12/27/2023 0 Comments Illuminated manuscript letters t![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (The previous record holder, the 1995–1996 exhibition in Washington, consisted of twenty-one paintings and proved so popular that people lined up in the winter cold for as long as twelve hours to view it.) Any museum that hopes to stage a Vermeer exhibition also has to contend with viewers’ tendency to linger longer before his paintings than they do before the work of his contemporaries-the sort of behavior curators ordinarily welcome but that must make estimating the pace of admissions particularly difficult.ĭespite the challenges, however, this latest version of blockbuster Vermeer largely succeeded in reconciling its contradictory imperatives. Managing those crowds can’t have been easy, especially since the Rijksmuseum’s advance publicity made much of the fact that the twenty-eight paintings on display represented the largest group of works by Vermeer ever assembled-probably more, according to the museum’s director, Taco Dibbits, than the artist himself could have seen at any one time. One of the most intimate and quiet of painters, and one who often chose to work on an unusually small scale, Vermeer has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser. Though much still remains unknown about the artist and the man alike, there is no question about the spell he continues to exert on his viewers. Titled simply “Vermeer”-the “Johannes” that still preceded it for the last monographic exhibition of his work at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995–1996 apparently felt superfluous-the Rijksmuseum show sold out its entire run of tickets just days after it opened. Thoré called his discovery “Van der Meer de Delft” in order to distinguish him from the bewildering array of other Van der Meers and Vermeers who wielded a brush in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, but such discriminations have long outlived their usefulness, as the recent exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam clearly demonstrated. When The Art of Painting (circa 1666–1668) changed hands at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch-an error that persisted until Vermeer’s signature was deciphered and De Hooch’s identified as a forgery in the 1860s. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (circa 1657–1658)-recently restored by the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and the centerpiece of its Vermeer exhibition less than two years ago-was purchased in 1742 for the elector of Saxony as a Rembrandt two decades later Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, better known as The Music Lesson (circa 1662–1664), entered the Royal Collection at Windsor as a Frans van Mieris. The result was that when an occasional Vermeer did circulate, it was often attributed to someone else, and even admirers of his paintings didn’t know whose art had actually captivated them. (Houbraken’s The Great Theater of Dutch Painters first appeared in 1718, and the commentators who followed mostly took their cues from him.) If the art historian Ben Broos is right to speculate that the influential chronicler of Dutch painting Arnold Houbraken managed to skip the crucial lines about the newly risen phoenix because they appear on a separate page from the rest of the poem, then an accident of printing may also have helped consign the artist to oblivion. Vermeer’s virtual disappearance from the record is usually explained by the small size of his corpus-modern scholars estimate that the entire oeuvre consisted of some forty-five to fifty works, as compared to more than 350 currently attributed to his great compatriot Rembrandt-and by the fact that a significant number of his paintings were swallowed up in a single private collection during his lifetime. Despite this evidence of the esteem in which Vermeer was held at the time, his name largely vanished from accounts of Dutch painting in the centuries that followed, only to reappear-phoenix-like-when the French journalist and art critic Théophile Thoré devoted a three-part article to this “unknown of genius,” as he’d earlier dubbed him, in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1866. The context was a poem by the printer Arnold Bon, published in 1667 to commemorate the premature death of the painter Carel Fabritius in the explosion of Delft’s gunpowder arsenal thirteen years earlier, and Bon concluded his lament by reassuring his fellow citizens that a worthy successor had nonetheless miraculously emerged to take Fabritius’s place. In an uncanny anticipation of his subsequent reception history, Johannes Vermeer made one of his first appearances in the printed record in the guise of a phoenix, the mythical bird that regenerates itself from its own ashes. ![]()
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