cone Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226114705 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
Included in these eighteen essays by Cone are his never-before-published essay, "The World of Opera and Its Inhabitants," the unabridged version of "Music: A View from Delft," an introduction to this collection by the author himself, and a complete bibliography of his published writings. "This selection of [Cone's] writings includes all the most incandescent and influential articles. We should have had such a book long ago."—Joseph Kerman, University of California at Berkeley Winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for 1990
Author: Jane Jelley Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192506900 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Johannes Vermeer's luminous paintings are loved and admired around the world, yet we do not understand how they were made. We see sunlit spaces; the glimmer of satin, silver, and linen; we see the softness of a hand on a lute string or letter. We recognise the distilled impression of a moment of time; and we feel it to be real. We might hope for some answers from the experts, but they are confounded too. Even with the modern technology available, they do not know why there is an absence of any preliminary drawing; why there are shifts in focus; and why his pictures are unusually blurred. Some wonder if he might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture what he saw before him. The few traces Vermeer has left behind tell us little: there are no letters or diaries; and no reports of him at work. Jane Jelley has taken a new path in this detective story. A painter herself, she has worked with the materials of his time: the cochineal insect and lapis lazuli; the sheep bones, soot, earth and rust. She shows us how painters made their pictures layer by layer; she investigates old secrets; and hears travellers' tales. She explores how Vermeer could have used a lens in the creation of his masterpieces. The clues were there all along. After all this time, now we can unlock the studio door, and catch a glimpse of Vermeer inside, painting light.
Author: Walter A. Liedtke Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art ISBN: 0870999737 Category : Art, Dutch Languages : en Pages : 642
Book Description
Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has assembled a splendid catalog of Vermeer and his artistic milieu. Seven lengthy, well-illustrated chapters (Liedtke wrote five, Dutch art historians Michiel Plomp and Marten Jan Bok wrote the others) describe life in the city of Delft; the painters Carel Fabritius, Leonart Bramer, and others who preceded Vermeer; the careers of Vermeer and De Hooch; the making of drawings and prints in 17th-century Delft; and the collecting of art in the same period. The catalog follows: each painting, print, and drawing accompanied by a lengthy catalog essay. Oversize: 12.25x9.75". c. Book News Inc.
Author: Anthony Bailey
Author: Walter A. Liedtke
Author: Anthony Bailey
Author: Philip Steadman
Author: Stephan Koja
Author: Timothy Brook
Author: John Michael Montias
Author: Edward T. Cone
Author: Jane Jelley
Author: Walter A. Liedtke