The Rijksmuseum publishes the list of works from the historical exhibition that it will dedicate to the extraordinary genius of painting that stopped time
Around the world there are 37 paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), one of the most enigmatic masters of painting. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam brings together 28 of them in the exhibition about the Dutch genius who stopped time. It will be the most important ever dedicated to the Delft painter. According to Friso Lammertse, the museum’s chief curator, the paintings that will comprise it contain “all the mystery, the poetry and the magic of his painting”.
The Amsterdam museum expects to receive half a million visitors – a maximum of 3,000 per day – between 10 February and 4 June 2023. Online reservations are now possible for a historic and unrepeatable exhibition.
«It is difficult to describe where the magic of Vermeer lies. His paintings are not symphonies, like those of Titian or Rubens: they are chamber music. It suggests more than it explains. They don’t tell everything, and therein lies their poetic mystery,’ says Lammertse, who this Friday presented the list of paintings from the historical exhibition on which he has been working for seven years at the Prado Museum. It will also be a milestone in the investigation of this delicate and lonely genius with no workshop or school, buried in the folds of history for two centuries.
With loans from the best museums and collections in the world, curator Pieter Roelofs confirms Vermeer’s attribution of three works that have been questioned by their owners: ‘Girl with a Flute’, from the National Gallery of Art in Washington; ‘Young Woman Seated before the Virginal’, from the Leiden Collection, and ‘Saint Praxedes’, from the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, an early and recently attributed work, a copy of another by an Italian painter and made long before the fabulous maturity of the baroque master. “We think they are works by Vermeer, although we will have to wait for the studies to make a firm statement. This is a very sophisticated debate between institutions’, said Lammertse.
In addition to the four ‘Vermeers’ of the Rijksmuseum – ‘The Milkmaid’, ‘The Alley’, ‘The Love Letter’ and ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ – there will be milestones such as ‘The Interrupted Music Lesson’, ‘Military and ‘Laughing Girl’, and ‘ Lady and Maid – a trio leaves the Frick Collection in New York for the first time –, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, ‘The Geographer’, ‘The Lacemaker’, ‘View of Delft’ – voted the most beautiful painting by Marcel Proust in the world–, or “Woman with Lute,” from the New York Metropolitan, the museum with the most works by Vermeer, five of which it donates.
Not much is known about the delicate and meticulous painter, perhaps trained in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Delft, and who may have been a pupil of Carel Fabritius. The most optimistic calculations assume that he painted between 45 and 50 works in barely twenty years, no more than two a year, something unheard of compared to Rembrandt’s 330. Famous in life, it fell into obscurity until Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered it in 1866 and named it ‘the Delft Sphinx’. Until then, Vermeer had been an enigma. “There are no letters, no diaries and no self-portrait,” says Lammertse. “We only know that he was born in his father’s inn, both an art dealer and an innkeeper on the Delft square. His education determined him and he got to know painting,” he explains.
Poor and Protestant, he married a wealthy Catholic at the age of 21 in an unequal marriage that would produce fifteen children, eleven of whom lived. “A neighbor of a Catholic neighborhood, he was very social, but he made super mystical paintings,” says Lammertse. The curator of the Rijksmuseum states that Vermeer never had a workshop with other employees and ‘he always painted alone at home’. He has no doubt that he “had to have employers” and one of them was a baker. “How can you feed 11 children with such low production if you have no guaranteed sales?” he wonders. There are those who believe that he earned his living by means other than painting. He fell ill and died the next day, and his wife made an inventory showing a single donkey. She must have sold all her assets to pay off her debts.
“He was underrated, but in life he was famous and faded into history. He signed his paintings but did not date them, except for two of them, which enabled the others to be located later,” says Lammertse. He always painted human figures in mysterious interiors lit from the viewer’s left, engaged in domestic or recreational tasks. “His technique is great. He seems to dislike edges and his ‘sfumatos’ resemble Leonardo’s,” adds the expert. “He takes more than he puts in, seeks simplicity and adjusts the composition in a constant game of trial and error,” he concludes.
Despite the complex situation, with brutal inflation that does not abate, stratospheric insurance and transportation costs, and the uncertainty created by the war in Ukraine, the exhibition organizers believe their work “has not been more complicated than other exhibitions”. “If we compare with the exhibition that was in The Hague 30 years ago, it is clear that it was more difficult. Now it is much more expensive, yes we already know that, but we have much more efficient technical resources,” says a Lammertse “surprised at how extraordinarily easy” it has been to get the loans.
Only three Vermmer fabrics have gone on sale in the past century. In 1921, ‘La callejuela’ was auctioned without finding a buyer, an exquisite and delicate view of the streets of Delft, the birthplace of the painter, and donated to the Rijksmuseum, which today exhibits it together with jewels such as ‘The Milkmaid’, an iconic fabric that the Rijksmuseum has thoroughly researched, revealing many of the secrets of the Vermeer banknote.
In 2004, “Young Woman Sitting Before the Virginal” was auctioned, which, after dispelling doubts as to authorship and confirmed as a work by Vermerr in 1986, was awarded by Sotheby’s in London for $30 million to the Las Vegas casino magnate. Vegas Steve Wynn.
The third was ‘Santa Praxedes’, Vermeer’s first known and dated work, which was on display in the historical exhibition held by the Mauritshuis museums in The Hague and the National Gallery in Washington in the mid-1990s at the Delft University of Technology. master dedicated. century and who managed to collect 22 of his works. It was already an achievement for the Prado to collect nine paintings by the Dutchman in the exhibition ‘Vermeer and the Dutch interior’ that he organized in 2003.
1. ‘Woman Writing’, 1664-1667, National Gallery of Art, Washington
2. ‘Young Woman Seated before the Virgin’, c. 1670-1672, The National Gallery, London
3. ‘Lady Playing the Standing Virgin’, 1670-1672, The National Gallery, London
4. ‘Allegory of the Catholic Faith’, 1670-1674, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
5. ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’, 1654-1655, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
6. ‘Diana and her nymphs’, 1655–56, Mauritshuis, The Hague
7. ‘The Interrupted Music Lesson’, c. 1659-1661, The Frick Collection, New York
8. ‘Girl Reading a Letter’, 1657-58, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
9. ‘Girl with a Flute’, 1664-1667, National Gallery of Art, Washington
10. ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, 1664-1667, Mauritshuis, The Hague
11. ‘Girl in a Red Hat’, 1664-1667, National Gallery of Art, Washington
12. ‘Lady and Virgin’, c. 1665-1667, The Frick Collection, New York
13. ‘Soldier and Laughing Girl’, 1657-58, The Frick Collection, New York
14. ‘Saint Praxedes’, 1655, Kufu Company Inc., The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
15. ‘The Geographer’, 1669, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
16. ‘The Wine Cup’, c. 1659-61, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
17. ‘The Lacemaker’, 1666-1668, Musée du Louvre, Paris
18. ‘The Love Letter’, 1669-70, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
19. ‘The Milkmaid’, 1658-59, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
20. ‘The Pimp’, 1656, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
21. ‘View of Delft’, 1660-61, Mauritshuis, The Hague
22. ‘View of houses in Delft’, known as ‘De Steeg’, 1658-59, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
23. ‘The Pearl Appraiser’, c. 1662-1664, National Gallery of Art, Washington
24. ‘Woman Reading a Letter’, 1662-64, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
25. ‘The Girl with the Pearl Necklace’, c. 1662-1664, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
26. ‘A lady writes a letter to her servant’, 1670-1672, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
27. ‘Young Woman seated before the Virgin’, c. 1670-72, The Leiden Collection, New York
28. ‘Woman with a Lute’, 1662-1664, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Source: La Verdad
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