A man furtively making off with two loaves, Vermeer’s Milkmaid, baking bread in rural Sweden, a traditional baking oven, and glistening alongside mackerel and glassware.
Vermeer
A stolen painting of a concert, a girl with a pearl earring, ladies with a maid and writing a letter, an astronomer and a geographer.
Finding form with his famous compositions of figures lit by daylight from windows on the left. His use of maps, curtains, and his unique depth of field effects.
Washerwoman below stairs, a kitchen maid, haggling in the market, selling fish door-to-door, pouring milk, farming families, and drinking.
A woman spinning in front of her bed, a view of a street, a waterfront, marketplace, boats on the river, canals, windmills, a sandy beach, clouds, and frozen rivers – everyday life in the Golden Age.
Painting captions give information you’d never get from looking at an image, and that in turn tells you even more. This series looks beyond mere images at the media behind them.
Originally extracted from the madder plant, and turned into a pigment by laking, its colour could fade within months. Later purified to alizarin it proved no better, and is now used as a measure of non-lightfastness.
Maids toiling at food preparation and washing clothes in the sculleries and utility rooms in the basement. Among them is Vermeer’s Milkmaid, and some of Degas’ working women.
Used by all the masters from about 1300, including Leonardo da Vinci, Veronese, Rubens and Rembrandt, this pigment was lost in the early 18th century and wasn’t rediscovered until 1940.
The sound of music from Vermeer, Menzel, James Tissot, Hanna Pauli, Edouard Vuillard and others, from palaces to the homes of the middle class.
The Eclectic Light Company 