Vermeer's Palette & Resources

"Many depictions of painters at work have survived. Initially, St. Luke painting the Madonna was portrayed predominantly. These paintings must contain reliable information with regard to the studio practices of the period in which they were created, or otherwise the contemporary viewer would not have recognized the representation. The same applies to the palettes shown in these paintings. When analyzing a large random sample of palettes depicted in paintings, such consistency emerged in the shape and the arrangement of the paint that one may safely argue that no well-trained painter would think of painting a fake palette.

"Generally speaking and based on studio scenes, it can be stated that prior to 1400 painters worked with separate paint trays, each of which held prepared paint of one color or hue. The first depictions of palettes stem from about 1400. They most closely resemble bread boards with a handle, used by the painter to hold the palette. Someone must have come up with the idea of making a hole in the handle that would be big enough to put one's left thumb through (fig. 1). The advantage of this innovation is obvious: it enabled the painter to support the palette easily in a horizontal position on the thumb; he could then hold other tools (including the maulstick while painting) with the remaining fingers of the same hand. Next, we see that the hole is no longer found in a handle-like protrusion from the palette, but that it is situated in the flat of the palette itself.

"The earliest palettes were small. Although they increased in size in the course of the sixteenth century, painters' palettes remained relatively small up to the early nineteenth century: 30 to 40 cm long. Only during the nineteenth century did they grow to the size of half a tabletop, sometimes made in such a way that they were adapted to the curve of the painter's body, in order to gain extra space for mixing paint."^{Van der Wetering, Ernst. Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 141-143.}

The number of pigments available to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter werea paltry few indeed when compared to those available to the modern artist. While the current catalogue of one of the most respected color producers (Rembrandt) displays more than a hundred pigments, about only 20 pigments have been detected in Vermeer's oeuvre.^{Hermann Kühn, "A Study of the Pigments and Grounds Used by Jan Vermeer," Reports and Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art, 1968, 154–202. This examination of Vermeer's pigments is principally based on Kühn's study. Due to the discreet number of paint samples taken, which were only from the outer edge of the canvas, the study provides only partial knowledge about which pigments Vermeer used and how he employed them. Recent studies have been integrated into this study.}

Of these few pigments only ten seemed to have been used in a more or less systematic way.

In Vermeer's time, each pigment was different in regards to permanence, workability, drying time, and means of production. Furthermore, many of these pigments were not mutually compatible and required separate or specific methods of application. This study will examine the history and origins of each pigment, as well as their applications by Vermeer and his contemporaries.

Vermeer's principal pigments

A significant lacuna in the palette of seventeenth-century painters was the lack of the so-called "strong colors." Only a handful of bright, stable and workable colors existed. Mixing colors to create new tints did little to alleviate the problem. When pigments are physically mixed together, the new color is inevitably less brilliant than either one of the original components and, more importantly, more importantly, some older pigments were not even compatible

One thorn in the side of the seventeenth-century painter was the chronic shortage of strong, opaque yellows and reds which could be used to model form with relative ease. The exceptionally brilliant red and yellow cadmiums, now obligatory paints in any contemporary painter's studio, were not commercialized until the 1840s. For centuries the only strong opaque red adapted for modeling was vermilion. Vermilion is a very opaque pigment with excellent handling properties but it nonetheless possesses a fiery orange undertone and must be glazed to protect it from degrading. Strong yellows, in particular, were scarce and the only brilliant green was the problematic verdigris. To overcome the lack of suitable purple pigments and economize, artists had learned to first model form in tones of ultramarine and white and then glaze over the dried layer of red madder obtaining a lively purple tint.

Moreover, strong colors were not always readily available in the unpredictable marketplace and had to be used with utmost economy. For example, natural ultramarine, the most precious of all blues for the artist, had become so expensive that painters usually used it as a glaze over a monochrome underpainting. Vermeer employed natural ultramarine in this manner.

Economic considerations played a decisive role in the artist's working procedures. If the complete range of pigments, each already ground in oil, had to be available for use at all times, large amounts of paint would go to waste. Metal tubes were employed only in the mid-nineteenth century. Unused paint from a single painting session was kept temporarily in pig's bladders or the entire palette could be submerged in water overnight to prevent contact with oxygen which induces drying.

It is highly unlikely that Vermeer would have had all available pigments on his palette in any given work session. Painters were known to set out specific palettes each day, according to the passage they planned to paint. The wooden palette above represents the seven principal pigments which Vermeer commonly employed.