Of collection Largest paintings Vermeer’s Amsterdam opens in
Ablockbuster show of paintings by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer opened in Amsterdam on Friday, boasting the largest assemblage of the beloved artist’s works in one place.
On display until June 4 at the exhibition are classics such as Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid, among 28 others, with galleries and private collections from the United States to Japan lending their prized works to the showcase.
The unprecedented exhibition, organised at the Rijksmuseum in the Dutch capital, has already sold more than 2,00,000 advance tickets, the most in the history of the Netherlands’ national museum.
Vermeer is famed for his hauntingly lit domestic scenes of 17thcentury Dutch life, with the paintings themselves doing the talking, since little is known of the life of Vermeer, often known as the Sphinx of Delft.
“This intense beauty and this moment where time stands still, [is] something that you really see in this show,” says Taco Dibbits, museum director. “You can only see when you’re confronted with a painting by Vermeer. And here you have it 28 times, so it’s incredibly exciting,” Dibbits adds.
DID YOU KNOW THIS
ABOUT VERMEER?
Vermeer is known to have painted very few works. There are just 35 authenticated works still in existence — meaning that some three quarters of his remaining oeuvre is now in one place. Here are a few interesting tidbits from the Dutch Baroque artist’s life. He was nicknamed the Sphinx of Delft thanks to little being known about his life. Born into a family of Calvinist traders in 1632, he converted to Catholicism, marrying a wealthy woman with whom he had 11 children, but on his death left a mountain of debt from his own art trading. In his lifetime, during the Golden Age of Dutch art that also produced Rembrandt, Vermeer was a respected artist with a number of wealthy patrons, but apart from a few astute collectors, his work went largely forgotten after his death. It was only in the 19th century that he was plucked from obscurity, notably due to the interest shown by French journalist and art critic Theophile ThoreBurger.
Celebrity brought a rash of fake Vermeers onto the market as art forgers sought to cash in. The Rijksmuseum says his “remarkably small oeuvre” is believed to comprise 35-37 paintings, but only around 30 have been indubitably certified as his, with debates continuing about the authorship of several others. Girl with Flute is a case in point. The Dutch master’s work was part of the intrigue in the Agatha Christie mystery and an episode in the hit TV series Meanwhile, Girl with a Pearl Earring owes its monumental fame in part to a 1999 best-selling novel by US author Tracy Chevalier.
This intense beauty and this moment where time stands still, [is] something that you really see in this show. TACO DIBBITS, Museum director, Rijksmuseum