What secrets was Vermeer hiding?
Hi, I'm Antonio García Villarán and in this video
I'll talk about this oddball of a painter by the name of Vermeer.
I was here at home, when Google Arts & Culture called me.
They said to me: "We are doing research
about the light in Vermeer's paintings.
We believe you can help us, since you know so much about that."
I said: "Sure, I can help, but I'd have to see the paintings."
They said: "We want to invite you to The Hague so you can see them in person."
I said: "Alright, but Vermeer lived in Delft.
That's where he worked
and where the light we see in his paintings comes from.
Maybe I could go there as well."
They said they'd pay for everything.
I was on my way.
I like Vermeer because he is a very rare painter.
He only has between 33 and 35 confirmed paintings.
THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS
The paintings are also small in size.
Goes to show you don't need a massive body of work to make history.
Like Picasso had for instance.
He is one of the most famous artists despite having few paintings.
The museum I was invited to was the Mauritshuis.
Mauritshuis means Maurice, because it was Maurice's museum, his home.
Maurice was a Count.
COUNT JOHN MAURICE OF NAUSSAU
He had a 16th century palace
that houses not only Vermeer paintings, but also works by Rubens,
Frans Hals and Clara Peeters among others.
They also told me I could interview the director of the museum.
I started thinking I could learn a lot by doing that.
Maurice's home was turned into a museum in 1822.
It's like travelling through time.
Every wall is wrapped in silk. They are very intimate galleries.
It has large windows that let that characteristic Hague light in.
And there it is, the Girl with a Pearl Earring.
I came into the museum alone, there is no one else, just me
and the Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's incredible.
Such an experience...
I realized so much seeing this painting by myself.
First, all the shading on her face is done in green.
He uses green for the facial shadows.
Something else, she doesn't have eyebrows.
Like David Bowie.
There is a difference in the strokes made on the face and those on the scarf.
The scarf has very loose strokes
while those on the face are more careful.
That all serves to make the light fall upon the face in a very calm way.
It makes her look peaceful.
Something else, her mouth,
if you look closely, you can see it's half open.
She looks at you as if she was a bit stunned.
She's a very young girl.
She looks like she doesn't have much life experience.
And she is just there thinking: "Who is looking at me?"
Another interesting thing is that this painting has no background.
It's just black. A bit like Pop art.
Like Andy Warhol, but from another time.
This painting is famous because of the film.
But studies made after the movie found that these works, these portraits,
were samples, a way for the painter to say:
"Look this is how good of a painter I am."
So he wasn't painting a particular person.
There are a lot of theories.
Also, there are two more girls with the same earring.
One at MoMA, made by Vermeer.
And a fake one that someone tried to pass off as a Vermeer painting.
For a long time it was believed to be a real Vermeer.
What happened was that a friend of Meegerem.
Remember him? I made a video about how he forged Vermeer paintings.
Well, this painter friend of his made this funny portrait.
He passed it off as a Vermeer painting,
but thanks to technology we realized it wasn't so.
It was a fake in the end.
I love the memes about the painting.
They are so great.
You need a sense of humor.
In this room we have more Vermeer paintings.
Here is one from his early period. Look...
The one behind me.
We can see the strokes are thicker.
It's true that he doesn't show all the skills from his other paintings.
For example, the pointillé technique, that I'll show you next, it's not here.
Here is a doggy and something interesting.
Can you see that behind the doggy? It seems to be the undercoating.
It's true that the Girl with the Pearl Earring is great,
but this one, the View of Delft,
It's very good, especially because of what I'll show you next.
If we look at it from afar, it looks like a landscape photo.
A run-of-the-mill painting, very well painted of course.
What if we get close?
What really amazes me about the painting is the pointillé,
those tiny dots, it's not pointillism, it's different.
It creates a great contrast with the way the sky was painted.
The sky and the water
were made with long strokes.
But if we look closely at the boat, what do we find?
There are dots big and small,
which are like drops of light.
It helps to immerse us in this environment Vermeer creates.
For example, look at these two women here. Look at their faces.
There is nothing there, but we understand it perfectly.
Or these figures,
which we can clearly see were painted after the landscape was finished.
You can tell because they are a bit transparent. Like ghosts.
One of the things I love about Vermeer is his skill at painting the silence.
He knows how to paint calmness.
And as far as I know, in the 20th century we have people like Edward Hopper
who does something similar.
It's like I always say, there is nothing new under the sun.
Something you always see at museums is
that next to the star paintings like the Girl with the Pearl Earring,
there are others that are overlooked, but are just as good.
For example, his contemporaries, Vermeer's contemporaries.
Like this one by Gerard ter Borch.
It's incredible. Look at the mother picking lice from the child's head.
Look at the kid's face
and how he holds that apple or red ball.
Look at the apron as well.
And look at how small the painting is.
It's minuscule.
Look at how this face is painted, how it's drawn.
How engrossed she is writing that letter, perhaps it's a love letter.
Or these by Frans van Mieris.
You devil!
In this one painted by Frans van Mieris it shows the extent of his mastery,
but I don't see much of an ambience.
What it does have is two doggies here, maybe they are playing.
Dogs are very important in paintings.
This one is by Gabriël Metsu.
Since they left me here alone,
I'm going to take a look around the museum, see other paintings.
No snitching.
I'm going to look at Rembrandt, some very important paintings.
Look what is back there.
Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson
Impressive.
Wow, here all the paintings are great.
The museum was amazing, but I'll save this for another video.
I hear people coming from that direction so I'm leaving.
I'm going to use a secret passage I was told about.
I'll show you. Do you see the wall?
It's this way. We are leaving.
Goodbye.
The interview with the director was awesome.
Thank you for meeting with me.
DIRECTOR OF THE MAURITSHUIS
It's not every day a YouTuber can meet with the director of a museum
So I'm very thankful.
If Vermeer was alive today, would he be an Instragrammer?
He may very well have been,
but he would've been an Instagrammer with something extra.
I told her that people in Instagram upload pictures with nice lighting,
which depict scenes from every-day life.
Which is similar to Vermeer's paintings.
She agreed that Vermeer could have been an Instagrammer.
But that he would've been a special Instagrammer
I said he would be a successful one.
She thought that he would keep the mystery in his images.
Because Vermeer despite putting a lot in his paintings,
he also keeps a lot to himself and we have to reinterpret them.
He always omitted something. He is full of mystery.
So maybe he was an Instagrammer that did some Photoshop before uploading.
An Instagrammer that uses Photoshop. Alright.
Or maybe he'd add filters to his pictures. Which is more modern.
All Instagrammers use a bit of Photoshop.
Did Vermeer paint to make a living?
Or do you believe that, due to him being an art merchant,
he painted hoping one day he would be remembered for that?
He had 11 children. He had to work hard to feed them all.
Let me start with the last question first
We are fairly certain he painted very few paintings.
We know that not all of them have survived.
There are mentions in inventories.
She told me historians have a theory.
Vermeer may have painted for a patron.
All of his paintings show up in an inventory.
And everything he painted was sold.
Which allowed him, on the one hand, to use expensive colors
and on the other, to take as much time as he wanted.
I just hope he didn't take 20 years to finish a painting.
Like some artists of the time.
Right.
Which makes him all the more intriguing, doesn't it?
She told me it was a different time.
He painted to feed his family. To earn a living.
What is the difference between Vermeer and his contemporaries?
So you have to see him in the context of his time.
He was not isolated.
He was a product of his time and yet outside of his time.
She told me that recently there was exhibition regarding that.
Vermeer compared with his contemporaries.
She said the difference lies on the technique.
Because the themes are very similar. The every-day life.
But Vermeer had something special. Something that set him apart.
Perhaps it was because of the pointillé technique.
Imagine that the museum tells you:
"You can have a Vermeer painting.
You're special and you've earned it.
You can take it home."
I wanted to know what her favorite painting was.
She got very emotional.
Well, I'll have to say the View of Delft.
Which happens to be in the Mauritshuis, like a lot of Vermeers.
It is a painting that never travels from here,
so you have to see it here at the Mauritshuis.
Because it's quite fragile.
What is the biggest lie told about Vermeer's paintings?
Well, there are a lot of theories about Vermeer.
Because we know so little about him.
I think one of the most interesting things is we don't know what he looked like.
Some people think we see his self-portrait in an early painting
and in another painting in Vienna where you see him from behind.
But in fact we don't know what his appearance was and we'd like to.
There is no Vermeer DNA anywhere? Can we clone him?
I don't think so.
I told her about a time I had to look for paintings by el Greco in Toledo.
It's unbelievable, but I found several in private houses.
Those paintings that were unknown.
Did she believe we might find undiscovered Vermeer paintings?
I wish it were true.
We do know his work was small.
El Greco had a great workshop and there was a lot being produced.
That is a big difference.
She told me Vermeer was forgotten until the 19th century.
That is when people went crazy for his work.
A French historian researched him
and uncovered almost everything Vermeer did
with the exception of a painting found recently.
At first, there were doubts it was a Vermeer.
But some studies confirmed that it is.
But the canvas has been repainted.
Apparently, that work is on the market now.
We know some paintings have been lost.
But we believe it was only a few.
Yesterday I told my followers
that I was going to interview the director of the museum.
I told them to send me their questions and from those I'd pick the best one.
Almost everyone asked about the camera obscura technique.
Did Vermeer use it or not? So I asked the director about it.
I looked it up, in at least 13 paintings by Vermeer
there is a dot the size of a pinhole.
That dot allows us...
to draw pictures with perspective.
Which shows us Vermeer's drawing skills.
I was surprised to learn they found out about the hole in that museum.
I'm a painter, I've been painting since I was 13.
I know that I want to try out anything new that comes to the market.
I believe Vermeer might have used the camera obscura. Why not?
But I believe he also used this technique.
As well as any other within his grasp.
He lived in a time and place where these lenses were available
and they must have been fascinating.
So sure he would have looked at them.
I think the general consensus is that he understood it.
And you see reflections of that in his paintings.
I'll make it short, she told me that at the time the lenses existed.
That he likely used camera obscura.
But she thinks he used it alongside other techniques.
Which is what I think as well.
When we were done, she showed me a picture of the View of Delft
and a picture she took
from the same place Vermeer stood in to paint it.
Two helpers stood where the people are in the painting.
Look at how big they are. They are gigantic.
This proves that he might have used camera obscura,
but he also came up with his own things.
I'm glad that nowadays we have female director in the museum.
As opposed to a male one, we already have a lot of those.
But how many female artists,
are featured in this museum, compared to the number of male ones?
To finish the interview I asked her a question I was excited about.
How many women are featured in the museum?
Not how many were in the paintings, but how many female artists
or how many paintings by female artists were in the museum.
Well, thank you.
One of the reasons we have fewer female artists from the 17th century
is because they weren't permitted to be part of the guild.
There just weren't that many.
I hope that in the future we have more female artists and directors.
She told me there were only four pieces by female artists.
So I asked how many were by men, she said they have loads of them.
Here is one of the few paintings by a woman in the museum.
There are only four of them featured here.
Ángeles Caso, a Spanish writer,
wrote several books about female artists.
She found a few women entered the guilds.
She wrote a book about female painters from the 14th century to today.
There were a lot of famous female painters in history that were silenced.
And some female painters whose work was attributed to male artists.
-Thank you. -Thank you very much.
To better understand how Vermeer paints light,
I'm going to enter that house and I'll try to understand
how the light here, which is different from the light in other places,
affects the objects and the rooms.
Let's see if I can unravel all of Vermeer's secrets.
Now that I have a lot of light, I can see there is a lot of contrast with the shadow.
There is a white halo here, the light is rather white.
It looks like there are shades of green here.
Like the same greens I saw on the Girl with the Pearl Earring.
I can tell that in these enclosed spaces with large windows,
the light coming in is very soft.
It bathes the whole room and me as well.
But it doesn't create a strong contrast.
It's just like I saw in Vermeer's paintings.
It's all so calm.
I could be a Vermeer painting right now.
I came up to the attic.
You have to be careful. I already hit my head twice.
Look how the light falls here.
That is, the whole area is in darkness.
I should be nearly invisible.
If I sit here my face should be dark,
but look at my arm, you can see it perfectly.
Those were the special effects of the time.
I also noticed that everything was surrounded by green.
What was outside had an effect on the inside.
If I placed an object and it caught the light from the window,
it'd also catch the colours from the outside.
Perhaps that is why his paintings had those greenish tones.
Besides, everything around you finds its way into your work.
I learned so much, it shed light on many of my questions.
Looking at the estate, I kept thinking about his paintings.
But there was something else that intrigued me
What kind of palette did Vermeer use?
How many colors?
It's one thing to see something and another to paint it.
And how you paint it.
What does this remind me of?
This is also a Vermeer painting.
In Delft, where Vermeer lived,
there is a museum where his works are reproduced in the original format.
There, I uncovered more of his secrets.
CENTRO VERMEER
I'm in Delft. Since Vermeer has so few works,
here they made a museum with reproductions of all his paintings,
all 30-something of them.
But they're life-sized.
It's very interesting.
This way I can have an idea of what they are like.
They may not be originals, but I'm sure I can learn something.
The first thing I noticed about Delft was its light.
It was whiter, purer, more crystalline.
That along with the calmness of the city,
it's full of bicycles, it's quiet everywhere.
Much like Vermeer's paintings.
Vermeer used a very limited palette.
Only seven colors.
He used two types of oils.
The classic linseed oil and walnut oil.
He used expensive pigments as well.
Like lapis lazuli, which is essentially a precious stone
and it came all the way from Afghanistan.
Here we can see what I mentioned about the pinhole and perspective.
You place a dot, here is the horizon line.
Lines are drawn from the point which helps draw perspective.
With this app we can see the colour palette they used
to paint the Girl with the Pearl Earring.
This is the abstraction, it's only these colours.
Here is a sort of camera obscura where we can see the street.
The museum had walls that showed
the different kinds of light you can see throughout the day.
If you stick around to see the light, you'll see it changes by the second.
It goes up and down in intensity.
What is clear is that this light conveys peace and quiet.
And that is also present in Vermeer's paintings.
I wanted to see with my own eyes what Emilie, the director, showed me.
I wanted to go and see where Vermeer stood to paint his work.
I went to the spot where Vermeer painted the View of Delft
I realized he must have done so from an elevated place,
because the perspective didn't line up with the one from the painting.
I assume he went up on a roof, a church or a tower.
I also confirmed that people were too large.
So Vermeer really did create that effect
to make Delft into a much grander city.
By making the people small, everything else becomes larger.
Artist stuff.
To say goodbye, I went to the church where he's buried.
It's not a church anymore, but a tourist attraction.
I found the little plaque which holds his remains.
It was quite modest.
He wasn't well known or famous.
I realized Vermeer shared a lot his secrets with me.
But he also inspired a lot more questions.
For that, I thank him.
Vermeer is still a mystery.
I sincerely hope you liked and got something out of this video.
Subscribe and smash that Like button.
See you soon.
THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS DREAM POSSIBLE
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