A New Vermeer, the Story of how an Old painting became so very New

foreign [Music] ER and today let's have a look at this lovely painting of a girl reading a letter by Johannes Vermeer he made it round about 1657 or 1658 we're not entirely sure as it's not dated but it's a painting that has been in the news for the last couple of years because it changed the way we look at Vermeer somewhat of course to be fair the way we look at Vermeer changes all the time because we keep finding new little details about his life but in this case it's because the painting itself changed as well which is why in the title I called it a new Vermeer because during a restoration it turned out that it had been altered in the past but not by Vermeer himself and today again it looks the way it did when it left vermeer's Workshop so let's have a look at it it is of course a girl reading a letter and interestingly enough Vermeer painted a whole series of these scenes of girls or women reading letters writing letters or just receiving them so it's a theme that kept coming up in his career and to be fair not just his career the theme of people reading and writing letters was quite common and it was certainly not invented by Vermeer the painting is in the gameld gallery altamister in Dresden and it has been there for the better part of the last three centuries now I've told you in various videos about Vermeer and that he had been all but forgotten in the 18th century and was rediscovered during the 19th and ever since we've been researching the work of and life and time of Johannes Vermeer and that also means that we've been trying to establish a chronology in the paintings that he made now I'm sure you know that he didn't make that many paintings or at least there's not that many of them left these days there are 37 that are considered premieres but not all of those are universally accepted nevertheless it's interesting to figure out in which order he made these paintings and although we can disagree on some of the details there's a clear development in his work for instance he started out making fairly large paintings with several figures that were also quite big and then he started making these intimate settings within a room this sleeping girl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is generally seen as the first real genre picture of a girl in a room but what would become typical for him to paint were scenes of a girl and sometimes one or two other people with her in a room but next to a window and this is the first one of those after that he made this one of two people talking at a table and then this one known as the milkmaid now I've made a video about her before and there's a link at the end of this video and in the description but there's a clear link between the girl reading a letter at the window and the milkmaid and that's not just because they are both pictures of one woman alone in a room absorbed in an activity but since the 19th century there were also links by the fact that they stood in front of a white empty wall and in my video of the milkmaid I explained how well that works to have that empty wall because that makes us focus on the girl pouring milk and in the development of the work and style of Vermeer it was long thought that this was the precursor because he tried it here before even though the picture in all is a little bit more cluttered so it was thought that this was sort of a line of development that we could discern here but then the museum in Dresden started its Restoration in 2017 and our view of this Vermeer changed completely and consequently with it the way we look at the development of the style of Vermeer because it turns out that instead of a large blank wall in the background he painted a painting within the painting there and we had known about that painting since 1979 when this picture was first x-rayed this actually is that x-ray from 1979 and you can clearly see this painting painted in the background but it was assumed that it was one of those cases where Vermeer had changed his mind and altered his composition because he did that all the time pretty much every painting by Vermeer that has been studied with these modern techniques has revealed that he altered his original composition and tinkered with it for some time for instance the milkmaid didn't have a blank wall in the background at first either and in this case the painting on the back wall was not the only alteration for instance he first painted a chair seen from the back in front of the painting So on our side of this table and there was a large wine glass there as well but then he decided to paint them over with a green curtain now in the early 2000s the gamelda gallery started restoring their vermeers they started out with this one and they found that cleaning it brought out the vibrancy of its colors so much more but that they decided to restore this one as well now the basic restoration for a painting would be to remove the old varnish and renew it with a fresh layer you see varnishes were applied to paintings when they were finished to protect the paint from dust and dirt and what have you and they can also have the effect of bringing out the brightness of some colors but these varnishes will discolor over time that is actually their point they are there to collect dust and dirt and so when they discolor you can remove them and you apply a new layer and pretty much if you do that every Century or so your paintings will look lovely well it doesn't actually have to be done every Century sometimes if you keep a painting in a good clean climatized space you can go longer between Restorations but clearly this one needed it as it had become quite yellow and when they removed the varnish they discovered a strange discoloration which you can see clearly in this picture and that led to speculation about the painting underneath it meant they started to think that this strangely colored patch over the painting in the painting underneath was added decades after the painting had left Vermeer Studio because it looks like this over painting was done in a color that matched a discolored varnish so what might have happened is this the painting was made in the late 1650s it was owned by one of the collectors of vermeer's work and then it was sold on in the early 1700s you see there was only a handful of original Vermeer collectors and they had all died by that time and in fact so had their children and often that third generation the grandchildren of the original collectors would sell on the collections because they were no longer interested in them and then someone either the new owner or before that an art dealer thought it looked better without the background painting and he simply had it painted over without having the painting cleaned first so that white back wall had to match the varnish that had been there for say 50 years so in the recent restoration they were cleaning the old layers of varnish off and they found out that there was a chemical difference between the regular back wall and this white painted patch so what you do then is you take a sample which is a tiny Fleck of paint that you have to actually remove from the painting so you have to have a pretty good reason to do that but in this case they clearly did and that flag of paint was then studied under a microscope and they found this now this is a cross-section from that flag of paint from the painting under a microscope the museum in Dresden is wonderful on his website they provide all this information and it shows that this bit was painted over a layer of varnish and that of course proves that it was done after it left vermeer's Workshop and the discoloration proves that it was done decades after so now they had to decide whether or not to keep it or remove it and obviously in the end they decided to remove it which is not easy you see it means someone has to scrape it away with a scalpel while looking through a microscope and apparently they first cleaned a band of about a centimeter wide across this painting within the painting which was done just to test and see if the paint underneath was reasonably intact and when it was decided that it was in good enough condition the white paint was removed completely now as I said that's easier said than done it took ages because they could only do one or two square centimeters per day but when all was said and done it revealed this lovely image of cupid standing in the background by the way I mentioned earlier that there was this green curtain that was also on alteration a later Edition but as far as anyone can tell at this moment that was an alteration done by Vermeer himself so there was never any question of removing that but now of course we have this new image of a slightly more cluttered space with a large painting in the background now obviously it's a girl reading a letter she's standing at an open window in what we assumed was a standard Dutch window at the time we can see the little panes of glass set in lead strips you can see that they're rectangular and the top row has a little bit more of an ornate setting it's very similar to several other windows that he painted for instance in the very next painting we think he made or in the painting known as the Dutch diminutive word for street so I guess it translates to the little Street and we have to zoom into one of the corners to see one of the lower Windows without closed shutters to see that it has the same kind of pattern it also shows a clear difference between this window and the one in the milkmaid as this one is clearly very clean and the one in the milkmaid is kind of grimy and of course it's open so she can get most of the light shining on her letter and that she's angled towards the sunlight so as to be able to read it better and of course we can see her reflection in the window which seems like a bit of a tour de force showing off that he could do it and it's pretty convincing at first glance but if you study it closely it turns out that it's not really the right reflection because in the reflection she's a little bit shorter than she is in the rest of the painting and if it were truly her reflection she would have had to turn her head just a little bit more towards the back of the painting and originally that's exactly how he placed her or at least that's what has been interpreted from the x-rays that have been made for this recent restoration and she has this lovely dress on which is not a cheap dress I say this because it's very different from the milkmaid because there the woman wears cheap Stern clothing this is not a servant she is the Lady of the house or judging by her youth the daughter of the lady of the house and between her and us there's this table with an oriental rug over it that has been crumpled up simply to make it look more pleasing in the painting because I'm sure people did not really have their tables like that although they did put rugs over tables just not this crumpled up because that's simply not very convenient and it makes it unstable to play such an expensive Chinese Bowl on I mean they're kind of fragile it is by the way the kind of Chinese porcelain or earthenware made during the Ming Dynasty were imported to the low countries and especially in delft they tried to copy the process of making these blue paintings on it which is the origin of delft blue in this case it has all kinds of fruit on it and around it some of which seem unnaturally large and then there's his curtain which is pretty big I mean it covers almost a quarter of the entire painting and x-rays have shown us that originally he placed a chair on our side of the table there at least that's what they tell me I haven't been able to make it out but apparently they see a lion's head there and that matches the chair that's also in the background against the back wall it's known as a Spanish chair and they were quite common at the time here's one that's still kept in the right Museum in Amsterdam but what we can more clearly make up from the x-rays is that he originally painted a large wine glass there it's known as a humor in Dutch and I think a rumor in English and they were apparently in use all the time you see them on paintings everywhere now that blurry shape over there kind of looks like he wanted to paint a glass like this one again one kept in the red Museum and it even looks like it might have had some wine in it and a Vine hanging over it but then Vermeer changed his mind and he decided to cover them all with this curtain which I think makes the scene much more intimate because now it's all about the girl reading in front of the window by the way this curtain is not a curtain within her room you can see it has these little brushes at the bottom so we can see that it ends there and there's a curtain rod at the top that extends over the entire width of the painting and he didn't paint any Stoppers at the end of them like you would usually have at the end of a curtain rod now I stated because it all indicates that this curtain was intended to be not part of her scene but an illusionistic device or a trumpella element it is meant to make us think that there was an actual curtain in front of the painting now this may now this makes me think of two different things one is the story of zuxes and parashus these were two painters from ancient Greece who had a painting competition simply to see who could fool the eye most successfully precious painted grapes so well that birds were attracted to them and then asked zuksis to remove the curtain in front of his painting but it turned out that the curtain itself had been painted so zukes has won the competition because he hadn't just fooled Birds but a human and even a fellow painter but there's also the very real thing that people did of fixing a curtain in front of their paintings this was done to protect them from too much sunlight and it also seems to have been part of the sort of ritual of looking at your paintings it makes them more special if you have to remove something every time you look at them on this painting by Gabriel metsu which incidentally is also of a woman reading a letter we see a maidservant doing just that she opens the curtain to peek at the painting and there were plenty of painters that used this device at the time several of them were actually from delft like this one and Vermeer undoubtedly new paintings like these so he didn't paint it here to be original but to make the scene more intimate now the girls reading a letter which is obviously a love letter this was already interpreted that way before the painting of cupid behind her was revealed the reason for that is that it's hard to imagine her reading anything else I mean sure this could be a reminder to pay a certain bill or something but what's the fun in that and with all these paintings that there were of women or men reading and writing letters it is usually assumed that they are love letters but in this case it's made abundantly clear by the painting in the background there we see Cupid with his bow and another hand stuck up in the air but we can't see that hand because of the curtain but we can also see that he's standing with his foot on the inside of a mask and there's another mask right next to it now this for a 17th century educated viewer would have been a clear reference it's not just that there's a god of love doing something right next to a girl reading a letter but there's a specific picture that this comes from it's this emblem made by Cornelius Bull from an emblem book published in 1608 by Otto von vane the book was called amorum emblemata and in it were all these little pictures with a title or motto next to it and then a little poem and the whole thing picture poem and motto would be considered one work of art called an emblem this particular emblem had the title or motto in conkusa fide which I suppose translate to unshakable Faith and you can see that these two Cupids look very similar and it's even standing on a mask now in the accompanying text a little poem it has explained that he's holding a ring which is the ring of gigs now that the name and the ring comes from a story in Plato's Republic it is a ring that can make the wearer invisible and Anonymous and in Plato's Story the person who wears it can do anything they want and that makes its wearer behave immorally but the little poem in the emblem tells us that true love doesn't need such trickery so here we see her reading that letter and it makes us wonder if whoever wrote her that letter is her true love or is he perhaps deceiving her now Vermeer used paintings in the background all the time and often they tie into the overall meaning of the painting but this one he actually used a lot in the sleeping girl that's in the Metropolitan Museum there's also a painting in the background it's in this shadowy bit of the picture so it's very hard to make out but if we look closely you can see a leg of a child and a mask and then there's this one which is in the frick collection there's a very dark painting in the background as well in this case it could really do with a good cleaning but again if we look closely you can just make out this same Cupid who's actually holding his hand up in the background but the clearest one can be found in the National Gallery in London it is this one called lady standing at a virginal the other three were made within two or three years of one another but this one is about 14 years later and there are some differences with this one and the original qubit in that there are no masks on the ground here and he's not holding a ring but something that looks like a playing card but that painting I'll get into in a different video suffice it to say that it was one of vermeer's favorite themes to come back to but I love the way he played with the various levels of reality in this painting there's us looking at the painting with the painting within it but at the same time there's a curtain that's supposed to be in our space not the space of the girl there and somehow they all tie in with each other now as I mentioned before this painting is in the collection of the Camille Gallery altamister in Dresden and it has been there since the mid-18th century it was acquired for this man Friedrich August III Electro Saxony and king of Poland at some point he decided he needed a huge art collection and so he sent expert out across Europe to buy it for him I've mentioned this in another video about the Sistine Madonna and that's this one because some of his experts went to Italy and bought this Raphael for him and others went to Paris where they bought a group of 30 paintings from Prince kanganyang and the strange thing about that deal for our story is a letter that accompanied it because in that the prince tells us that he sent over the agreed 30 paintings but he added a bonus one outside of their original deal as a gift and that's this painting he thought of it as a painting by Rembrandt now I'm sure you're aware through the various videos I've made about Vermeer that he had been thoroughly forgotten by pretty much everyone so it entered the collection of Friedrich August as a gift but they didn't really see it as a Rembrandt in the inventories it was called in the manner of Rembrandt and in 1783 there was an inventory that said it was by hovert Flink he had been a student of Rembrandt so it's still sort of close to Rembrandt and in an inventory of 1826 it was listed as Peter the hog which is a little bit closer because at least he was a genre painter from the same city of delft and he was probably an inspiration to Vermeer and the hawk was much more fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th century and several Vermeer paintings were falsified by over painting the original signatures of Vermeer and replacing them by Peter which was simply done to fetch higher prices for them but it wasn't until the 1860s that it was recognized as a Vermeer all of which is a little bit surprising especially if you consider that there's a signature right there behind the girl on the painting although admittedly it has worn off a bit but the painting has been in that same collection since the 18th century it only left Dresden during World War II to be safely stored in a fortress called kernish Stein and with much of this collection was taken to Moscow after the war but was returned in the 1950s so now if you want to see this painting for real usually it would have to go to Dresden to the gamelda gallery Alta Meister but as I'm making this video it's on loan to the Rex Museum in Amsterdam for a big Vermeer exhibition now if you're planning to go there I hope you already have tickets because they tell me it's completely sold out but if you are coming let me know perhaps there's some other stuff I could show you around in and give you a tour and a museum of your choice in the Netherlands but of course this painting after the 4th of June in 2023 that's when the exhibition ends all of these paintings will be going back home to their respective museums and I expect this one will be back in Dresden somewhere in the summer so if you want to see it after that go to Dresden but in the meantime don't forget to like And subscribe and thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you again soon bye [Music]

Channel: Stories Of Art

Views: 9,497

Keywords: Vermeer, a new vermeer, stories of art, carel huydecoper, gemäldegalerie alte meister dresden, dresden, gemaldegalerie, gemaldegallerie alte meister, old masters gallery dresden, johannes vermeer, the new vermeer, girl reading a letter at an open window

Id: fdUhXysU0P8

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023