Tronien were, in effect, paintings conceived independently by the artist and sold for the open market. Rather, the work is a perfect exemplar of the tronie. The glaze also helped to protect the vermilion, which tends to turn black when exposed to the atmosphere.Įven though some writers have hypothesized that one of Vermeer's daughters modeled for the Girl with a Pearl Earring, it was not conceived as a portrait even though the care with which Vermeer portrayed her androgynous features suggests it was executed from life. When thoroughly dry, the preparatory underlayer was "glazed" with a thick, highly transparent ruby red pigment called red madder creating a special shine-through effect. In this case, the basic form's lighting and coloring were first defined with tones of a vermilion red and black, producing a somewhat drab monochrome base. This two-stage method achieves a brilliance and depth impossible with straightforward opaque paint. The hat was painted with the glazing technique. In any case, the illusionistic depiction of rare fabrics or furs was one of the tell-tale signs of the so-called tronie, small-scale studio pieces meant to entice the purchasing appetite of potential clients. In lack of convincing evidence, Vermeer expert Walter Liedtke considers that Vermeer may have based the hat's shape on some lost source in art and perhaps invented its material "for the occasion, for instance by pinning fur pelt or feathers onto a hat like the one in the Girl with a Flute." Although modern authors have described the hat's material as cloth, leather or velvet, its blurry, fractured outline hints at feathers.
Perhaps only Rembrandt or Michael Sweerts, two Dutch painters who delighted in rendering exotic headgear, could have been able to pull off a picture with such an unusual combination of such an outlandish garment and mundane face and produce a work of great human significance. This eccentric red hat has no exact prototype in either Dutch fashion or Dutch painting, and one wonders how Vermeer may have come upon it. Saskia van Uylenburg in a Red Hat (detail)
0 kommentar(er)
