Sunday June 4, 2023 Amsterdam
Today we went to the Vermeer Exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. This is the largest ever exhibition of Vermeer paintings. There were originally 28 paintings in the exhibition. The painting “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” was returned to Mauritshuis in The Hague at the end of March. We have seen that painting several times. It was made famous because of the 2003 movie, Girl with a Pearl Earring. I explain in the photo album how Sue got us tickets to the exhibit. Over 650,000 people attended the exhibit. There are 37 acknowledged paintings attributed to Vermeer. We had seen 36 before the exhibit. The one we had not seen is “Saint Praxedis" that is at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan. We probably would have gone to the exhibition if “Saint Praxedis” wasn’t included, but it was a MUST see since this painting was included. Enough about my obsession.
The one hour lecture was very good. He told us that upon Vermeer’s death at age 43 in 1675 an inventory of the property was done. Several items that were recorded are actually shown in some of the paintings. These included a painting of Cupid that is shown in “A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window” and in “A Lady Standing at a Virginal.” The speaker took questions at the end. Several people were asking for definitive answers such as: did Vermeer use his daughters as models for his painting? He said it would be reasonable to think so, but there is no way of knowing this for sure. After writing this and looking at Vermeer’s painting too often I’ve noticed other items that appear in more than one painting. So I did a little searching on the internets. The same map of Holland and West Friesland appears in two paintings: “Officer and a Laughing Girl” and “Young Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”, and ‘supposedly’ in the “Love Letter” in the foreground at a sharp angle. I can’t quite see that one. Vermeer shows a different map in two other paintings: “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” and “The Art of Painting”. The same yellow jacket with white fur appears in three paintings: “A Lady Writing”, “Mistress and Maid”, and “Woman with a Pearl Necklace”. “The Geographer: and “The Astronomer” use the same globe and they both wear the same gown. But I digress, back to the exhibit.
After the lecture we followed a line on the museum floor that led us to the first room of the exhibit. We think there were nine rooms in the exhibition. Eight rooms had 3 or 4 paintings each, and the last room had a time line of Vermeer’s life and when it is thought each painting might have been made. As I mentioned in the photo album the first room we entered after the lecture was really crowded, because we all got there at once. So we moved on to the next room and later returned to the first room for the close up photos. I think we spent a little more than an hour at the exhibit. After the Vermeer exhibit we went to the Rijksmueseum’s Hall of Honor, where they exhibit some of their most famous and popular paintings. The largest painting in the hall is Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” As you can see from the photo, work was being done on the painting. They were working on this painting when we were here in 2019. We went home and just relaxed, and I tried to catch up on my blog posting, i.e. this masterpiece.
By the way I have also posted a separate link to the nine paintings that were not in this exhibition plus “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” that was in the exhibition but returned to the Mauritshuis in Den Hague at the end of March.
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