School of Vermeer (Study)

Date:	1983
Medium:	Watercolor on paper
Size inches:	18 x 24
Size cm:	45.7 x 61
Signature:	Signed and dated lower right
Location:	Private Collection, Vincennes, Indiana

A note by the artist on his Study for School of Vermeer

I made my painting Schoolroom in 1979. It was followed by some related works employing images of a schoolroom and then I went on to other things. In 1983 I returned to the schoolroom image, combining it now with quotations from Vermeer in a study for a School of Vermeer. In this study the model standing in front of the blackboard is Vermeer's Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Her image is repeated in the drawings on the desks. Above the blackboard is Vermeer's Woman in a Red Hat from the National Gallery, Washington. The picture above the blackboard on the right wall is Vermeer's Little Street in Delft from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The windows on the left and the ceiling are Vermeer's. The door and the desks are mine.

My 1984 painting School of Vermeer was developed from this study. It was while I was working on that painting that I saw I could paint a School of Caravaggio, and it was while I was working on School of Caravaggio that I saw these were not two isolated paintings but the first of the many "school" paintings that followed. (George Deem, New York, May 25, 1996)