Category Archives: The Real Johannes Vermeer

The real life person of the famous Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, and his wife Catharina, his daughters and the role these women played in his paintings.

GIRL WITH A PEARLESCENT CAMERA

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 This picture is a modern spoof on the world famous painting by the 16th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.   The girl in the legendary painting (as well as in several other of his paintings) is his second daughter, Elizabeth!  Vermeer never hired models — he painted only family and friends.  It doesn’t take a cosmetic surgeon to compare the features of the women in the majority of his paintings to observe that the same women are being painted in their own home, again and again in different poses, settings, lighting and clothing.  Most of his paintings feature his wife, Catharina, who was not only his constant accomplice in creating a family, she was his foremost ally in his life as an artist!

The painting named (by others), “Girl with a pearl earring”, as well as “The girl with a red hat”, and “The girl with a flute”, and others, are all of his second daughter, Elizabeth, who was a teenager when they were painted.  He used her as the model for a series of very small “tronie” or facial portraits, which were popular at the time.

These miniature “head shots” were especially well suited to the use of the camera obscura to create what we know now to have a photographic quality, rendering the light and perspective differently than the unaided lens of the human eye perceives it.

To learn all of the details about the women who posed for Johannes Vermeer in all of his famous paintings, read the book VERMEER: PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME, by Lawrence R. Spencer.

DOWNLOAD THIS BOOK FROM iTUNES
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/vermeer/id443800993?mt=11 

 

DELUSIONAL or HERETICAL?

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Vermeer on iTunes

“I am very sure that my new book, Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime, will be considered by many people to be delusional or heretical.  Many will dismiss my observations and comments because they don’t follow the dictates of  “authoritative research” or the opinions of art “experts”.

This book may threaten persons who have a financial vested interest in the Vermeer paintings that still exist today, as their livelihood or financial well-being depend to some degree on the value currently assigned to the paintings.

Although the monetary value of Vermeer’s paintings have been vastly inflated, in part, due to the mystique created by authorities or speculators, it is not my intention to devaluate them. It is not my intention to invalidate property that was sold or bartered by Vermeer and his wife, Catharina, hundreds of years ago.  Quite the contrary.

My intention is to honor the lives of Johannes, Catharina, their eleven surviving children and Maria Thins, his mother-in-law and patroness.

This book does not represent or endorse any financial, spiritual, religious, political organization or practice or philosophy of any kind.  All personal observations and opinions offered by the author herein are purely and solely personal opinions, with no other source than those noted in the footnotes or appendix.

Any and all individuals or organizations from whom research and/or opinions have been borrowed or sited for referential purposes in this book are not affiliated with and do not in any way acknowledge the validity of or endorse the findings or assertions of the author or publisher of this book.

Finally, this book is not intended for people who have a vested interest, or who “know best”.  Personal observations, whether visual, empathetic or conjectural, of the author about the life and death of Vermeer, 300 years after the fact, are wholly subjective.”

Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime  https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/vermeer-portraits-lifetime/id569744974

Paperback book —     Support independent publishing: Buy this e-book on Lulu.

AUDIOBOOK — http://www.audible.com/pd/Arts-Entertainment/Vermeer-Audiobook/B009NVX2PM/ref=a_search_c4_1_4_srTtl?qid=1392802819&sr=1-4

PAINTING LOVE AND LIGHT

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Vermeer: Portraits of a Lifetime bookThis documentary film (below), narrated by Meryl Streep, is a academic analysis of many of the paintings of the Dutch master artist, Johannes Vermeer. Throughout the film the question is asked of the “expert” commentators, all of whom are technical experts in the mechanics of oil painting, “What makes a Vermeer painting a Vermeer painting?” Ironically, none of the “experts” know the answer to this simple question. In my book Vermeer: Portraits of a Lifetime“, I reveal the simple, yet profound answer to this question.  Support independent publishing: Buy this e-book on Lulu.

Vermeer and his wife, Catharina, had 15 children. All but one were daughters. The subjects of Vermeer’s paintings are almost entirely of his wife, and daughters. Nearly all of his paintings were created in his own house, owned by and shared with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins.  The male subject of many of his paintings is his best friend and neighbor in Deft, Holland — inventor of the microscope and the camera obscura — Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. (seen in the paintings The Geographer and The Astronomer, et. al.)

Technical analysis notwithstanding, what the “experts” fail to comprehend is that Vermeer painted his beloved family members and dearest friends in his own home.  In addition to technical expertise, the visual aid of the camera obscura — which revealed the hidden patterns of light in objects — Vermeer painted love of his family, his home, his life, his personal universe.  What makes “a Vermeer a Vermeer”?  Love and Light.

I will be traveling to visit the home of Vermeer in Delft for the first time in a few weeks.  I am very much looking forward to seeing and feeling his love and light.

VERMEER — AN EMPATHETIC EXPLORATION

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Paintings of Johannes Vermeer exhort a mystic awe in the human soul.   Aesthetics, women and mystery are each a glue that have baited many of the most powerful traps in history.  Vermeer combines all three.  Almost nothing factual is known about the painter personally, or the bevy of enchanting women he painted.

Compounding the mystery is the puzzle of identifying the people he painted so repetitively.  Apparently, they were nearly all his wife or daughters!  Moreover, they were portrayed at various ages in their lives, over a span of twenty-two years during which he and his wife produced an family of 15 children, 11 of whom survived! As a consequence of their common genetic similarities in their physical appearance, they also shared clothing, hair styles, and jewelry.   Add to this monochromatic puzzle are identical rooms, windows, lighting, furniture, fixtures and the themes surrounding them.  The resulting maelstrom of similarities make differentiating one person from another a near impossibility.

Most of his work, apart from the paintings produced during his six year apprenticeship at the Guild of St. Luke, were portraits of his wife, family and a few close friends. Vermeer never painted his family members, or his self-portrait, with the intention of selling them, any more than you and I would think of selling photographs or home videos of the members of our own family.

He painted people in his surroundings that were close at hand, familiar, and endeared to him.  Mostly he painted for the love of aesthetics, and to innovate the technology of painting — to discover new techniques to more exactly render the myriad subtleties of light, and to endow love, and life on canvas, with colors and brushes.  Like many artists before and after Vermeer, these challenges intrigued and consumed his interest, intellect and spiritual passion.

Apparently, during his own life, it never occurred to him that anyone would be interested in paying money for many of his paintings.  Most of his paintings were still in the possession of his wife when he died prematurely at the age of forty-three!  Astoundingly, they were never sold, even though he and his family were literally starving from the want of money to buy food!

According to the research of Vermeer scholar, Anthony Bailey, the value of Dutch money was as follows:  “…a Dutch cloth-worker in 1642 got eighteen stuivers a day; there were twenty stuivers to one guilder, and a 6-pound loaf of rye bread coast about four and a half stuivers…”.

Imagine his shock and dismay to discover, 300 years later, that his paintings are worth many millions of dollars!  Yet, during his own lifetime, he never earned enough from them to feed his family, and indeed, died from an overwhelming bought of depression because of it.

These facts confound comprehensive and compound the mystery of Vermeer.

In this book, I propose to travel this impossible labyrinth, to discover the long-hidden key to ancient riddles: Who were the people painted by Vermeer?  Who was Vermeer, the artist and the man?

As though this were not daunting enough, I propose to do this, in part, by leaping the abyss of 300 years from the present year of 2008, returning through my own experience as an artist, a father, a husband and a man, through my own, personal life experiences, to re-experience the life of Vermeer, as though it were my own!

I do not claim that I am or was Vermeer.  Such an assertion would be entirely subjective, impossible to prove, and irrelevant. As do myriad other people fascinated by his art and his life, I have a good deal of personal empathy and common life experiences that I share with this obscure man, as a father, as a parent, as an artist and as a spiritual being.  I intend to employ this empathy as a tool of investigation and discovery:  just as one might use a divining rod to seek out water in the desert.

As a lost dog uses native intuition to find it’s way home, I am searching for a lost self.  As a tourist in Italy feels a sense of deja vu when visiting the Coliseum in Rome: one can almost smell the roar of blood spattering on the sand, and reel at the lust for pain and death oozing from the crowd!  And thrill as a blade slashes and vomits entrails to the ground.  The spirit writhing to be free of a mangled corpse crumpled in the dust.

I yearn to recover a lost identity.  Vermeer.

Does the intervening distance of time make a difference in this investigation?  Let me propose that time is only an arbitrary measurement of the movement of objects through space that has no effect or relevance here.

Has time changed the emotions of love, lust or hatred in ten thousand years?

When struck in the heart by a spear, does a great-great grandson not bleed just as profusely now as when his ancestor was struck down on a ancient battlefield?

Were the tears shed and anguish suffered over the dead child of our mother’s, mother’s, mother any less real than our own in the eternal now?

If I experience what another man has experienced, am I not, to that degree, that man myself?  If I am willing to invade, permeate and be that experience, and to assume responsibility for it, is it not my own?

My experiment is to be Vermeer.  That is, to return to his life and time to experience his existence from the perspective of subjective emotional, artistic, and spiritual experience in present time.  To this degree, I am Vermeer.

To the degree that you re-experience his life with me, you are Vermeer.  In truth, Any Man who is willing to be Vermeer, is, to that degree, Every Man.

— Excerpted from the book, “Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime”, by Lawrence R. Spencer