The choice of this striking red satin dress with its scintillating gold brocade suggests that the girl entertained high expectations from the encounter with the debonair gentleman and has dressed herself to make her best impression. The tabbaard was always closed at the back and heavily boned to keep it as rigid as possible making it adapted for formal occasions only. Dutch costume expert Marieke de Winkel identifies this dress as a tabbaard, a combination of a stiffened bodice and a matching skirt. Foreigners generally explained the Dutch disregard for 'hat honor' as their longing for egalitarianism, personal independence and freedom."īefore Vermeer settled on the elegant fur-trimmed yellow morning jacket for his female sitters, he seems to have been initially attracted to a more formal full-length dress. Members of the lower classes were required to remove their hats in the presence of superiors. German and English travelers in the Netherlands were frequently surprised that Dutch men kept their hats on indoors, during meals, in company and even in church. In contemporary French and Dutch language, the word 'hat' could be used as a metaphor for a man, as opposed to 'coif' denoting a woman. Marieke de Winkel, who has written extensively about Dutch costume in relation to painting, noted that in the 17th-century Netherlands, "the hat was perceived as a sign of authority and male supremacy. Europeans only bared their heads before a monarch, and since the Dutch had no monarchs, their hats stayed on." The custom of removing one's hat while entering a building or greeting a woman was not yet observed. As the historian Timothy Brooks observed, in the time this picture was painted "a courting man did not go hatless. The gentleman in this picture would not have been considered discourteous for having kept his hat on. In Vermeer's paintings it is always the female who, all said and done, commands the scene relegating the male figures to an oddly passive role. One hand on a wine jug and the other on his hip, the cavalier patiently waits on the spectacularly dressed young woman ready to pour more wine as soon as it has been drunk.Īlthough rivers of ink have flowed to describe their beauty and to decipher the thoughts and emotions of Vermeer's female sitters, the men who court them have received less attention. The sumptuous gilt frame adds greatly to the aesthetically rich yet measured pleasure of the picture. ![]() The use of the landscape as a metaphor of love was frequent in literature and popular love lyrics set to musical accompaniment. Elise Goodman has shown, instead, that landscapes are "iconographically charged emblems that contribute to and expand on the meaning of the pictures." Thus, the landscape in the present work emphasizes the amorous intention of the elegant cavalier who makes his love known through refined music making and wine drinking according to accepted norms of ritualized courtship. Van Everdingen was the younger brother of the painter Caesar van Everdingen whose large-scale Cupid appears three times in Vermeer's oeuvre and a fourth before the artist eventually painted it out.Īlthough Dutch art scholars have demonstrated that figural paintings, maps and drawings were sometimes used to insert hidden meaning into the depicted scenes, landscapes were generally considered decorative fillers. The wooded landscape, which is painted with great delicacy, is done in the style of Allart van Everdingen. Thus, it is very probable that, together with the staid portrait on the rear wall, it provided an incentive towards moderation an admonitory comment to the protagonists' lack of self-restraint. ![]() Rollenhagen's illustration is accompanied with the text "The heart knows not how to observe moderation and applies reins to feelings when struck by desire" The level symbolizes good deeds and the bridle symbolizes emotional control. ![]() The female figure who holds a level and bridle personifies Temperantia, or Temperance, which is very similar to an image from Gabriel Rollenhagen's Selectorum Emblematum of 1613. The symbolic meaning of the coat of arms is now clear and certainly and educated Dutchmen of the time required no coaxing to understand it. Although Janet Vogel and her husband had lived in Delft not too distant from Vermeer, Janet had died in 1624, eight years before the artist was born. Vogel, first wife of Moses van Nederveen, but it is not known how Vermeer came by it. The coat of arms has been identified with Janetge Jacobsdr. One of the most remarkable features of the painting is the colored stained-glass window, which appears in another painting by Vermeer, Young Woman with a Wine Glass, in Berlin.
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