Young Woman with a Water Pitcher:  A Virtual Reconstruction 

(part one)

In the early and mid 1660s Vermeer painted a group of closely related works which Lawrence Gowing  called the "pearl pictures." In these paintings the artist made a move away from the kind of cubical interior which he and De Hooch had painted before and "adopted an approach that in some respects  was closer to that of the Leiden artists Metsu and Frans van Mieris. The preoccupation with linear perspective and geometric order diminished in favor of simpler compositions, in which the view is usually brought closer, only one figure is depicted and the behavior of light becomes the predominant aesthetic concern."¹

The importance given by Vermeer to composition in these pictures can be deduced by the many significant alterations he made in the course of the painting process and which can now be observed with the aid of with modern laboratory analysis. Such changes can be seen quite clearly in the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher to a degree that the artist's initial composition may be virtually reconstructed.

Aim and Criteria

The aim of the virtual reconstruction of the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher is  to provide a reasonable hypothesis of  the artist's original pictorial concept and not an image of the painting as it once actually appeared before it had been altered by the artist. The changes in composition may have been made during an  early phase of the painting procedure, called underpainting, before color and detail had been introduce even though the now excluded chair seems to have been brought to a good degree of finish. In its simplest terms, an underpainting is a monochrome  version (usually brown or neutral grey) in which the artist fixed composition, created volume and distributed darks and lights in order to produce an overall effect of illumination. With a minimum of time and effort a great part of the artist's pictorial ideas could be envisioned. The parts of the painting which did not match the artist's expectations could be readily observed and corrected with relative ease.

The virtual reconstruction of the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher is based primarily upon an infrared reflectogram² of the painting, Arthur Wheelock 's extensive analysis of the pictorial technique and  expressive content of the work in relation to the compositional alterations³ and, naturally, on images of the painting as it appears today. The painting can be virtually reconstructed to an acceptable degree since there exist indications of the nature, size and position of those objects that Vermeer deleted or altered.

By comparing the reconstructed version to the final version (part two), a few observations might be made about the reasons for which Vermeer may have altered so profoundly the initial pictorial concept.

Changes in Composition

Vermeer made two very significant compositional changes in Young Woman with a Water Pitcher both of which can still be vaguely observed with the naked eye. In the initial composition, the map of the Seventeen Provinces of Netherlands⁴ was represented behind the young girl's head instead of its present position slightly to the left-hand side of her head. The exact initial position of the map's left-hand border is indicated by a barely perceptible change in tone of the background wall to the left of the woman's head.  Since the proportions (see table below) of the final version of  the map painted by Vermeer  coincide closely to the original 1671 printed version which has survived, the map's position and dimension can be projected fairly accurately.

The first reconstruction (see top right-hand colored column) is based upon the assumption that while Vermeer changed the position of the map he maintained unaltered the map's dimensions as it appears in the painting today. As can be noted, in this reconstruction the entire width the map including part of the second ball belonging to the hanging rod would have been represented within the bounds of the canvas.

However, Arthur Wheelock has pointed out that "in the upper upper right of the reflectogram a diagonal curve is also slightly visible under the wall map in its present position. This line appears to be an indication of the Dutch coastline as it would have appeared when the map was positioned behind the woman." If this observation is correct, Vermeer would have had to paint the map larger than it appears today to make the coastline coincide at the point indicated by Wheelock." This change in scale should not come as a surprise since it is a well known fact that Vermeer sometimes altered size some of various objects represented in his works for aesthetic or perhaps iconographic reasons. For example, the painting of the Finding of Moses seen in the far right-hand side of the Astronomer appears far  larger when it is represented in the later Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. The second, more probable virtual reconstruction of the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher  is on the top of the second page of this study.

In the lower left-hand corner of the painting Vermeer had initially included a chair with lion's head finials which appears in many of other of his paintings. Then infrared reflectogram  indicates that it had been painted in some detail before it was painted out completely.

While the alterations Vermeer made in the position of the map and the lion's head chair in the foreground have a dramatic visual impact in the reconstruction, the smaller size of brim of the silver water basin and the basin's slightly different shape are less apparent.