The Art of Painting
Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) · about 1666 to 1668
A heavy tapestry curtain has been pulled aside, and you look into a quiet room where a painter sits with his back to you, brush in hand, at the start of a picture. His model stands by the window in a blue dress, holding a trumpet and a book and wearing a wreath of laurel. On the wall behind her hangs a large map of the Netherlands, and light from the unseen window falls across the black and white marble floor and the brass chandelier above. It is the largest and most elaborate painting Vermeer ever made, and he kept it in his own house until he died.
The model is Clio, the muse of history, as described in a popular emblem book of the time, so the painter is not making a portrait but painting fame itself. Vermeer's technique is at its most refined here. Look at the tiny dots of light on the chandelier, on the nails of the chair and on the model's pearl, and at the way the map is rendered with every crease and tear. The painter wears old-fashioned slashed clothes, a costume rather than working dress, which suggests the picture is an allegory of the art of painting, its dignity and its power to give lasting glory. The curtain in front is painted so convincingly that it seems to belong to the gallery rather than the picture.
After Vermeer's death his widow tried to keep the canvas from creditors, without success. It vanished for two centuries, surfaced in Vienna in the early nineteenth century as a work of Pieter de Hooch, and in 1940 was sold by the Czernin family to Adolf Hitler for his planned museum in Linz. Recovered from a salt mine after the war, it was handed to the Austrian state in 1946 and has hung here since. Claims for restitution were examined and rejected in 2011. Stand a little to the left, where the model's face catches the light, and the room seems to breathe.
Did You Know? The painting was found after the Second World War in the Altaussee salt mine, packed alongside thousands of other works gathered for Hitler's planned museum.
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