Vermeer's Paintings in their Frames

All 35 of Vermeer's paintings, as well as two questionable works are listed (below) in chronological order. Images of each work with its frame can accessed by clicking on their titles. The frame of Vermeer's The Concert is shown without the picture because it was stolen in 1990 and never recovered.

Frames are an important part of viewing a work of art. They isolate the image from its environment permitting the viewer to experience its illusionist qualities minimizing distracting elements which immediately surround it. Without a frame many delicate chromatic balances and subtleties of painting technique are less easily perceived. Figurative painters in fact, sometiems keep their paintings in frames while they are working in order to balance more accurately compositional and color harmony. A frame is similar to a window which, instead of allowing us to observe the outside world from within, permits us to observe the artist's inside world from outside.

Only rarely, Old Masters paintings are encountered in their original seventeenth-century frames. The few Dutch paintings which are still in their original frames are for the most part those in which modern art history has shown little interest. Box frames, in lacquered black oak, were favored in the last years of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth century. These give way to more complex ebony frames, although only few of them have the intricate ripple moldings familiar from nineteenth-century imitations. The earliest gilt frames are from shortly after 1650.

"Frames have invariably been adapted in the course of the centuries to suit the fashions of the day. In the early nineteenth-century, for example, it was the heavy, golden Neo-Classical model that prevailed. Entire collections were reframed in the style, as the Ioannides Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum illustrates.

"For years current fashions were considered more important than an appreciation of the historical perspective. It was only in 1984, with the publication of Framing in the Golden Age,¹ accompanying a similarly titled Rijksmuseum exhibition, that a change occurred. This seminal work was the first to explain to a wide audience how seventeenth-century paintings were originally framed. For many it came as a surprise, and for art-lovers it was a revelation, to see the extent to which a frame determines the ambience of a painting." ²

"The predilection for frame finishes during seventeenth-century Holland steered away from the opulence of the gold leaf gilded frames being produced at the time in France and Italy. Tastes tended more towards simpler, earthier tones as seen on the frames of Vermeer and Rembrandt and as shown below on Rembrandt's early self-portrait which hangs today at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Many of the early, ripple-style frames, however, were actually manufactured in countries such as Germany and Spain and thought of as 'Dutch' because of their extensive use in Holland.

Frames were often painted black in a form of ebonizing, due to the limited availability and cost of ebony. Considering the wide use of this approach the finish has come to be known in certain circles as Dutch Black."³