Where do you go to buy art supplies? Nowadays you can buy pre-primed canvas, tubes of paint and brushes online or from your local store. Where did Vermeer’s art supplies come from? This is one of our research questions within the Girl in the Spotlight project. We can consider this from the global to the local level: from pigments that came from faraway lands, to the apothecary in Delft where Vermeer may have bought them.
Pigments are coloured powders, which an artist would mix with a binding medium, in this case, oil. Some natural pigments come from the earth. Brown and yellow pigments like ochre and umber are literally called ‘earth pigments’. Other pigments, like vermilion and lead white, were made synthetically, even back in the 17th century. The red and yellow lake pigments started as dyes (usually used to dye clothing), then this dye was attached to a white powder to make a pigment.
The pigments found in the Girl with a Pearl Earring include: vermilion, red lake, lead white, carbon blacks, weld, earth pigments, ultramarine, and indigo. In the next few blog entries, I’ll go through the colours one by one and tell you where they came from, the strange methods used to make them, and how and where they were used in the Girl.
