Largest Vermeer Exhibition Ever Staged Opens February 2023 At The Rijksmuseum


Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is a household name today for paintings like The Milkmaid and The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the subject of a bestselling book by Tracy Chevalier and a movie starring Scarlett Johansson. The Golden Age painter produced a small number of works in his lifetime, only 37 of which remain today. This February, The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will bring together the majority of those paintings in Vermeer, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work ever presented.

At least 28 paintings of Vermeer’s very small oeuvre will be loaned from museums and collections, some for the first time, from Europe, the United States and Japan. The Frick Collection will lend all three of its Vermeer masterpieces to the exhibition:  The Girl Interrupted at Her Music, Officer and Laughing Girl, and Mistress and Maid.  The Rijksmuseum exhibition will be the first time that all three paintings are shown together outside of New York since they were acquired more than a century ago.  Two paintings have undergone extensive examination at the Rijksmuseum prior to the exhibition. 

 Additional highlights include The Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague), The Geographer (StädelMuseum, Frankfurt am Main), Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin,Woman Holding a Balance (The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), The Glass of Wine (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), Young Woman with a Lute (Metropolitan Museum, NYC) and The Lacemaker (Louvre, Paris).  Works never before shown to the public in the Netherlands will include the newly restored Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.  The Rijksmuseum itself owns four masterpieces by Vermeer: The Milkmaid, The Little Street, Woman Reading a Letter and The Love Letter. 

In the lead-up to the blockbuster survey of Vermeer, curators, conservators and scientists from The Rijksmuseum, Mauritshuis in The Hague and the University of Antwerp have worked together to authenticate three paintings with contested attributions: Girl with a Flute (c.1669-1675, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC); Saint Praxedis (c.1645, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo) and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (1670–72), from Thomas Kaplan’s Leiden Collection. Techniques used for the investigations included the sophisticated Macro-XRF and RIS scanning technologies.

Scanning also brought to light fascinating new details of the well-known works. In The Milkmaid two new objects were found on the canvas: a jug holder and a fire basket.  The artist himself later painted over the objects.  The most recent scans also uncovered what is clearly an underpainting. Using similar technology, underpainting has also been noted in additional paintings such as Woman holding a balance from the National Gallery in Washington.  The conventional understanding that Vermeer painted slowly and with great thought must therefore be revised.  His end results may appear introverted and contemplative but his working method is virtuosic and rigorous. 

As one of the most revered and famous of the Dutch masters, Vermeer’s paintings sell at auction for millions of dollars but he was less well known in his own day, mainly because he did not produce many paintings (probably about 45) and these were created for patrons in his hometown of Delft. His contemporary, Rembrandt (1606 – 1669), in contrast, painted hundreds of works. Vermeer made a good living but by 1672 he was in financial trouble and he died bankrupt in 1675, leaving his wife and many children in poverty.

Pieter Roelofs, Head of Paintings and Sculpture and co-curator of the exhibition, said: “The mystery of Johannes Vermeer, also known as the Sphinx of Delft, has clung to the artist for more than 150 years and has become part of his reputation.  Connecting what we now know about his personal life with his work brings us closer to Vermeer.”

Vermeer at The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam from 10 February – 4 June 2023.  Tickets are € 30.00 Adult/ Free 18 and under



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