The soldier and the laughing girl

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The soldier and the laughing girl (Jan Vermeer)
The soldier and the laughing girl
Jan Vermeer , 1658
Oil on canvas
49.2 x 44.4 cm
Frick Collection

The Soldier and the Laughing Girl is an oil painting by Jan Vermeer . The picture 49.2 centimeters high and 44.4 centimeters wide was made in 1658. It shows awoman drinking wine in the presence of a soldierand alludes to seduction with the help of alcohol . The painting is thus a moralizing representation. The soldier and the laughing girl hangs in the Frick Collection in New York .

Image description

In the left foreground of the picture sits a soldier with a wide-brimmed hat, who has his back turned to the viewer of the picture and is heavily shaded. He put his right hand on his hip. He is facing the woman sitting across from him, who is smiling at him and has opened her left hand in a rhetorical gesture . She wears a white headscarf and is illuminated by the light falling into the room through the window. In the background on the wall, as in many of Vermeer's paintings, a map can be seen. The map is about " The New and Accurate Topography of All Holland and West Friesland ", which was commissioned in 1609. In contrast to the original, Jan Vermeer has rendered the land masses in blue and the water in ocher. It is possible that Jan Vermeer was alluding to the diminished role of military personnel in Dutch society.

In the picture The Soldier and the Laughing Girl , the size differences between man and woman are greater than in any other picture by Jan Vermeer due to the sudden reduction in space. The excessive size of the soldier is also due to the reproduction conditions of the camera obscura . The resulting composition clearly shows the dominance of men. In 1891 the American lithographer , illustrator and author Joseph Pennell was the first to discover and describe “photographic perspectives”. With the contrast between the light that falls on the woman and the shadow that surrounds the soldier, the symbolism of the purity of the woman and the evil machinations of the man is used.

The room shown is also shown in an earlier painting by Jan Vermeer. The letter reader at the open window , created in 1657, not only shows the same table and chair, but the young woman reading letters even wears the same dress as the young woman in “ The Soldier and the Laughing Girl ”. The map also appears in Vermeer's picture Letter Reader in Blue from the 1660s.

Provenance

Letter reader at the open window, 1657

The Soldier and the Laughing Girl was acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1911 for nearly $ 300,000. The purchase came at a time when the prices for Vermeer paintings had risen sharply and the paintings were in great demand among collectors. So wrote Wilhelm von Bode in the New York Times that a Vermeer "the greatest treasure for an American collector" would be (something like: "the greatest treasure for an American collector"). Frick had previously acquired the painting The Interrupted Music Lesson in 1901 .

The painting The Soldier and the Laughing Girl can be seen today in the Frick Collection in New York .

literature

  • Timothy Brook: Vermeer's Hat - The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. Profile Books, London 2009, ISBN 978-1-84668-120-2
  • Norbert Schneider: Vermeer all paintings . Taschen, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-8228-6377-7
  • DuMont: Vermeer . DuMont Literature and Art Publishing, Cologne 2003. ISBN 3-8321-7339-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brook, p. 28
  2. ^ A b Norbert Schneider: Vermeer all paintings . Taschen, Cologne 2004. page 31.
  3. ^ Charles Seymour Jr .: Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura. In: The Art Bulletin. Vol. 46, No. 3, 1964, ISSN  0004-3079 , pp. 323-331.
  4. ↑ Brook, p. 54 and p. 55
  5. ↑ Article about the three Vermeers of the Frick Collection on frick.org, accessed July 14, 2008