Experimentation and Innovation in Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat: New Findings from the National Gallery of Art

Abstract

Considered within the context of his biography, his overall artistic production, and the seventeenth-century Dutch market for tronies, a recent multidisciplinary investigation of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (National Gallery of Art, Washington) suggests that this small painting represents a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. Vermeer experimented here with bolder, more abstract brushwork and more highly contrasting pigments—an approach that grew out of his handling of the preparatory stages of the painting process and that he ultimately adopted in his high-life genre works as well. Positing the painting as an experimental foray that presaged Vermeer’s subsequent development also indicates a likely date of about 1669.