AMSTERDAM – Some art lovers make it a point to visit and see as many works as possible by 17th-century Dutch masters John Vermer.
From Friday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will make life much easier for them.
A blockbuster exhibition at the Dutch National Museum of Art and History brings together 28 of Vermeer’s paintings from seven countries around the world. Not bad considering that only 37 paintings are generally attributed to the artist, who lived in the city of Delft from 1632-1675.
Never before have so many Vermeer works been shown together in a single exhibition. Seven of the paintings have not been in the Netherlands for more than two centuries.
Taco Dibbits, director-general of the Rijksmuseum, believes the exhibition offers visitors a chance to immerse themselves in the exquisite interior scenes Vermeer is best known for, including ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ and ‘The Milkmaid’, as well as early religious paintings and two cityscapes. both show his hometown of Delft.
Noting the beguiling simplicity of “Mistress and Maid,” one of three paintings loaned for the show from New York’s The Frick Collection, Dibbits said it “exudes that calmness, that ideal world.”
Vermeer’s use of light – often coming from a window to the left of the canvas – the bold colors and careful composition can be seen throughout the exhibition.
“Vermeer has this quality that everything is perfect. It’s all coming together,” Dibbits said. “There is perfect happiness in his scenes. There is stillness, there is intimacy.”
Vermeer was nicknamed “The Sphinx of Delft” because so little was known about him – he left no letters or diaries and there are no known portraits of him. But recent research has begun to unravel the mysteries of the painter. Studies related to the exhibition further deepen the knowledge of his work.
“We’re really getting closer to Vermeer than ever before,” said Pieter Roelofs, head of the Rijksmuseum’s painting and sculpture department. Recent research means that “we really understand more about his life, about his household, about his direct contacts, the people he took these pictures for and what they mean”.
In preparation for the exhibition, the museum has been scrutinizing its own Vermeer paintings, including the iconic The Milkmaid. High-tech scans looking through the work’s surface have revealed that Vermeer altered the background as he painted, apparently to ensure focus was only on the woman pouring milk. A jug holder originally standing in the background – similar to a coat rack – was painted over.
Tracy Chevalier loved another of Vermeer’s best known works – Girl with a Pearl Earring – so much that she wrote a novel about it, which in turn became a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.
Chevalier attended a preview of the exhibition on Monday, examining this painting and the other 27 that were on display across a series of 10 galleries.
“I think the curators really understood that for him, less is more. And I feel the same way; that you don’t need many, many things. So this show only has 28 paintings, but 28 is perfect because you have the space and time to really look at each one.”
The Girl with a Pearl Earring only had to travel a short distance from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and will not stay until the end of the exhibition. She returns home after March 30th.
Other masterpieces made a longer journey for the exhibition, which took about eight years to complete.
“Officer and Laughing Girl”, “Mistress and Maid” and “Girl Interrupted at Her Music” flew from the US East Coast and left the Frick Collection while the New York Museum is being restored. This paved the way for more museums to loan paintings for the exhibition. Other works come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Leiden Collection in New York. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which organized the last major Vermeer retrospective in 1995/96 together with the Mauritshuis, also sent paintings.
The 28 paintings come from 14 museums and private collections in seven countries.
With a retrospective this comprehensive, the paintings that aren’t in Amsterdam become almost as remarkable as the ones that are. Some of the 17th-century works are so fragile that they simply cannot be transported. One painting – ‘The Concert’ – didn’t make it to Amsterdam because it is among 13 works of art still missing after it was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 in one of the world’s most notorious art thefts.
The exhibition in Amsterdam opens on Friday and runs until June 4th. It has already become the Rijksmuseum’s most sought-after exhibition – according to Dibbits, the museum has sold almost 200,000 tickets so far and has extended opening hours to accommodate more people.
For art lovers who can’t make it to Amsterdam or can’t get a ticket, there’s already one digital show available narrated by Stephen Fry.
Online viewers can zoom in on tiny details of ultra-high-resolution photographs of some Vermeer paintings to see what makes his work stand out.
“I think for Vermeer, light is color and color is light…” Roelofs said. “And I think one of the things that we’re going to see is how he really knows how to focus – and that makes him really exceptional. ”
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