On 18 Jul, 2015 With
Oil paintings techniques: Vermeer’s Palette Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings. One aspect of his meticulous painting technique was Vermeer’s choice of pigments. He is best known for his frequent use of the very expensive ultramarine (The Milkmaid), and also lead-tin-yellow (A Lady Writing a Letter), madder lake (Christ in the House of Martha and Mary), and vermilion. He also painted with ochres, bone black and azurite. The claim that he utilized indian yellow in Woman Holding…
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On 7 Mar, 2011 With
Vermeer’s painting technique: Underpainting After the initial outline drawing was completed Vermeer began the underpainting, one of the most important stages in his working procedure. Without a thorough knowledge and mastery of the underpainting technique, many of the artist’s complex compositions, accurate depiction of light and chromatic subtleties could not have been easily achieved. Underpainting, or “dead color” as it was called in Vermeer’s time, is rarely practiced today. For the last century, most artists have simply begun painting directly on the canvas with full color surpassing the underpainting stage entirely. Therefore, neither the function or the practice of underpainting is well understood. In its simplest terms, underpainting is a monochrome version of the final painting which fixes the composition, gives…
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On 18 Feb, 2011 With
Girl reading a letter by an open window by Johannes Vermeer
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On 10 Oct, 2010 With
Boston art theft remains biggest unsolved mystery By John Wilson Vermeer’s The Concert is estimated to be worth around £200m The Gardner robbery remains the largest single property theft of all time As crime scenes go, it has got to be one of the most beautiful. The Dutch Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is lined with green silk wallpaper, from terracotta cobbled floor to oak timbered ceiling. On one wall hangs a Van Dyck, on another a Rubens but these artworks are not the first things one notices in the first floor gallery. It is the empty frames that stop you in your tracks. One, an ornate gilded rectangle framing nothing but green wallpaper, once held…
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