Exhibition brings works by Vermeer, his contemporaries to light
More than 20 years after the legendary exhibition Johannes Vermeer, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, presents ‘Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry’.
On view in the gallery’s West Building from October 22, 2017 through January 21, 2018, the exhibition examines the artistic exchanges among Dutch Golden Age painters from 1650 to 1675, when they reached the height of their technical ability and mastery at depicting domestic life, artdaily.com reported.
Some 65 masterpieces by Johannes Vermeer and his contemporaries — including Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolas Maes, Eglon van der Neer, Caspar Netscher, and Jacob Ochtervelt — are grouped by theme, composition, and technique, thereby demonstrating how these painters admired, challenged, and pushed each other to greater artistic achievement.
The paintings also reflect how these masters responded to the changing artistic climate of the Dutch Republic in the third quarter of the 17th century, particularly in Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden, Deventer, Rotterdam and Delft.
Since 1995 the Gallery’s curator of northern baroque paintings, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., has mounted more than a dozen monographic exhibitions on Dutch artists, including several featured in this exhibition.
Among them are Johannes Vermeer (1995), Jan Steen (1996), Gerrit Dou (2000), Gerard ter Borch (2004–2005), Frans van Mieris (2006), and Gabriel Metsu (2011). As the culmination of these monographic exhibitions, ‘Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting’ reveals how these painters were artistically more connected than has previously been understood.
Dutch genre painting reached the pinnacle of its popularity and technique during the third quarter of the 17th century as a network of artists working in different cities found success depicting scenes of the daily life of the elite. ‘Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting’ makes clear that artists often studied and emulated paintings by other masters.
While little is known about exactly when artists saw paintings by those working in different cities, travel across the Netherlands was relatively easy at the time with the country’s efficient infrastructure of roads and canals.
Artists would have been able to make short journeys to visit painters’ studios as well as the homes of collectors and art dealers. There are also specific instances of contact between artists such as cosigned documents, as with Vermeer and Ter Borch; a few known teacher-student relationships, including Dou and Van Mieris; and anecdotes — for example, that Steen and Van Mieris were reputedly drinking buddies.
The paintings in the exhibition are presented in groups that illustrate how artists inspired each other in their subject matter, figural motifs, stylistic decisions and painting techniques. Subjects include women writing letters, musical duets, astronomers, lace makers, and a woman holding a parrot.