In “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, Tracy Chevalier tells the story of the creation of Vermeer’s famous painting titled “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. Chevalier explains the artist’s complicated relationship with both models and patrons. She also touches on how apprenticeships worked during this time period. There are also in-depth descriptions of the mixing of paints and color application. Chevalier gives a realistic representation of what the process of art creation entailed in the 17th century.
The patron and the artist have a somewhat complicated relationship. The patron describes to the artist what they want in the painting, and it is in the artist’s best interest to follow instructions carefully. Van Ruijven wanted Vermeer to paint him with
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Chevalier describes the mixing of the paint in great detail. Griet goes to the apothecary to buy materials for her master. After she obtains them, she washes them in order to produce a brighter and deeper color. She then grinds them with a muddler. The longer she grinds them, the finer the powder, and the deeper the color. The ground powders are mixed with linseed oil. Some colors are stored in vessels covered with a piece of parchment and others are stored in a pig’s bladder, to keep them from drying out. Another process described is the application of colors onto the painting. In one painting, Vermeer starts by painting a black base for a blue skirt. Over time, he adds glazes of lighter blues to create a more dynamic shadow in the folds of the skirt. One thing that determines the outcome of the painting is the lighting in the room. Griet was timid to clean the windows because she feared that she might alter the lighting. Cleaning them would allow more light to enter the …show more content…
Apprentices live in the household of the master artist. Frans, Griet’s brother, starts an apprenticeship in a tile-making workshop at age 13. He left his family to move into the workshop. He started his training by doing simple, menial tasks, like taking the tiles out of the kiln, for many hours every day. His labor was essentially in exchange for lodging and food. Apprentices only observe art being made for a while. Then, when the masters feel they are ready, more formal training can begin. They learn techniques and skills and help the masters on their works. After several years, the apprentice essentially graduates and the contract ends. If the student is phenomenal enough, they may eventually open their own studio. Frans originally planned on opening his own workshop with his father, which could not happen partially because his father lost his eyesight and partially because Frans did not finish his
The paint does not have any visible signs of cracking like other oil paintings. It appears to be as vibrant today as it was when it was originally painted. A good example of this is the color of the chairs. The fuchsia is the first color are drawn to. From there the composition pops out at you. The king’s ruffled shirt shows Hirsch’s used of impasto. Impasto is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on the canvas thickly enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible.
The face of the portrait is detailed, and more naturally painted than the rest of the composition. However, the left iris exceeds her eye and extends past the normal outline. The viewer can see every single brush stroke resulting in a unique approach to the capturing human emotion. The streaky texture combines with the smoothness flow of the artist’s hand creating contrast between the hair and the face. The woman’s hair is painted with thick and chunky globs of paint. The viewer can physically see the paint rising from the canvas and flowing into the movement of the waves of hair. Throughout the hair as well as the rest of the portrait Neel abandons basic painting studies and doesn’t clean her brush before applying the next color. Because of the deliberate choice to entangle the colors on the brush it creates a new muddy palate skewed throughout the canvas. Moving from the thick waves of hair, Neel abandons the thick painting style of the physical portrait and moves to a looser more abstract technique to paint the background. Despite the lack of linear perspective, Neel uses a dry brush technique for the colorful streaks in the background creating a messy illusion of a wall and a sense of space. The painting is not clean, precise, or complete; there are intentional empty spaces, allowing the canvas to pear through wide places in the portrait. Again, Neel abandons
Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.
Edna seeks occupational freedom in art, but lacks sufficient courage to become a true artist. As Edna awakens to her selfhood and sensuality, she also awakens to art. Originally, Edna “dabbled” with sketching “in an unprofessional way” (Chopin 543). She could only imitate, although poorly (Dyer 89). She attempts to sketch Adèle Ratignolle, but the picture “bore no resemblance” to its subject. After her awakening experience in Grand Isle, Edna begins to view her art as an occupation (Dyer 85). She tells Mademoiselle Reisz that she is “becoming an artist” (Chopin 584). Women traditionally viewed art as a hobby, but to Edna, it was much more important than that. Painting symbolizes Edna’s independence; through art, she breaks free from her society’s mold.
The life of a typical women in the 17th century Dutch society is preoccupied with managing the household and their social status, while common servant women struggled with endless amounts of daily chores and the challenge of maintaining themselves in a different environment. In the renowned novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier it is through the characters such as Maria Thins and Greit that the roles of women during the dutch golden age are vividly demonstrated. Maria Thins is a prime example of a typical household women, she manages the house by ensuring that the family makes enough money to support the ever growing family. The character of Griet displays the obstacles that a common servant women would encounter, through the
The contrasts between depth and surface, figure and landscape, promiscuity and modesty, beauty and vulgarity all present themselves in de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle. Although the figure is a seemingly normal woman out for an afternoon with her bike, she becomes so much more through the artist’s use of color, contrast, and composition. The exotic nature of woman presents itself in her direct stare and slick buxom breasts in spite of a nearly indiscernible figure. It is understood that, on the whole, de Kooning did not paint with a purpose in mind, but rather as an opportunity to create an experience, however, that does not go to say that there isn’t some meaning that can come of this work. Even Willem de Kooning once said that art is not everything that is in it, but what you can take out of it (Hess p.144).
We can see a clear representation of the impressionist that tended to completely avoid historical or allegorical subjects. In this painting, Monet’s painted very rapidly and used bold brushwork in order to capture the light and the color; include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes. An insistence on what Monet called “a spontaneous work rather than a calculated one” – this in particular accounts for the sketchy and seemingly unfinished quality of the Impressionist paintings. In the texture, he played with the shadow and light and created variation in tone, he employs patches of depth and surface. The light in the painting come from back to the windmill, it is a light shines softly behind the houses and the windmill. He was shown each brushstroke in the painting. Balance is achieved through an asymmetrical placement of the houses and the most important the
Not only does he make the woman’s jacket blue, but also the two chairs. The jacket is similar to a turquoise color this sometimes symbolizes sophistication. He uses that color to explain the emotion in the women, and the mood. Also, the dark blue chairs symbolize peace and calm. This could mean that the letter was from someone checking up on her. Behind the woman is a giant brown scroll that looks like the map of the Netherlands. Some people say that the letter was written by a traveling husband. There is almost a mystery to why Vermeer uses the color blue so much in his paintings. Mostly it’s because he wants to show a sense of peace and
...ause the look of curiosity of the girl extends beyond the frame. This gives the painting a sense of curiosity.
The most prominent color in this painting is blue; it is used in the walls, the doors the articles of clothing hanging on the wall hook and some of the items resting on the nightstand. The other prominent color is green, used on parts of floorboards, the window, a part of one of the doorframes, parts of the hanging paintings and the empty vase on the nightstand. Brown is the only ...
...ng particularly the way Rubens blends in the yellow streak of visible light while using other objects in the center of the scene. Rubens began with a thin layer of blue and a thick brush and made his painting on top of that layer additionally with thin layers with exclusion of the main objects in the center that receive a thicker coating of paint. Those objects were also painted with a much thinner brush than that of the first layer.
Girl With a Pearl Earring is a historical novel that is set in 17th century Delft, Holland. The novel is narrated in the first person by a sixteen-year-old girl named Griet. The story opens in the year 1664, where Griet is unexpectedly informed that she will be starting work as a maid in the home of Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch painter, and his wife, Catharina. Due to Griet’s father, a tile painter, getting into a workplace accident which has blinded him and denied him the ability to work, her family’s economic position has become precarious. Her brother Frans has begun an apprenticeship, but is not yet earning any wages, which is why she must take the job.
He is so careful that not even his wife, Catharina, is able to enter. This has always angered Catharina. Griet’s being aloud inside makes it even worse. At first, Griet only enters the office to clean, but that soon changes. One time, when Vermeer sees Griet in a position he wants to paint. He stops her and repositions her. He says, “Look over your shoulder again”(86). This inspires him to paint her. Then this leads to complications in their relationship. This secret is kept from Catharina in fear that Griet could be punished or even fired. With Griet living above the studio, it is easy to find time for them to work. Because of Catharina’s pregnancy and Griet’s quick escapes to her room, they feel
Their intellectual horizons which were previously limited to light poetry or novels, have grown to include the vast fields of painting and music…I refer not here to those who, mistaking the vocation of their sex, are filled with the desire to be painters in the same manner as men. Even if the noisy, over familiar atmosphere of the studio itself were not essentially antipathetic to the codes of decency imposed on women, their physical weakness, and their shy and tender imagination would be confused in the presence of the large canvases, and of subjects either too free or too restricting, such as those which normally for...
The idea of mastery can be traced as far back as Aristotle who “felt that artistic training included mastery of a medium and gaining knowledge of one’s environment” (DeHoyas, M., Lopez, A., Garnett, R., Gower, S., Sayle, A., Sreenan, N., Stewart, E., Sweny, S., & Wilcox, K. (2005). This concept of mastery has held true for many centuries in varying forms, with the “Medieval apprenticeship being one of the first examples of art instruction in the Western world” (DeHoyas et al., 2005). Beginning around the 11th century craft guilds played a major role in training apprentices, journeymen, and masters, with the earliest recorded guild dating from 1099 (Madaus & Dwyer, 1999). The craft guilds played an important role in the European economy, and by the 14th century became a powerful hierarchal organization (Madau et al., 1999), which we can still see today in the form of trades and unions. Throughout the history of art, the relationship between apprentice and master held a prominent position in the education of young artisans. The apprentice usually began training at the age of 13, although Leon...