Glazes and Final Touches

The red hat was glazed with a transparent layer of red madder  (a ruby red transparent pigment of natural origin) over the orangish vermilion red. The lips and cheeks were also lightly glazed with a warm reddish tone. Vermeer continued to further refine various parts of the painting using his finest sable brushes. The painting was left to dry completely before adding the final details and highlights.
Final touches, including the famous pointillés, were added only at the very end of the painting process. These few touches, applied with absolute surety and at the same time spontaneity,  have a major role in defining the final aspect of Vermeer's work. They make it sparkle with life. The pointillés, or spherical highlights, are typical in his later works. They are very apparent on the chair's  lion head, the young girl's lips and the sleeve of her robe. This visual phenomena, not seen by the naked eye, is usually explained by Vermeer's use of the camera oscura.
                               detail_of_chair.gif (6925 bytes)
                                             detail of chair		                   detail_of_mouth.gif (12229 bytes)
                        detail of face                                                                		detail_of_robe.gif (6403 bytes)
    detail of robe
How long did it take to paint the "Girl with a Red Hat"?

It is almost impossible to calculate exactly how long Vermeer took to finish one of his paintings. In roughly 20 years of  artistic activity about 35 works remain. In Vermeer and his Milieu, a documented study by John Montias of Vermeer's life, Montias deduces that Vermeer  produced from 45 to 54  paintings during his career. This means he made approximately two a year. But there are great differences in size and detail among them. The "Girl with a Red Hat" has a compelling sense of urgency about it that hints of a relatively quick execution and even though the paint handling in some parts is very rapid and fluid, there are many areas that that require painstaking application. The immediacy of the work that we sense might explain why he employed a tiny panel which had already been painted upon. It is a very time-consuming and laborious job to prepare a new canvas or panel from scratch. Since the painting is small even by Vermeer's standards, we can surmise that while it probably took him no more than three or four months to complete the painting, it almost certainly required more than two. We must also remember that it is seems illogical that Vermeer might have used artificial light to paint by, and so the numbers of useful daylight hours during a Dutch winter are indeed very few.

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