Painting techniques of the masters
Jan Vermeer (1632 - 1675)
The height of Dutch painting marked itself with the scenes of everyday life as immortalised by Jan Vermeer. Vermeer was an art dealer and sometime committee member for the Delft Painters' Guild. Together with contemporaries including Gerard Ter Borch and Pieter de Hoogh, Vermeer would have been influenced by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Around 30 paintings have been attributed to Vermeer and from these we can gather the method he used to create his masterpieces.
For 'The Guitar Player', Vermeer sized a canvas and prepared it with a grey-brown ground. Through infa-red photography, it has been established that Vermeer didn't work from preliminary drawings, instead he would most probably have used a 'camera obscura' that would project the image onto the canvas. From this projection he would establish the drawing on the canvas and maybe would have laid in some preliminary colours directly onto the projected image. Vermeer painted light as it fell on the subject using a variety techniques including thin glazes, flat under painting and opaque 'alla prima' painting. Visible brush marks are kept minimal except in areas of alla prima and highlights where he would characteristically use spots of light-coloured paint. It is also interesting to note that Vermeer used ultramarine a very costly pigment at the time, being derived from the semiprecious lapis lazuli. It was more common for artists to use 'Smalt', a deep blue pigment made from cobalt glass or azurite.
Vermeer used subdued colours, more in-keeping with the optical realism. He would also paint form as it would appear to the eye, rather than how it actually was, so hands were not painted with anatomical accuracy but in terms of light and shade. This may have been as a result of his use of the camera obscura, making him a forerunner for the use of photographs as a reference tool.