Some art lovers make it a mission to visit and view as many works as possible by 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, known for his expertise at rendering light and intimate household scenes.
Starting Friday, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is making their lives a whole lot easier.
A blockbuster exhibition at the Netherlands’ national museum of art and history brings together 28 of Vermeer’s paintings from seven countries around the world. Not bad considering only 37 paintings are generally ascribed to the artist who lived from 1632-1675 in the city of Delft.
Never before have so many Vermeer works been put on show together in a single exhibition. Seven of the paintings haven’t been in the Netherlands in more than two centuries.
The show gathers half the works that Vermeer, who died aged 43 and worked slowly, is thought ever to have painted and three-quarters of those that still exist. He likely never saw so many of his own works together at one time.
Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said Vermeer was a man who lived with a large family and had a busy life as an art dealer, but still managed to obsessively refine works of quiet beauty, bathed in light rendered with almost photographic accuracy.
“It’s this … complete focus and tranquillity in his paintings that we still love today,” Dibbits said.
Alongside famed works like “Girl With A Pearl Earring” (1664) and “The Milkmaid” (1659), the exhibit features Vermeer’s two known outdoor paintings, several large canvases, and a string of his portrayals of women — including playing instruments, reading and working.
“What’s quite striking when you look at Vermeer is that in his paintings, it’s mostly women who are the protagonists,” said curator Pieter Roelofs, noting Vermeer had seven daughters.
Vermeer’s use of light — often coming from a window situated on the left of the canvas — the bold colors and meticulous composition can be seen throughout the exhibition.
“Vermeer has this quality of kind of everything is perfect. Everything falls in place,” Dibbits said. “There’s perfect happiness in his scenes. There’s tranquility, there’s intimacy.”
Vermeer earned the nickname “The Sphinx of Delft” because so little was known about him — he left behind 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 being carried out around the exhibition are further broadening knowledge about his work.
A key document is an inventory of possessions drawn up after his death, which left the family in debt. Furniture and many objects mentioned on the list appear in the paintings.
Roelofs said major advances have been made in understanding how Vermeer worked, including identifying pinholes at the focal point in some paintings such as “The Milkmaid”, part of a system of strings he used to help ensure perfect perspective.
Artists and scholars dispute whether Vermeer may have made use of a ‘camera obscura’, a forerunner of the modern photocamera.
Roelofs said Vermeer’s works are more than something a good eye and skilled hand can create. Recent analysis shows the composition of “The Milkmaid” changed several times, notably by stripping things out to simplify it.
In preparation for the exhibition, the museum has been taking an extremely close look at its own Vermeer paintings, which include iconic “The Milkmaid.” High-tech scans that peer through the surface of the work have revealed that Vermeer tweaked the background as he painted, apparently to ensure that the focus shone solely on the woman pouring milk. A jug holder – similar to a wall-mounted coat rack – that was originally in the background was painted over.
“That is what Vermeer is: it’s never good enough and he keeps working on it until he thinks its sufficient to hand over to clients,” Roelofs said.
Author Tracy Chevalier, whose novel “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was adapted to a movie of the same name, said for her the exhibition evoked an image of Vermeer as a reserved man who “plays his cards close to his chest.”
“His paintings are so quiet and there are no children … he must have compartmentalized his life and said ‘no, no kids in the studio’.”
Museums in Germany, France, Japan, Britain, Ireland and the United States contributed to the exhibition, which opens on Friday and runs until June.
With such a comprehensive retrospective, the paintings that aren’t in Amsterdam almost become almost as noteworthy as those that are. A few of the 17th-century works are so frail that they simply can’t travel. One painting — “The Concert” — didn’t make it to Amsterdam because it is among 13 artworks still missing after being stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 in one of the world’s most notorious art heists.
The show in Amsterdam opens Friday and runs to June 4. It has already become the Rijksmuseum’s most in-demand exhibition — Dibbits said the museum has so far sold nearly 200,000 tickets and has extended opening hours to accommodate more people.
For art lovers who can’t get to Amsterdam or snag a ticket, there is already a digital show available narrated by Stephen Fry. (Reuters/AP)