NEW YORK – Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch painter famous for his quiet domestic scenes, careful composition and exquisite sense of light and shadow, produced only 34 paintings in his lifetime. Each sold for the equivalent of a year’s pay for a middle class person of his time.
Now, more than half of the Vermeers in existence — many freshly cleaned and sparkling, and some never before seen in the United States — are on view in New York.
“Vermeer and The Delft School,” a major show featuring 15 works by the prized painter from the first half of the 17th century. The show focuses on the key decades of the 1650s and ’60s, when Delft painting took a turn toward the more naturalistic.
The Delft School is best known for its quiet images of domestic life by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. These and other Delft artists painted views of the households, courtyards, church interiors, streets, and squares of Delft during the 1650s and 1660s.
This fascinatin exhibition has been organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with The National Gallery, London.
Highlights include such rarely lent masterpieces as the 1667 “The Art of Painting,” on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the 1656 “The Procuress,” from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Germany.
“This is the first time ‘The Procuress’ has ever been seen in this country. The museum never lent it before,” Liedtke said. “But a greater painting and second in difficulty to get is the ‘Art of Painting,’ and we’re thrilled to have that, too.”
Also featured are the 1658 “The Little Street,” from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the 1665 “Girl with the Red Hat,” from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Met’s own “1672 “Allegory of Faith.” Six of the Vermeer paintings were absent from the National Gallery’s blockbuster 1995 Vermeer retrospective.
The Met show is unprecedented in that it places the famous artist in the context of the cosmopolitan town of Delft, one of Holland’s oldest cities.
In so doing, the show shatters the common misconception of Vermeer as a lone genius in a backwater town.
Even in Vermeer’s time, Delft — only 3 miles from court in The Hague — was a city of reserved sophistication and wealthy patrons, many of whom had earned so much money in the beer and linen trades that they happily shelled out the equivalent of the annual income of a skilled cabinetmaker for one of Vermeer’s paintings.
“I’m not saying he wasn’t a genius. He was. He was exceptional,” said Liedtke. “But in this show you see both how he fits in … and for the first time you really understand how he is a genius, because you see the beauty of the average level around him, and the next best level, and he’s still ahead of that.”
The wealth of the city was so great that even horses were decorated with elaborate tapestries for parades. A refined Delft horse covering, in mint condition, is featured in the first gallery.
“These were the best of economic times and the highest literacy rates and the most peace that Holland had experienced up to that point,” said Liedtke. “As they say, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ When the economy is booming, attention shifts to family, clothing, and feeling good about your life.”
In addition to paintings of domestic scenes, Delft masters produced historical pictures, refined portraits and paintings of flowers, as well as stunning decorative art works.
Including the Vermeers, the show features 85 paintings by 30 artists, about 35 drawings, and smaller sections of tapestries, guilded silver and lovely pieces of the famous blue and white porcelain known as Delftware.
The only works in the show not from Delft are drawings showing the topography of the famous city.
Throughout the exhibit — organized in rough chronology with some thematic sections — Vermeer’s works have been mounted amid those of his contemporaries to show the various ways they treated similar subjects.
To be fair, Vermeer had a number of luxuries his contemporaries did not.
“He takes about four months to paint a picture, because he had the support of one or two private patrons who bought about half of his works. His contemporaries only had a couple of days or a couple of weeks to do a painting,” Liedtke said.
The artist’s virtuosity shines through in gallery after gallery.
“He creates a sort of blur at the edge of an object rather than a line. He’s fascinated by optical effects. Light playing over a shoulder. His shadows are always transparent. They’re not like brown painted on a sleeve. They’re see-through. Very subtle transitions of light and shade,” Liedtke said.
The groundbreaking show is accompanied by an illustrated catalog of the same name, featuring essays by Liedtke, Rueger, and a number of other prominent scholars.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition catalogue is made possible in part by The Christian Humann Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Doris Duke Fund for Publications.
After New York, the show travels to the National Gallery in London, where it will be on view from June 20 through Sept. 16, 2001.
