On the acknowledgements page of Traces of Vermeer, Jane Jelley thanks one friend who tracked down pig bladders and another who harvested mussel shells from a freshwater moat. Jelley, a painter, takes her research on the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–75) out of galleries and archives and into the studio. Her experiments are two parts Professor Branestawm, one part Great British Bake Off. She discovers that she can make yellow ‘lakes’ – pigments produced from dyes of the kind used by Vermeer and his contemporaries to create subtle ‘glazed’ effects – in her kitchen at home. First, you collect some unripe buckthorn berries from a hedgerow or the flowers of the broom shrub. Next, ‘You have to boil up the plants; and then you need some chalk, some alum; some coffee filters; and a large turkey baster.’ She reminds us how fortunate modern artists are to be able to buy their paint in ready-mixed tubes from Winsor & Newton.
Before he laid down even a dot of paint, Vermeer would have weighed, ground, burned, sifted, heated, cooled, kneaded, washed, filtered, dried and oiled his colours. Some pigments – the rare ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, for example – had to be plunged into cold vinegar. Others – such as lead white – needed to be kept in a hut filled with horse manure. The fumes caused the lead to corrode, creating flakes of white carbonate that were scraped off by hand.
Vermeer knew how to soak old leather gloves to extract ‘gluesize’, applied as a coating to artists’ canvas. Or he might have followed the recipe for goat glue in Cennino Cennini’s painters’ manual The Craftsman’s Handbook: boiled clippings of goat muzzles, feet, sinews and skin. This was best made in January or March, in ‘great cold or high winds’, to disperse the goaty smell.
An artist had to be a chemist – and he had to have a strong stomach. He would have known, writes Jelley, ‘the useful qualities of wine, ash, urine, and saliva’. ‘Do not lick your brush or spatter your mouth with paint,’ warned Cennini. Lead white and arsenic yellow were poisonous, goat glue merely unpleasant. The art historian Jan Veth, writing in 1908 about Girl with a Pearl Earring (c 1665–7), fancied that Vermeer had painted with ‘the dust of crushed pearl’. Forensics have since revealed the earthier truth.
Before he laid down even a dot of paint, Vermeer would have weighed, ground, burned, sifted, heated, cooled, kneaded, washed, filtered, dried and oiled his colours. Some pigments – the rare ultramarine blue made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, for example – had to be plunged into cold vinegar. Others – such as lead white – needed to be kept in a hut filled with horse manure. The fumes caused the lead to corrode, creating flakes of white carbonate that were scraped off by hand.Vermeer knew how to soak old leather gloves to extract ‘gluesize’, applied as a coating to artists’ canvas. Or he might have followed the recipe for goat glue in Cennino Cennini’s painters’ manual The Craftsman’s Handbook: boiled clippings of goat muzzles, feet, sinews and skin. This was best made in January or March, in ‘great cold or high winds’, to disperse the goaty smell.
An artist had to be a chemist – and he had to have a strong stomach. He would have known, writes Jelley, ‘the useful qualities of wine, ash, urine, and saliva’. ‘Do not lick your brush or spatter your mouth with paint,’ warned Cennini. Lead white and arsenic yellow were poisonous, goat glue merely unpleasant. The art historian Jan Veth, writing in 1908 about Girl with a Pearl Earring (c 1665–7), fancied that Vermeer had painted with ‘the dust of crushed pearl’. Forensics have since revealed the earthier truth.
by Laura Freeman, Literary Review | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
