The Lacemaker
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) · c. 1669-1670
A young woman in a lemon-yellow jacket bends over a lace pillow, bobbins pinched between her fingertips, pins in place, her whole attention narrowed to a few square centimetres of thread. Beside her a blue sewing cushion spills a cascade of red and white threads across the table, and a heavy book, probably a Bible, props up the arrangement. The picture is the size of a sheet of paper, the smallest thing Vermeer ever painted, and it obliges you to stand close and adopt the same concentration as its subject, which is exactly the effect he wanted.
What happens at that distance is remarkable. The threads spilling from the cushion are not drawn at all; they are ribbons of liquid pigment that a tiny movement of the wrist has laid down, and they are deliberately out of focus while the working hands are sharp. Vermeer is imitating what an eye focused at close range actually does, throwing foreground and background soft, an optical effect associated with lenses and often taken as evidence that he studied images formed by a camera obscura. He also uses pointillés, small beads of light, along the edges of the threads and the woman's fingers.
Lacemaking was a domestic virtue in the Dutch Republic, celebrated in moral literature as the opposite of idleness, so the subject carried an approving message for its first owners. The canvas passed through eighteenth and nineteenth-century Dutch collections before the Louvre acquired it in 1870, and it quickly became a painter's painting: Renoir named it among the most beautiful pictures in the world, and Van Gogh wrote admiringly to his brother about its lemon yellow, blue and pearl grey.
Did You Know? At 24 by 21 centimetres it is the smallest known Vermeer, yet in 2023 the Louvre lent it to Louvre-Lens as a star attraction on its own.
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