* It is surprisingly small
* It is kinda "fuzzy" or "blurry", you can't detect too much brushwork.
* It is very expressive
But my favorite Vermeer is not this, it is View of Delft, also in the Mauritshuis. The colors, hues and textures on it are just amazing.
For Brazilians, a funny curiosity: Mauritshuis means House of Maurice. It is really the former residence of Maurice of Nassau (Maurício de Nassau), the governor of the Dutch colonies in Brazil. This museum also have some interesting works by Rugendas and other painters showing life in colonial Brazil and a very cool collection of puppets made with bread paste showing life in colonial Indonesia.
The Mauritshuis is a very good reason to visit The Hague. If you go there take a walk to the M.C. Escher museum too.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Vermeer-...
Many people speculate that the model for the "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer" was Leeuwenhoek, the creator of the first microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer.
And the use of devices for helping in drawing was actually quite common in those times. Durer and Da Vinci made drawings showing these kind of devices.
In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps.
Nothing is quite something after all.
From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.
The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.
That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
Well that settles that, then.
I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.
One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".
Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
Thanks in advance for any reply
There are hints of overpainting around the right eye (left side facing us). Background plus eyebrow. Too smooth, doesn't have the same crackle as the rest of the painting.
The veneer may be quite yellowed. Looking at the cloth on the top of the head over the blue fabric. Might originally be a bright white, but now appears yellowed due to exposure of the last veneer aging and yellowing under UV light.
WalterBright•3h ago