The first certain information about Vermeer as an artist came from the year 1656, the time when his famous work, The Procuress was composed. Being the largest composition he painted, this work had a new direction for both subject and style. The genial figures you see in this composition are in contrast to those of Vermeer’s own school. In fact, these kinds of people were composed by Pieter de Hooch, a companion of the artist in Delft. But he painted nothing like this great canvas. In this composition, Vermeer’s immediate sources were transposed and magnified with an impeccable confidence into a grand presentation of one of the oldest themes of the genre painting. The grand postures, striking colors, and embellished garments of the Delft define this canvas, but there is a psychological aspect that makes this composition more riveting. In this article, I am giving a brief overview of The Procuress (Vermeer) to narrate the excellence of the famous Dutch master.
A Little Beginning.
To start, the composition consists of a crucial element of the artist’s later equanimity, not merely latent but consciously articulated. The canvas clearly consists of issues that involve sexuality and the distance between the sexes, informing us about the tensions in the genre scenes. Though there are discrepancies in the work, it yields configurations of relatedness that are among the most moving aspects of Vermeer.
When you first look at the composition, The Procuress by Johannes Vermeer, the initial glance confirms that the artist was more open to the problems than to the possibilities of the sexual theme. Painted in 1656, Vermeer composed this painting three years after he was admitted to the Delft Painters’ Guild. It essentially establishes a precise starting point for the chronology of his output. The work likely reflects a young artist’s ambition to establish a capacity to create complex compositions. This trait is common in the early works of the Dutch artist.
The setting in the composition is not comparable to the artist’s later genre on account of its narrative content. It is possible that Vermeer found inspiration for the composition from the works of Dirck van Baburen and of a follower of Caravaggio.
What Does The Procuress (Vermeer) Say?
If you look at the tonal values of the painting, they are much darker than every composition of the artist. Furthermore, the color scheme is specifically marked with the predominance of black. The setting is a brothel, and the two figures on the left materialize an atmosphere of venality and concupiscence. Vermeer gave a mental quality to these figures; they mirror facets of the viewer’s psyche and the painting’s subject, and in doing so, indicate the elements of the bad conscience and sexual unease with both the painting and the scene of looking.
It is possible that people might compare The Procuress with the typical Dutch brothel scene, such as Van Baburen’s Procuress, which he composed in his two later compositions with heightened neurotic intensity. In this version, there are several layers of meaning. At first glance, the painting gives an extended view of a visually and emotionally satisfying image about an exchange between the man and woman on the right, who has just begun to assert itself and draw us deep within it on its own complex terms. However, as we move closer to the image, two alienated figures in the black are being left behind, trapped in their frozen postures of voyeuristic remove. It can strike any viewer by how unaffected the couple on the right seems, either by their setting or the dark figures who surround them. Within the configuration they share, the bond of man and woman seems invulnerable to either the voyeuristic or the moralist gaze, but the surprising power of the detail isolates them.
All these impressions are visually immediate sensations, like the composition particularly achieves the feel of inhibited access to the experience that couples share despite the darkness around them. The artist might identify them with a fear of judgement on the left and insist on our complicity with him, but the painting finds an unabashed sensuality in the two figures on the right. There is a particular force through the woman, which further creates a structure of the painting, against the left-to-right movement. She became a radiant subject about which other figures gravitate in the increasingly dark and frigid orbits. And this is the only time when a man finds himself included in this richly female sphere. Unlike how it may first seem as a moral prejudice and sexual restraint canvas, The Procuress (Vermeer) is one of the most unsentimental and guilt-free celebrations of shared erotic experience in all of the art.
Looking at the Subject Matter Closely.
Compositionally, let’s divide the canvas into lower and upper halves. You will see that the lower half is filled with thecarpet with heavy folds towards the right, and a black cloak thrown on top of it to the left. While the upper half consists of figures and the action we will talk about.
Similar to this, let’s see the left and right sides of the canvas. The right side has a rendering of powerful and radiant color with the subject’s true protagonists. On the left, both the figures, which are secondary, have dark clothing. Among these secondary figures is the procuress herself, who is old and emerged from the background with partially masked two male figures, and the other is the observer who looks out at the viewer, but his face is in complete shadow.
There is a clear difference between the two female figures, whose faces are completely visible, and the two male figures, whose faces are largely obscured by shadows. The head of the two male figures also marks the upper curves of the undulation that emerges within the figural sequence. Further, the headgear in both cases are notably cropped by the upper picture edge.
The four figures are convincingly individuated and appear to have been studied from a model. If one looks at his later painting, The Milkmaid, the young woman’s physiognomy strikes us as similar to what we have in The Procuress. In this canvas, the young woman’s white bonnet is pushed so far back so to reveal most of her forehead. Further, the lady’s gaze is lowered.
The principal figure is this young woman, who Vermeer made the centre of composition through color and illumination. She sits holding a glass in one hand while the other is open to receive a coin from her husband. Her husband in red attire with shadow over his face offers a coin to her wife as he puts his hand on the woman’s chest to explore sexuality. Both of them have been confined in their own space with an erotic bond. One of the significant things that is crucial to note is that there is a gap between the thin gold coin and woman’s hand. The man’s grip of the coin influences on how we feel about him and the moment as a whole. If we see the coin as balanced on his forefinger with the tip of his thumb ready to flip it, it might suggest casual sex and relishing image of himself that goes along with him. However, the longer we see, the moment deepens and the grip becomes firm as if he is pressing the coin between his forefinger and tip of thumb. This might show his hold in the relationship but there is a caring contemplative tenderness he offers with the coin. As he reaches forward, he also draw back into himself. And he completes this gesture to let go by reaching his whole hand forward into her but he is so caught up in the pleasure of the present that he seems hesitant to do so. There is a secret reciprocity as the woman savours this pleasure.
A final word on the man’s other hand on the woman’s breast is that it is an openly erotic gesture but the hand is not at all subtle. Vermeer rendered it without personality in contrast to his finely articulated counterpart involved in the coin’s exchange. One of the things that makes this gesture moving is the sense of fortuitousness about it. He puts his arm around her too as if the touch has a new sense of realness.
In the composition, A Maid Asleep, Vermeer used Turkish carpet dominating the lower half of the picture similar to what he did in The Procuress. Hence, he did use several elements of his early compositions in his later works.
If you look at the bottom half of the painting, it stresses a division. The black cloak draped over the table’s edge blots out the bright and richly patterned tapestry. Further, this cloak’s curve encloses the two figures on the left in a dark ovoid shell. Its heaviness also pulls them downward and roots them in a dark below that is static and inert. The two dark figures on the left not only attaches a central relationship but confront us with the negative images of the authorial and spectatorial aspects of our own presence to the composition. The cavalier on the far left wears the same costume as the artist in later and more openly self-conscious Artist in His Studio. It might refer as a self-portrait too.
The cavalier holds a lute in his right hand, sensing himself as in direct complicity with the painting’s audience, which has resemblance to several of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. The action suggests the typical Dutch “Merry Company” scene as he seems to understand himself as the belonging to such group. The slightly forced and tentative quality of the libertine pose he strikes betrays an insecurity and embarrassment beneath it as he sees the exposed sexuality of the couple. Even the object that he holds in his hand is only to isolate him from the possibility of the real human contact, further making a strong contrast with the beautiful interweaving of hands between the couple on the right. Hence, the composition presents a skeptical view of the artist’s relationship to erotic experience, which is itself deeply in touch with that experience.
The Firm Characteristics of Vermeer’s Composition.
Johannes Vermeer exhibited a distinctive approach to light in his compositions. This is evident in his focus on the soft, melting quality of slightly blurred edges and his signature illusionism in rendering surfaces. For instance, here, he contrasts the blue-and-white glazed stoneware jug with the gentle folds of a carpet. Though there is calmness in mood, it is in spite a potentially raucous setting. The painting thereby fundamentally differs from the Early Dutch Caravaggisti.
What is innovation in The Procuress (Vermeer) is not the subject matter or the artist’s general turn towards genre painting, but an entirely new approach to the painterly appropriation of observed reality. There is a sort of painterly illusionism and a visual impact of light and shadow, especially in his treatment of the figure of the observer.
Final Words.
The Procuress (Vermeer) is a mastermind composition that relieves sexual experience of two absolutely different men; one who can’t let it go as it gives so much pleasure to him in the present and other who is isolated by any such thing. The steady wine glass, the poised coin, and the woman’s own happy calm attested to it gives the order of sexual experience of the burden of will here. Though the loving couple presents an image of what it feels like to be in the world of love, the cavalier demonstrates a self-isolation in his own mind.
Resources.
Featured Image: The Procuress by Johannes Vermeer; Johannes Vermeer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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