Little is known about him. He died impoverished and there were no letters, contracts or other documents. He had no workshop or followers. Its appearance is an enigma. It is believed that he came to paint an unpreserved self-portrait, and a dozen of his paintings have not survived. play. He did very little: being generous around fifty. from this, Only 37 of them have stood the test of time. And one of them is missing: ‘El concierto’ in March 1990 was one of the pieces stolen from someone. the most grandiose art thefts in history, including ‘Storm in the Sea of Galilee’, Rembrant’s only known seascape, which attracted this oil painting and 12 others from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (USA). His father was an innkeeper and art dealer. I don’t travel She converted to Catholicism to get married, and although she died young, she had 15 children.
A milestone hard to reach
Hitherto little-known biography Johannes Vermeer (Delft, 1632-1675), Someone The great masters of the golden age of Dutch painting, and one of the painters of all time most known and admired. Its popularity is overwhelming. So much so that From this Friday (and until June 4th) of the Rijksmuseum In Amsterdam (Netherlands), it is considered the exhibition of the year, or rather the event of the year, in the art world, and is currently the largest exhibition in history dedicated to Vermeer..
“Even Vermeer never saw so many oil paintings together in his lifetime. Bringing them together was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Now or never”, says Taco Dibbits, director of the Dutch museum. So those in charge of the Rijksmuseum guess half a million views pre-ticket sale is working tirelessly (over 200,000 tickets submitted) and before it starts the art gallery is already extended hours The reason for such enthusiasm is of course explained by the name Vermeer, but it is not only the number of works exhibited, but also the source. tag ‘exceptional’ to the instance. Not surprisingly, it brings together 28 of the artist’s 37 preserved paintings. 75% of his job. And it’s a milestone that has never been reached before and that’s definitely hard to repeat afterwards.
jobs that never travel
The Dutch museum’s showdown drinks a lot from luck. Three works from Vermeer’s brush The Frick Collection and never left its walls, but the expansion of the New York headquarters has been a miracle Three works, ‘Lady and Maiden’, ‘The Interrupted Music Lesson’ and ‘Soldier and Laughing Girl’, and two works, ‘Alegory of the Catholic Faith’ and ‘Woman with a Lute’, will be on display. Protected by the Metropolitan of New York, the room that places the most value on Vermeer’s work: five. The other three—’A sleeping maid’, ‘Woman with a water jug’, and ‘The study of a young woman’—will not travel because their bequested terms prevent borrowing. And so, until we reach 28, which features two of the best-known oil paintings: ‘Daughter of the Pearl’, temporarily left his home in Mauritshuis in The Hague and “Milkmaid”, ‘Letter’, along with ‘Woman reading the letter’ and ‘Street’, has only been moved from room to room as it is one of the four pieces of the Rijksmuseum collection.
Artifacts stolen by the Nazis
Nine artifacts will be missed, including ‘The Astronomer’, which belongs to the British Royal Collection – its fragile condition deters an era’s required confusion – and will be on loan from the Louvre in Abu Dhabi until June. like the others ‘Young man with a glass of wine’ and ‘The art of painting’ never travel because their owners, the German Herzog Anton Ulrich museum and the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, do not envision their rooms with the emptiness of their absence. As an anecdote, the latter and the “Astronomer”
In the swamp of history
A century before saving two of the few works produced by the Dutch master, the artist’s figure itself had to be saved. Despite the popularity it currently enjoys, Vermeer remained in the art gallery for two centuries. French art critic until 1866 Théophile Thoré-Bürger raised him to the altars -and named it the ‘Delft sphinx’ because of how mysterious and enigmatic it was- After seeing the ‘Delft Landscape’ oil painting (also available at the Rijksmuseum exhibition), same as author Marcel Proust was considered the “best painting in the world”. Although it is difficult to decipher the cause of so much forgetfulness, underproduction and his petty proclivity for drawing major costumer and genre scenes that could earn him commissions, as did his contemporaries Frans Hals and Jan Steen, and the fact that he would dislike a legion of collectors had something to do with it: most pieces fell into the hands of Delft resident Pieter van Ruijven.
poetic mystery
The Vermeer thing is more domestic privacy: scenes of women often caught doing a mundane task: reading or writing letters, embroidering, playing saz, pouring milk into a bowl… he manages to suspend this with time and with it. raise to glorify every day. “It’s hard to describe where you live Vermeer’s magic. His paintings are chamber music, not symphonies like those of Titian or Rubens. It suggests more than it explains. They don’t tell everything, and that’s where their poetic mysteries lie.” In the opinion of Friso Lammertse, curator of the Rijksmuseum. Much of this mystery is explained by the skillful way of lighting the pieces, often indoors. How he uses light is influenced by one of the many studies conducted by the accompanying Dutch museum, which reveals that it was the Jesuits who accompanied the exhibition and showed the painter the use of the camera obscura. It is not a matter of believing that he is using one of these optical instruments, as much as he knows and practices how it works.
More than a ‘pentimiento’
There are more discoveries as some pieces go through the past. latest research techniques. Thus, in ‘La callejuela’ more than one ‘regret’, added and deleted characters, as well as windows and shutters. The same can be seen in ‘The Milkmaid’, where Vermeer initially conceived of placing a jug hanger and then a vanishing brazier. The black line, also seen under the young woman’s left arm, indicates that the figure was drawn before. Details that solve the character’s mysteries, but They don’t remove an iota of mystery from their hypnotic canvases.