Officer and Laughing Girl
The Soldier and the laughing girl is an oil painting by Jan Vermeer. The 49.2 inches high and 44.4 inches wide picture was taken 1658. It shows a drinking wine in the presence of a soldier and woman playing on the seduction with the help of alcohol to. Thus, the painting is a representation of moralizing. The Soldier and the laughing girl hangs in the Frick Collection in New York.
Image description
In the left foreground of the picture, a soldier sits with a wide-brimmed hat, which turns to the viewer of the image and the back is heavily shaded. His right hand he Akimbo. He is the opposite seated woman facing him, the smiles at him and opened her left hand in a rhetorical gesture. She wears a white headscarf and is illuminated by the light falling through the window into the room. In the background on the wall as can be seen in many pictures Vermeer's a map. When the map is "The New and Accurate Topography of All Holland and West Friesland ", which was commissioned in 1609. Jan Vermeer has differing reproduced from the original land mass in blue and the water in ocher. It is possible that Jan Vermeer thus alluded to the diminished role of members of the Army in the Dutch society.
In the picture, the soldier and the laughing girl the size differences between men and women due to the sudden space reduction are as large as in any other painting by Jan Vermeer. The overly apparent size of the soldier also by the conditions of reproduction of the camera obscura is conditional. The resulting composition, the dominance of the man out clearly. 1891 discovered and described the American lithographer, illustrator and author Joseph Pennell first the " photographic perspectives ". With the contrast of light that falls on the woman, and shadows surrounding the soldiers, also the symbolism of the purity of the woman and the man's evil machinations is troubled.
The area shown is reproduced on an earlier painting by Jan Vermeer. The resulting 1657 letter reader by the open window not only shows the same table and the same chair, but the letter -read young woman even wears the same dress as the young woman in " The Soldier and the laughing girl ." The map also appears in Vermeer's image reader letter in blue from the 1660s.
Provenance
The Soldier and the laughing girl was acquired in 1911 by Henry Clay Frick for almost $ 300,000. The purchase came at a time when prices for Vermeer painting had risen sharply and whose pictures were in demand by collectors. So Wilhelm von Bode pushing in the New York Times that a Vermeer " the greatest treasure for an American collector" would be (in a sense, " the greatest treasure for an American collector "). Previously, Frick had 1901 image The broken music lesson acquired.
The painting The Soldier and the laughing girl is now on display at the Frick Collection in New York.