Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher

Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, oil on canvas, c. 1662 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris http://smarthistory.org/baroque-holland.html http://smarthistory.org/baroque-holland.html

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Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher

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Dr. Zucker: We're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we're looking at the "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher"
that dates to about 1662 by Johannes Vermeer. It's one of the real treasures in New York.
Dr. Harris: It's a lovely small painting, so typically of art in Holland during the 17th century.
Small images, domestic scenes, still lifes, landscapes, family scenes, genre painting.
Images that reflected the middle class culture (Z: The Protestant culture, right?) of the 17th century republic of Holland.
Dr. Zucker: Where there was a middlle class, or what we would recognize as middle class
and where possessions were important expressions of one's place in society.
Dr. Harris: Yes, but it was also very deeply religious culture.
Dr. Zucker: It's interesting because if this is a Protestant culture and of course, the Roman Catholic Church have, for so long in the West, been one of the primary patrons of an artist.
When the church is no longer a primary patron, artists do have to look for different, and two different kinds of subject matter.
Dr. Harris: Artists have to find another way to making a living, right?
Dr. Zucker: That's right! And so you have here an image that really reflects an idealized domestic life.
Dr. Harris: And would've been commissioned or purchased by wealthy businessmen.
And although in the 1600s, the period of Baroque in Italy, Spain, and France,
this is a kind of Baroque very different in Holland because of the Prostestant culture there.
Dr. Zucker: It is different, and when I think of Baroque in Holland, I usually think of the first half of the 17th century.
I think of the work of Rembrandt. This is so different.
Here, there's kind of a delicacy in a kind of awareness of the light and of the fleeting. I think that is very very different
Dr. Harris: This is a very poetic moment where the simple act of opening a window,
holding a water pitcher, maybe looking to water some flowers that are out the window.
Takes on a timeless quality. You can feel the love of the domestic here, the love of small rituals, the love of the every day.
To me, in a way, Vermeer is always a reminder of the beauty of what's around us.
Every day. You know, it's not Christ on the cross. It's not something monumental and heavenly.
But in a way, the presence of the divine in the every day, which speaks to us in a modern way.
Dr. Zucker: It is absolutely poetic. You see this woman against the white background, but there's no white in that wall.
(No.) Dr. Zucker: Behind her. (That's true.)
Dr. Zucker: It's a whole prism of colors that's filtered through that leaded glass.
You have warm whites of the wall against this cool sharp blue-whites of the linen headdress that she wears.
Dr. Harris: And,the way that she's very characteristically, for Vermeer, locked to that space. By the rectangle of the window.
Dr. Zucker: Of the map.
Dr. Harris: And the rectangles of the table and the chair behind her. There's a sense of very controlled composition
at the same time, something very spontaneous and something very caught. A caught moment in time.
Dr. Zucker: So, even as he's portraying this really beautiful, delicate kind of representation.
We also have a lot of evidence of what was valued in the 17th century in Holland. (We do.)
You know, you got as a tablecloth of this heavy carpet, which would've been a very expensive item of luxury.
You got the brass, and I'm especially taken, I have to tell you,
with the ellipse of that basin, which just is so extraordinarily convincing almost more than if I had seen that thing in person.
Dr. Harris: Yeah. Well, I think that's the thing in a way it becomes more real in Vermeer.
It's so carefully observed. Every little millimeter of the way the light plays on the reflective surfaces of the basin and the box.
Even the brass, nails in the chair behind it. I mean it's like.
It makes us see things that in our everyday vision we don't see and we don't pay attention to.
Dr. Zucker: And I have the sense that the woman who is portrayed in this image is in fact, as visually attentive as we are
In a sense modelling for us, the audience, this kind of visually attentiveness this awareness of her place
in the world, her place in space. Vermeer is brilliant, I think in creating that kind of love
and sensuality in space, in time and light (In color). It's just so gloriously beautiful.

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Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, oil on canvas, c. 1662 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker, Dr. Beth Harris http://smarthistory.org/baroque-holland.html http://smarthistory.org/baroque-holland.html

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