The Music Lesson by Johannes Vermeer Notebook

The Music Lesson by Johannes Vermeer, 1662-1665, is a carefully constructed geometric composition of a young woman standing at her virginal, taking a music lesson from a gentleman, her face reflected in the mirror above her. The richly textured interior, figures and objects recall Leonardo’s observation that objects partake of the colours of their surroundings to form an optical whole, and the three dimensional depth of the elaborate chequerboard floor likewise recalls the linear perspective of Renaissance painting. Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (1632 - 1675) was a Dutch master painter of interior genre scenes whose works were rediscovered in the 19th century. In carefully constructed, geometric compositions drawn in meticulous linear perspective, Vermeer explored the effects of light and colour across human figures, objects and textures in sunlit, domestic rooms, building upon the optical discoveries and 3D perspectival depth of Leonardo and the Renaissance. Both a painter and an art dealer, Vermeer slowly produced a few of his painstakingly executed, richly pigmented compositions per year, living entirely within his home city of Delft, eschewing the fame of his near contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt that he achieved finally in the modern era.