Flying Fox

Digital reproduction of 317 known paintings, 285 etchings and more than 100 drawings of Rembrandt van Rijn go on display next week at the former Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

Ernst van de Wetering, a leading Rembrandt scholar who supervised the project, said that the exhibition, unique in its kind, will offer viewers “a walk through Rembrandt’s mind.” All works will be reproduced in their original size and shown chronologically. He argues that the reproductions have the advantage of stripping away the aura of awe viewers often have when they see an original, which hinders their assessment of the work.

If that is not enough, some have been digitally enhanced by Van de Wetering himself, hoping to restore the color and detail they had when they left Rembrandt’s studio nearly 400 years ago.

Here, one may see Van der Wetering’s point and one may miss it entirely. Perhaps it’s a matter of assuming a realistic point of view. Without splitting hairs, the exhibit is at least (or cynically, at most) a very good and very big Rembrandt unfolded art book.

Being a painter, I am pretty well trained to look at paintings, so if aura is there, I assume it is produced by the inner workings of the painting  itself and not for other reasons. And again being a painter, the virtual restoration part leaves me puzzled. I accept age and decay as well as the aging and decaying of paintings. One may reasonably suspect Rembrandt did too.

“The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size”
the former Amsterdam Stock Eschange, Amsterdam
July 5 - Sept. 7. 2009

After years of stagnation, the London National Gallery has updated its internet presence.

For Vermeer enthusiasts, the re-do offers an improved zoom feature of both the Lady Seated at the Virginals and the Lady Standing at the Virginals, two late works which can be easily overlooked by newcomers.

Other than the restrained graphic re-make, someone at the National Gallery put his hand on his heart and eliminated the hideous watermarks which once “graced” these previous zoom features. If you are partial to detail (like myself) or a painter (like myself), these images provide both food for the eye and mind.

Although politics evidently constrain the gallery staff to aim their sites on the “lower” tier of museum goers (“Plan your visit here,” “Take part as a family,” “Subscribe to out Podcast link” links strategically infest the site), the textual information sorely disappoints. Do not the two ladies merit more than five bland paragraphs? Frankly, my 10-year web experience has taught me to never underestimate the inquisitiveness or intellect of the those who wish to warm up to the masterpieces for the first time. Both of these unobtrusive Vermeers have some pretty compelling stories to tell if one willing to scratch under the surface a bit.

Following even Vermeer matters little know to the general public, Pieter Groenewegen’s Mountain Landscape with Travelers has been temporarily loaned by the Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder Gallery (Amsterdam) to the Prinsenhof-Museum, Delft.

Although you may not associate Groenewegen’s rather conventional landscapes with the sublime masterpieces of Vermeer, Vermeer evidently found Groenewegen’s Mountain Landscape with Travelers sufficiently intriguing to incorporate not once, but twice in his Lady Standing at the Virginals. To be fair, the word intriguing should be reserved to Vermeer’s pictorial sleigh of hand rather than to landscape itself. Here is the story in a pill.

Some years ago, Dr Gregor J. M. Weber (Head of the Department of Fine Arts in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) noted that the landscapes which appear on the lid of the virginal and in the gilt frame on the background wall of A Lady Standing at the Virginals showed remarkable similarities. Other than the overall composition, the succession light and dark layers of rocks and trees, the roofs of the houses and the waterfalls of two landscapes were virtually identical. Weber concluded that they were both based on the same painting.

Although many Dutch landscape painters composed their works along these lines, Weber noted a much greater similarity with the work of Pieter Groenewegen from Delft and concluded that the work must have been by him. By coincidence, Weber saw a photograph of Groenewege’s Mountain Landscape with Traveler and informed the two Amsterdam art dealers, John and Willem Jan Hoogstader, of his finding who were amazed when they discovered they were the owners of the very picture in question.

Using computer montage, Weber further analyzed the two depictions in Vermeer’s painting in reference to the real Groenewegen. And although it was evident that Vermeer had used some poetic license in adapting Groenewegen’s landscape to his expressive exigencies, the coincidences were so compelling that the swept away any reasonable doubt of Weber’s original conjecture.

What remains to be understood is the scope of Vermeer’s pictorial trickery. Personally, I have a hunch that the two landscapes were meant to deliberately “echo” each other in order to create a visual analogy to the musical theme which is at the heart of Vermeer’s composition. Visual “echos,” some obvious and some more subtle, seem to be a standard tool in Vermeer’s pictorial repertoire. One example is the curling locks of the youthful Guitar Player which closely well echo the dangling foliage of the landscape behind her. Another is the snow-white cap of the maid and the billowing clouds of the landscape behind her in the Love Letter.

If you would like to dig further into the matter, the Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder has published Weber’s findings with copious diagrams and images in the Hoosteder Journal No 7, Sept, 2000. If you contact them they may send you a free copy. Some information, without images, can be found at < http://www.hoogsteder.com/publications/journals/journal-7/discovered>.

work: The Sacrifice of Isaac
artist: Andrea del Sarto
museum: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
get the zoom: http://www.clevelandart.org/explore/artistwork.asp?searchText=del+sarto&ctl00%24ctl00%24ctrlHeader%24btnSearch=go&tab=1&recNo=0&woRecNo=1

what it’s about: For a painter who wishes to comprehend the technique of Vermeer, the best imaginable venue would be to spend a day, even an hour, watching him paint.

The next best thing, this one at least theoretically possible, would be to be able study a half-finished work by Vermeer, say somewhere between the underpainting and the final working-up stages. No luck here either.

In fact, to think of it, we rarely come across incomplete paintings in any museums by any author or from any age, not because they are down on the gallery racks out of view, but because very few have survived. Most often, when a painter died or an incomplete work surfaced, either an apprentice or a competent colleague was called in to make it salable. Authorship, even in the case of the most renowned masters, did not have the same aura as it does today.

The third best solution would be able to study an unfinished 17th-century canvas by a competent artist. Wish granted. And not only is there such a picture, it’s viewable in an excellent Zoom on the net. To be frank, there is too much to learn just by looking, so get clicking.

If you are a painter and you need background information to make sense of Del Sarto’s canvas, my book How to Paint Your Own Vermeer on Vermeer’s methods and materials covers quite a bit of common 17th-century studio practices. If you are not a painter and would like to delve in to some of the mysteries of the masters’ workshop, you get the same information in lay terms in my Looking over Vermeer’s Shoulder.

When I launched the Essential Vermeer website 10 years ago, I was startled by how little was to be found on Johannes Vermeer and by the less-than-lukewarm attitude of the art community towards internet technology. On the other hand, being among the first to get seriously into the field was like turning into new four-lane highway with no cars on it and anywhere to go.

The latest feature of the  the Essential Vermeer Interactive Online Catalogue of Johannes Vermeer. It has been years in the making but only in recent months have I found the impetus to finish the job up having come across JQuery, an amazingly fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML event handling and animating (admittedly, only my youngest son’s patience and tech savvy permitted me to take advantage of it, beyond fundamental HTM, Photoshop and CSS, I am lost).

So, instead of me going on about what an online catalogue of paintings can do and all the endless research I have poured into the project, it’s best to simply go to the main page, click to the painting you like most and begin exploring. I hope you will learn and enjoy.

BTW, it’s just up so you may encounter bugs and misspellings that will be ironed out gradually. Please, please let me know of any problems you spot. You will agree with me that any Vermeer catalogue deserves to be perfect. Any suggestions and criticism are gold.

Bets are that you don’t know Caesar van Everdingen. Vermeer did.

Art historians believe that Vermeer used a now-lost, large-scale Cupid by Caesar Van Everdingen a good 4 times as a backdrop for his own compositions. The most explicit rendition, impossible to ignore, glares out from the late Lady Standing at a Virginal (see detail left). The other three are more discreet.

In the Maid Asleep, Cupid’s foot dangles in the upper left-hand where we can see the corner of a picture with an ebony frame. If you know he is there, you can see him standing erect in Girl Interrupted in her Music although pretty much obliterated by time and restorations. And had it not been for x-ray photography, we would have never known he hung in all his glory, dominating the background wall of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

Chances are Vermeer’s Cupid is the one mentioned in the inventory of his widow’s possessions in 1676.

Knowing how exacting Vermeer was in aesthetic matters, the modern viewer might wonder just what Vermeer had in mind. To our tastes Van Everdingen’s Cupid is simply too big, too confrontational, too rhetorical and too nude to have anything to do the values we prize in Vermeer’s art. Historians usually have no problem skimming over aesthetic valuations of the painting that no longer exists. Far more comfortable is to take Cupid as a symbol which 300 years ago meant, and still means, love to anyone.

In common with so many forgotten or underestimated artists, Van Everdingen occupied an important place in the art of his own time. The century-long refusal of critics and connoisseurs to look at his type of art shows signs of coming to an end.

It could not have escaped a young, ambitious painter like Vermeer that Van Everdingen was a superb technician, not only with detail and brushwork, but with his ability to paint portraits, mythological and allegorical pictures in a broad, yet crisp and polished style. His outstanding strength was his ability to simplify complicated forms and convey the sense of volume and surface with great pictorial economy. His treatment of light evokes the fullness of nature; even his shadows are colorful and pleasant to look at.

In his later years, when Vermeer pursued a more classicist agenda, Van Everdingen’s painting became more relevant than just being a convenient prop.

Luckily there are some excellent high resolution images of van Everdingen’s work on the net.

My preferences goes to:

Cupid with a Glass Ball
Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf
http://www.museumkunstpalast.de/mediabig/1845A_original.jpg

Winter
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/images/aria/sk/z/sk-a-4878.z

Bacchus with Nymphs and Cupid
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
http://www.oogvoornaakt.nl/

(this images is a bit laborious to access but very worth the while)

1. click on the “Bekijk alle naakten” link to the lower-right
2. scroll the multiple images to reach the far left-hand border
3. click on the farthest left-hand painting in the second row from the top
4. click on the medium size image of the paintings that appears which brings up an extraordinarily detailed image and use your mouse to explore the painting.

what is it? - Gerrit van Honthorst, like a number of 17th-century Dutch painters, knew his trade and worked well in different genres. He was equally comfortable in history painting, raucous bordello scenes and refined portraiture alike. Although sought-after in his own age, few average museum-goers are familiar with his work even though he was far more influential in his age than Vermeer. He was also far richer. In 1654, he sold his house in The Hague for the astronomical sum of 14,000 guilders (an average Dutch house might have gone for 1,000 or less) and lent Elizebeth, Princess of Hohenzollern no less than 35,000.

what to look for - Although the present canvas may not be particularly inspiring, it is nonetheless a solid piece of 17th-century painterly skill.

The most informative detail is the painter’s “selected” palette on which are disposed two rows of perfectly ordered paints blobs. The top are all the pigments conventionally used for mixing flesh tones. The bottom row presents the ready-to-use basic mixtures. If you don’t believe flesh can be so miraculously evoked with a hand-full of different tones, scroll up and inspect the faces of the lovely painter, the putto and her sitter. Analogous flesh palettes were employed by Rembrandt and Vermeer.

The choice of representing the selected flesh palette was far from random. From the very beginning of European tradition of easel painting, the depiction of human flesh was given great importance and it still constitutes one of the most telling technical challenges until this day. Willem Beur, artist and art writer of Vermeer’s time, wrote: “Just as we humans consider ourselves the foremost amongst animals; so too, are we the foremost subject of the art of paintings, and it is in painting human flesh that its highest achievements are to be seen, whenever a painter succeeds in rendering the diversity of colors and strong hues found in human flesh and particularly in the faces, adequately depicting the intricacy of the diversity of people or their different emotions.”

For the painter and the technically-minded, the top row of pigments probably are (left to right): lead white, yellow ochre, vermillion, red ochre, red madder, raw umber, black and a last unidentified pigment.

Selected palettes were the norm in 17th-century painting when complicated compositions were worked up in a piecemeal fashion, area by area. Painters laid on their palettes only those pigments which were strictly necessary for the day’s work in order to avoid waste of grinding time and raw materials.

Let’s be frank, since the internet began to reach out in the 1990s, the fine art community has made little headway on the web. Art with a capital “A” lags and it lags badly. Serious monographic sites of great artists are exceedingly rare and art collections and institutions are dutifully present but, save exceptions, not much more.

One area where progress is being made is in digital imagery. Major collections and museums are slowly but surely presenting their finest works with various Flash applications such as Zoomify allowing the viewer to scan with ease over good quality images. Some are carefully tucked away where the average viewer will never chance.

Obviously, we cannot expect to experience the impact of a work of art from the computer monitor no matter how high the image’s resolution may be. But zoom-viewing permits close-quarter, detailed observation that can provide its own pleasures and food for thought. Most importantly, considering that we will never, ever in our lives see 99% of these pictures where they are physically housed, high-quality, internet zooms constitute an illuminating resource and not merely eye candy for the curious.

The following Zooming-in columns  will report some of the most interesting zooms on the net, with hopefully, some interesting comments.

The name Van Meegeren is still a potent magnet. Eroll Morrris of the New York Times digs in and serves up a useful mulit-part article on the most notorious of all art-theft case including interviews with the authors the two most recent books on the subject, Jonathan Lopez and Edward Dolnick.

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/bamboozling-ourselves-part-1/

See my own Essential Vermeer interview with Lopez here:
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/interviews_newsletter/lopez_interview.html

and his take on the possibilities of the nightmare happening again:
http://flyingfox.jonathanjanson.com/2008/11/21/can-this-happen-again/

Vermeer’s Masterpiece,”The Milkmaid”
Sept. 10 -Nov. 29, 2009
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Just out is Carol Vogel’s NYT report of Vermeer’s Milkmaid coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September, 2009.

Although no blockbuster exhibition is planned for her arrival be warned, the humble, but most majestic of all maids is sure enough to draw important crowds.  So now, in one swoop, Vermeer both serious enthusiasts and the curious can take in 6 Vermeer paintings (the MET already has 5) at one time, walk a few blocks down to the Frick and see three more.

That’s about ¼ of the Delft Master’s surviving output.

The only other loan will be a drawing by Dutch artist Jacob Backer, Woman With a Jug, from about 1645.

The Dutch Golden Age: From Rembrandt to Vermeer
October 7, 2009 – February 7, 2010
Pinacothèque de Paris

Like it or not, some important Vermeer paintings are doing pretty impressive legwork. Seeing they are all over the place, if you are planning Vermeer–related travel then please consult the Flying Fox Vermeer Tracker page to avoid being let down. Here is the latest update.

The Pinacothèque de Paris will host an exhibition will put on an outstanding Dutch works of art, an ensemble of over one hundred and thirty pieces, including about sixty paintings, thirty graphic works, ten etchings as well as ten objects to give an ample representation of carved ivories, tapestries, china, wooden miniatures, silverware, glassworks and furnishings.

Vermeer’s late little Love Letter, will be on display.

In a recent interview, I was asked to explain why Vermeer’s art has enjoyed so much popularity in the last decades. Art historians, art critics, novelists, poets, film directors and ordinary lay people are inebriated by his canvases. Frankly, I am not sure I know the answer. However, the distinguishing features of Vermeer’s art seem to be at odds with much of the most successful art of our own age. That paradox might be a lead.

If pressed, I would take bets that the widespread increase in popularity of Vermeer’s work indicates a spontaneous trend towards unmediated visual experience and artist/viewer communication. The concept of art as an educational instrument may be loosing traction.

Here is how Vermeer’s work stacks up against today’s competition.

1. Vermeer’s works are small. Today’s cutting-edge artist is generally inclined to work in large, if not monumental, scale. Vermeer’s representations are “scaled down” as in the minsicule  Lacemaker, while today’s artist tends to “scale up” — see Jeff Koons’ £12.9m Hanging Hearts.
2. Vermeer produced a paltry number of paintings (36 have survived but probably he made no more than 60) and he likely did not utilize available techniques to produce multiples. Our most successful contemporary artists tend to be quite prolific, not to say repetitive.
3. Vermeer’s paintings were created for private viewing. They were destined to be hung in discreet bourgeois family dwellings where only a select few members of society could see them (public collections did not exit in the 17th c.). Today’s artists demand prominent, public or private platforms to exhibit their work including art fairs and public museums frequented by thousands of viewers.
4. Vermeer’s art is undemonstrative and evasive. Cutting-edge art tends to be invasive, brash and deliberately disturbing.
5. As far as we can understand, Vermeer proffered no substantial critique of any know social norm. Today’s artist is almost universally critical of one or more aspects of his society, and his work is frequently conceived a vehicle to direct social change.
6. Vermeer’s art represents daily life. There is nothing overtly provocative, spectacular, miraculous, shocking, humorous or extraordinary in his subject matter. While he carefully staged his mise-en-scène interiors and contrived his compositions with painstaking  attention, he never painted anything that could not have existed.  His works evokes states of meditative calm. Often, the value of a contemporary work of art is judged from its ability to shock the individual and provoke public opinion.
7. Vermeer accepted, and in one case rhetorically glorified, the canons of art of his age (see the Art of Painting). The cutting-edge artist is apt to challenge prevailing concepts of the art.
8. Vermeer’s art does not lend itself to the spoken word; it is essentially silent. He left no written documents regarding his art. Most of today’s artists press their point by appending explanatory documents (ex. exhibition catalogues) to their works or widely publicized interviews.
9. Vermeer was deeply committed to his craft. A significant portion of cutting-edge art is not materially executed by the artist himself.
10. The appeal of Vermeer’s art is simultaneously populist and lofty while today’s art favors low-brow dialect (kitsch and vernacular) but comes across as elitist. Vermeer’s art is inclusive where much of today’s art is exclusive.

Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals
Friday and Saturday, May 15-16
Presented by the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library

United States art collections holds more than 1/3 of Vermeer’s known output (14 out of 36). How did and why did they get there?

from the Frick website:
This two-day symposium will explore the growing taste for Dutch Old Masters among collectors of the Gilded Age and beyond, such as Henry Marquand, Benjamin Altman, John G. Johnson, Henry Clay Frick, and Norton Simon. Peter Sutton, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, will give the keynote address.

The event is free but registration is required. For more information or to register, please call (212) 547-6894 or email centerprograms@frick.org. The symposium is made possible through the generosity of the Consulate-General of the Kingdom of The Netherlands with additional support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

One of the paybacks of 9+ years of making the Essential Vermeer website is the constant influx of correspondence. Scholars and specialists inform me of their thoughts and writings, museums directors about their exhibitions and web initiatives. I receive suggestions, constructive criticism, books, articles and even proposals for collaboration from all over the globe.

Alongside public figures, there are people whose names I did not know who generously express their opinions and raise questions on about every facet of Vermeer and web publishing one could imagine. They send me images of their own paintings or a dusty canvas found in the attic hoping it’s  a Vermeer, posters, postcards, poetry and every now and then, a donation to keep the site going and growing.

The other day, a friend of the Essential Vermeer, Drew, established an absolute first.  After some email correspondence about his Vermeer travels and the newly attributed Young Woman Seated at a Virginal which just popped up at the MET, Drew went to view the work directly. He  pulled out his iPhone, snapped a digital photo and emailed it to me as he was standing in front of the painting.

Sometimes I wonder.

What would Vermeer have said about someone blasting an iPhone image of his painting instantaneously from one part of the globe to another he had never met? How would have he reacted if he new some of his 36 surviving works fly on jumbo-jets over oceans, mountain ranges and the Siberian tundra to be ogled by thousands of viewers who spend hours in line at exhibitions dedicated to his art in places called museums?  What would have he though if he could thumb through the lavish, band-new Vermeer: The Complete Paintings written by Vermeer specialist Walter Liedtke?

In my opinion Vermeer would have taken in all the technology with an wide, wide grin.  He would have loved the stuff. And he would have been delighted although sometimes puzzled at what has been written about himself and his work. Perhaps he would have needed a bit more time to comprehend how many people on the earth are knit together by his tiny canvases.

The Rijksmuseum has developed a webspecial to flank their temporary exhibition of Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance normally housed at the NGA.  It briefly investigates 3 aspects of Vermeer’s painting with comparative details of the Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum), Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (Rijksmuseum) and the Woman Holding a Balance (NGA). This special is nothing special, mind you, even though it might  interest those who tip their  toes into the water for the first time.

Lest one be disappointed at a missed chance (the code and text of the project must not have required more than a few hours to put together) visitors should remember that the Rijksmuseum offers a great deal when compared with other museums which house Vermeer paintings, especially, if you know where to dig. The quality digital scans of the museums’s holdings plus the depth of collection information can be daunting. Compare for example, the digital scans of the two Vermeers in the London National Gallery which cannot be downloaded by the viewer and bear unsightly watermarks capable of souring even the staunchest Vermeer devotee.

No doubt, the best part of this special are the downloadable images readily accessible on the press release page. In particular, the hi-resolution image Woman Holding a Balance is so accurate in color and exposition that it easily betters any printed image I have ever seen, a digital gem of sorts. The shot of the exhibition installation with the Milkmaid, Woman Holding a Balance and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is moving (see  image above photo: Jeroen Swolfs) if one recalls the time the Milkmaid and Woman Holding a Balance were hung together in Amsterdam in 1696 (see the post on the exhibition below).

Following the Rijksmuseum’s policy, the downloads are free for everyone and require no sworn oaths or bureaucratic sign-ups. Their heart is in the right place.

webspecial:
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/vermeer?lang=en

press release and images of the paintings on display:
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/pers/tentoonstellingen/vermeer?lang=en

Essential Vermeer interview with Jonathan Lopez, author of the The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren.

Han van Meegeren, the man who made Vermeers for decades, is justifiably the most written-about forger of all times. The most recent and original book on the topic is written by New York art historian Jonathan Lopez. Lopez casts new light on an old story by  fine tuning the results of years of patient research.

Two key points of the book are Van Meegeren’s hitherto underplayed Nazi sympathies and the mind set which allowed the greatest forger of all times to dupe the leading art specialists of his time. In order to explain the chasm between today’s unanimous view of Van Meegeren’s fakes as unsightly imitations and their original enthusiastic reception as true masterworks by Vermeer, Lopez reveals that “a fake doesn’t necessarily succeed or fail according to the fidelity with which it replicates the distant past but on the basis of its power to sway the contemporary mind.”

Jonathan opened up to an interview in which he explains what went into the book’s making and some fascinating side thoughts on Van Meegeren the man, whose brilliant darkness is probably better understood by Lopez than anyone else.

If you feel comfortable with your knowledge of Vermeer, Canadian historian of China Timothy Brook provides a new  lens for examining the artist’s work from a different point of view: Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2007).

Here’s my interview with the author:
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/interviews_newsletter/brook_interview.html

and very worthwhile podscast:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/02/brook_on_vermee.html

Writer, art historian and friend of the Flying Fox, Jonathan Lopez, wrote in recently…

Woman Holding a Balance
11 March to 1 June 2009
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Woman Holding a Balance will be temporarily reunited in Amsterdam after 300 years. Vermeer devotees will recall that these two paintings were auctioned off there to the same buyer at the Dissius sale of 21 Vermeer paintings in 1696, 21 years after the artist had died.

Both works achieved handsome sums, 175 and 155 guilders respectively, inferior only to the much larger View of Delft at 200. Let’s remember that the average Dutch worker’s wage was something like 500 to 700 guilders per year.

The man who was willing to pay the price, Isaac Roooleuw, a Mennonite merchant, clearly knew what he was getting. He was a painter. However, Roooleuw enjoyed them very little since five years later he was forced to sell them by foreclosure, each to a different buyer.

Although these works are divergent in theme and technique and were made years apart, I can’t think of a more revealing couple in all of Vermeer’s oeuvre. The Milkmaid is the personification of earthly sunlight. The Woman Holding a Balance, on the other hand, possesses a moon-like splendor that when observed directly, eclipses even it own complicated allegorical structure. The viewer has the sensation that it is possible to physically penetrate the space of picture’s crystal-clear penumbra had it not been for the sacral figure of the young woman who waits for her scales to  balance.

I do hope that they will be displayed in close proximity.

I have recently uploaded my new personal website which displays 7 interiors painted in oils and 10 watercolors of the suburban American landscape. Many of my colleagues and collectors find it hard to reconcile the two. But I simply paint for two different reasons. Here’s the first.

Ever since I saw my first Vermeer during RISD days, one of my goals has been to possess one of his works. Excluding the fact that I would eventually make or come into that kind of money, the only open venue was to do one myself (or at least an acceptable version).

Conceiving proper motifs wasn’t the real obstacle, on the contrary. By assuming the proper angle, it was striking to note how little seemed to have changed over the centuries. Everywhere I turned I saw, and still see today, Vermeer compositions. The looks, gestures and the simple sense of being there of today’s people engaged in letter writing and reading, courtship, study and music making appear identical as once did (the next time you see some young girl across the table batting in an email on her laptop, observe her expression when her hands come to stand still).

And then there was the indispensable ingredient of every Vermeer, the incessant activity of daylight. The laws which govern it are even more immutable than mankind’s daily activities. So there I had it, the plausibility of doing a contemporary Vermeer without a trace of anachronism.

The most problematic part was figuring out how to transform a theoretical Vermeer motif into a living picture with the primitive stuff we call paint and brush. Nobody at RISD had a clue and great pictures are not very reliable if considered as painting manuals.

Vermeer and Van Meegeren: The Real and the Faux
Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, and Ronni Baer, William and Ann Elfers Senior Curator European Paintings

Wed, Feb 25, 7 pm
Remis Auditorium

Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren became a folk hero at the end of World War II when he confessed to selling a fake Vermeer to Hermann Goering. Author Jonathan Lopez and curator Ronni Baer discuss the extravagantly sordid life of the world’s most notorious art forger and what he did to the image of the Vermeer we know and love.

Book signing follows.

Traditional Music in the Time of Vermeer
by Adelheid Rech

Why a study of Dutch 17th c. folk music on a Vermeer site?

Perhaps too often the sublime order and technical perfection of Vermeer’s compositions lure us into forgetting that the artist was brought up in a tavern run by his no-frills, hard-working father. In Dutch taverns, brawls, business deals, cursing and serious drinking went on from sunrise until late night.  Every now and then, a knife was pulled (as the saying goes “one hundred Dutchmen, one hundred knives”).

But taverns were also scenes of harmless entertainment and  joyfully congregation with plenty of music.

Thus, a conspicuous slice of the artist’s  life never found its way into his paintings, a life jam-packed with popular religious and secular festivities, riotous gatherings, joyous marriages and solemn processions that marked the passage of the year each with its own music.  No, not the music you would expect to issue from any of Vermeer’s dreamlike compositions, but simple, infectious melodies, true “hits” of the moment which were spread by itinerant musicians. These tunes charmed lovers, delighted children and made the grueling toil of daily life a bit more bearable.

This multi-part study explores hurdy-gurdys, shawms and rommelpots and other instruments you most likely  never knew much less heard.

So have a peek and take listen to the musical world behind the the paintings you know so well.

Vermeer, Fabritius & De Hooch: Three Masterpieces from Delft
Feb. 14 - May 24, 2009

Recently some noted museums are taking to small, in-focus exhibitions.

This tiny, but exceptionally focused display sets side by side three master painters of the Delft School: Carel Fabritius, Pieter de Hoogh and Johannes Vermeer.

Fabritius’s interest in illusionism is highlighted in his painting The Goldfinch, one of the fascinating pictures of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Its startling simplicity of figure against the stark white ground has often been seen as a possible starting point for Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace.

The Goldfinch will be hung alongside Pieter de Hoogh’s Courtyard of a House in Delft, a far more complex work from the collection of The National Gallery, London. De Hoogh was one of the most delightfully innovative painters of genre interiors and probable source of inspiration for many of Vermeer’s own works.

Complementing these two works will be the Gallery’s own masterpiece, Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid.

Its not every day that one discovers a portrait of Rembrandt. But now, not one, but four previously unknown images of Rembrandt’s face in works by Jan Lievens have been identified by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art.  Wheelock said he became “vaguely conscious” that it was Rembrandt’s likeness with the artist’s puffy jowls and famous bulbous nose while he was doing research for an exhibition on Lievens soon opening at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Although it is well known that Rembrandt and Lievens had shared ideals and experiences in the first years of their careers, this discovery sheds new light on the intimate side of their relationship.  According to Wheelock, it is Rembrandt who sits in the center of Lievens’  The Cardplayers (detail lower left) making it earliest known image of Rembrandt, just 17 years old. Rembrandt’s features can also be made out in Lievens’ Lute Player (detail upper left).

Although  considered in his own age a child prodigy, art  history has been less kind to Jan Lievens than Rembrandt.  During his adolescence, Lievens’ works were sought by princely patrons in The Hague and London before he reached the age twenty-five. But with the stellar rise in Rembrandt’s fame as the greatest artist of the Dutch golden age, Lievens’ own artistic reputation inexorably declined. This exhibition affords an overview of Lievens’ life and art drawing much needed attention to this neglected master. The catalogue essay argues that in many respects Lievens was the initiator of the stylistic and thematic developments that characterized both artists’ work in the late 1620s.

Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered runs February 7 to April 26 at the Milwaukee Art Museum. See the excellent website dedicated to this spectacular exhibition.

According to Benjamin Binstock (Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice), seven works generally attributed to Johannes Vermeer were painted by the master’s eldest daughter, Maria. Maria also receives the dubious credit of having forged her father’s works as a means to pay the family’s debts to the baker.

For a painter whose entire known oeuvre comprises only 36 paintings, that smacks of a pretty hefty revision.

Although I have not read the book yet, it appears that Binstock bases his conclusions on presumed inconsistencies in technique, materials, artistic level and reinterpretation of known archival documents.

Binstock has jumped into a snake pit to say the very least.

First of all, notwithstanding popular conception and outward appearances, one of the characteristics of Vermeer’s oeuvre is its very “inconsistency,” especially when compared to those of other artists who worked in the same genre mode. A Terborch always looks pretty much like a Terborch, Van Mieris ditto and many Dou’s are perhaps too much like other Dou’s. Many Vermeer’s do not look like each other, not just seven.

A visit to the Rijksmuseum can be instructive. Without previous knowledge, I would have never been able to link more than two of the four Vermeer’s there to the same artist even when they were hung in close proximity. Do the evident differences in style and technique make the rugged Milkmaid any less a Vermeer than the enamel-like perfection of the Love Letter?  Having toiled 30 years day in and day out attempting to emulate the his techniques and outward appearance in my own work, Vermeer’s versatility never ceases to amaze me.

And what to say about the oversized View of Delft, which Thoré-Burger described as “painted with a trowel,” and the miniscule Lacemaker, a work as carefully crafted as the lace the young girl is making?  Two distant and distinct worlds.

BTW, Thoré didn’t know how right he was: laboratory examinations show Vermeer added sand to texturize his paint and evoke the roughness of the ancient constructions of the View. Being a ceaseless experimenter, he once used gold leaf to imitate a metallic fixture and left traces of compass lines in the Procuress around the spherical body the wine jug. Obviously, his use of the camera obscura positions him among the most ductile artists of the time. It is best not to underestimate his depth, technical inventiveness and broadness of artistic vision.

I believe it takes years of close-hand study of the pictures themselves to grasp Vermeer’s inconspicuous  complexity. But the vision we now have of his oeuvre is both logical and consistent as much as possible with such an illusive artist. Please consult the most up-to-date resource in regards, Walter Liedtke ’s brand-new monograph, a monument of scholarship, intuition and rationality, VERMEER: The Complete Paintings.

Lastly, as far as I am aware, no new Vermeer-related documentation has surfaced in years. Binstock must, by force, engage in very serious reshuffling of well-know facts, none of which tell us anything significant about Maria.

With the usual hoopla Google has launched a virtual tour of the Prado Museum in Madrid that enables visitors to closely examine 14 of its masterpieces on their computers monitors. A Google spokesman said: “The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).

“With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (by Rubens), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (by Roger van der Weyden) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (by Bosch).”

While broadening the access to digital images of art works is welcomed news, it remains to be seen what real need this initiative may ultimately fulfill. What is Google’s commitment to art other than drumming up one-time novel seekers and sprinkling their brand with a bit of highbrow culture? Personal experience has shown me that museum goers rarely spend more than a few seconds per painting as they “do” the gallery and with special exhibitions it is not uncommon that visitors spend more time reading the accompanying brochure than looking at the objects on display.

For those who have not been able to see the picture, Vermeer’s A Lady Writing will be on view a week longer than expected at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The owing was to end its California appearance on Feb. 2, but has been extended through Feb. 9.

The Italian art historian Stefano Zuffi will be speaking of Johannes Vermeer February 20 Palazzo Ducale, Genoa.

February  20, 2009
Società di letture e conversazioni scientifiche a Palazzo Ducale, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa
information and participation: 010/581584 (Registration is obligatory)

After its zigzag performance, the Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, reattributed in recent times to Vermeer, has bobbed up again in an unexpected place, next to the Woman with a Water Pitcher at the MET.

With the help of Lee Rosenbaum’s timely reporting on CultureGRll (artsJournal) and some detective work of my own, let’s take a  look at the painting’s history.

• The Young Woman Seated at a Virginal is presumabley painted by Vermeer c. 1670.
• The picture is documented for the first time in 1904, when it was published in the preliminary catalogue by Dr. Wilhelm Bode of the collection of Alfred Beit, a South African-born diamond magnate who rivaled the great early 20th-century art acquisitions of Americans such as Frick and Mellon.
• Before and during the World War II, it was unanimously recognized by scholars, including Wilhelm Bode, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A.B. de Vries, Eduard Plietzsch and Ludwig Goldscheider.
• Following the dramatic Van Meegeren affair of Vermeer forgeries, De Vries, the Director of the Rijksmuseum, the leadingVermeer scholar, expressed doubts about the authenticity of the picture published in 1948. De Vries changed his mind, in favor of the painting, and wrote several letters saying that if his book were to go into a third edition he would rehabilitate the picture.
• When Beit died, the picture passed to his brother, Otto Beit, and then the latter’s son, Sir Alfred Beit, who eventually, in 1960, placed the picture on consignment with a London dealer.
• Baron Frédéric Rolin of Brussels, an occasional collector of Old Masters and dealer in tribal art, sees and falls in love with it. Aware of the doubtful attribution to Vermeer, he acquired it in exchange four works from his collection, paintings by Klee, Signac, Bonnard and Riopelle.
• Lawrence Gowing (1970) and Christopher Wright (1976) continued to accept it, but others dismissed it.
• In 1993, Sotheby’s was approached by Baron Rolin, with a request to undertake new research on the painting.
• A complete scientific study was begun in 1995 by Libby Sheldon of University College London, in collaboration with her colleague Catherine Hassall, and in 1997 Nicola Costaras of the Victoria and Albert Museum joined this team.. The investigation demonstrated that the picture was unquestionably 17th-century and that also that its technical composition was entirely consistent with Vermeer’s known working methods. In particular, the composition of the ground layers was found to be entirely comparable with other works by the artist, and the pigments used were also appropriate.
• Rolin dies in 2002, and the painting is offered for sale by his heirs.
• Sotheby’s auctions the painting to an unknown bidder for $30 million.
• The painting is shown briefly at the Philadelphia Museum. The buyer finally turns out to be the number one suspect, Steve Wynn the Las Vegas casino mogul and art collector.
• The painting disappears in Wynn’s main office.
• It is exhibited in Tokyo along with other 6 other Vermeer’s from August 2 - December 14, 2008.
• Norm Clarke of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the painting was sold by Wynn to an unknown buyer for $30 million.
• The painting raises its head for the last time on Dec. 29 in Gallery 14A of the European paintings galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, It is labeled as from a “Private Collection.” It will be on view until June 1.

Gary Schwartz, one of the most knowledgeable experts of Dutch 17th c. art, briefly mulled over the fashion of major museums who lend themselves to the cause of contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Read his article.

Like it or not, Hirst sealed a pact with the Rijksmuseum  (where four of Vermeer’s works are permanently housed) to exhibit his world-famous diamond encrusted skull along with the artist’s personal selection of sixteen 17th-century paintings from the Rijksmuseum collection.

Not content, the Rijksmuseum also dedicated a special website to Hirst’s work that must have been meant to work somewhat like a lighten rod. It democratically invites all opinion to efficiently channel the negative away. And, yes, in a clean hi-tech way.

I propose Vermeer’s macabre passage above (a detail of his Allegory of Faith) hoping it might constitute proof he was on par with his English colleague at least is one respect. Most of us know that Vermeer died penniless … and as Marcel Proust wrote,“ obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body.”

Hirst need not tremble for his own fate, costing £14 million to produce, his skull was sold to anonymous investors for its asking price of £50 million, the highest price ever paid for a single work by a living artist.

The universal art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), painter, writer and courtier
Symposium: 9 January 2009

Universiteit van Amsterdam - Agnietenkapel
Oudezijdsvoorburgwal 231
NL-1012 EZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

information from the organizers:
The versatile painter, poet, courtier and European traveller Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), one of Rembrandt’s pupils, has received much scholarly attention in the last two decades. Whereas older historians allotted him a marginal role as a minor figure in his master’s studio, he is now recognized for his central position in the world of art and letters in the Dutch Golden Age. This new evaluation is mainly due to careful studies of his treatise on painting, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (Introduction to the Academy of Painting, 1678). His book has been mined for unique insights not only into Rembrandt’s working methods but also into profounder problems relative to Dutch art and culture, such as pictorial realism, imitation and illusion, the rise of landscape and still life and the status of the “learned artist.” Whereas traditional Rembrandt scholarship seems to have hit upon the limits posed by the available documents on the artist, the work of pupils like Van Hoogstraten keeps offering new possibilities for research. Recently, Van Hoogstraten’s book was allotted a place in the canon of Key Texts for the Cultural History of the Low Countries.

This conference will be the first meeting of Van Hoogstraten specialists from various countries, who will bring their different approaches and scholarly traditions to bear on his art and writing.

confirmed speakers:
Dr. Jan Blanc (Université de Lausanne)
Prof. Celeste Brusati (University of Michigan)
Dr. Herman Colenbrander (independent scholar, Amsterdam)
Dr. Hans-Jörg Czech (Wiesbaden Museum)
Dr. Michiel Roscam Abbing (independent scholar, Amsterdam)
Dr. Paul Taylor (The Warburg Institute, London)
Dr. Thijs Weststeijn (University of Amsterdam)

further information & registration

download program (pdf)

from Prospect:

The prices of contemporary art works have risen to astonishing levels in recent years. Insiders say it’s because we have been living through a golden age of art. Nonsense, argue Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford, it is a classic investment bubble.

from the: Norton Simon press release

Vermeer’s Painting Techniques: Time Stilled and Light Made Tangible
Melanie Gifford, Research Conservator, Scientific Research Department, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, January 3, 2009, 4:00 p.m.

Vermeer’s paintings suggest that time has been momentarily stopped, giving the viewer leisure to explore his light-filled rooms and contemplate his pensive figures. Technical study of Vermeer’s materials and methods has revealed painting practices the artist developed to achieve these luminous effects, and artistic choices he made to create a timeless and self-contained world. Melanie Gifford explores A Lady Writing in the context of Vermeer’s techniques throughout his career, illustrated with close details and microscopic images of the paintings that give a new view of his extraordinary gifts.

Vermeer,  Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum
Vancouver Art Gallery
May 9 to September 13, 2009

This exhibition will highlight works of art of the 17th c. Dutch painting masters of the Golden Age. It will feature well over 100 works by many of the most celebrated masters of the period such as Aelbert Cuyp, Gerard Dou, Franz Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer, as well as an extraordinary selection of decorative arts, including furniture, silver, glassware, porcelain and textiles.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum and will include Vermeer’s late masterpiece, The Love Letter.

I would not miss the lecture or the book.

The Man Who Made Vermeers:
Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
Sunday, January 11, 2009, 2:00 p.m.
East Building Concourse Auditorium, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Jonathan Lopez discusses aspects of his recently published book, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Han van Meegeren’s Life in Forgery. Book signing to follow. Sunday Lectures at the National Gallery are free and open to the public on a first-come-first-serve basis.

BTW, The Man Who Made Vermeers is fifth of the 10 Amazon Best Books of 2008 in the Arts & Photography section. Well deserved.

It is surprising to discover that the stark white-washed wall in Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace was not a part of the artist’s original plan. Neutron radiography reveals that the girl’s silhouette was initially embraced by a large, decorative wall map of the United Provinces (identical to the one in The Art of Painting). Modern viewers do not regret the map’s disappearance. Other than being an extraordinary poetic statement in itself, Vermeer’s blank wall is a tour de force of pictorial technique.

Portraying the volume and play of natural light on white objects has always been problematic for painters. Aside from the rendering human flesh, no other motif challenges an artist’s technical skills and visual sensitivity more than a banal but elusive expanse of flat, uniformly blank wall illuminated with raking light. By comparison, analogous passages in Dutch genre paintings seem merely descriptive.

Although there are many ways to portray a nude white wall, Dutch 17^th century painters habitually used a simple combination of three common pigments: white lead (a bulky pigment made by the renowned Dutch stack process), raw umber (a low-key, greenish brown made of natural earth) and black (usually selected wood, vegetable prod­uct or animal bones which have been calcinated).

Obviously, the most intensely illuminated area near the widow is painted with the greatest quantity of lead white although pure white pigment seems to be reserved for the shiny lid of a nondescript container of the still life. As the wall receives less light moving from left to right, the near-white paint mixture must be gradually toned down by adding small quantities of brown and black. However, it is extremely difficult to calculate the correct proportion of the base pigments so that the wall appears darkened rather than simply dirtied. Too much black creates a sullen, brackish effect which bears little relation with the overall warm harmony of the painting spoiling the illusion of light. If too much brown is added the wall fails distance itself from the foreground figure and create the subtle pocket of air which flows throughout the painting. At the same time, the paint must be carefully brushed on and delicately blended without overworking the paint layer so as to avoid producing a mechanical smoothness.

As much as I have observed Vermeer’s wall and probably understood how it was painted, in front of the real painting its effect is so commanding that I am unable to separate the pictorial artifice from the illusion of a sunlit white wall, perhaps the most perfect wall ever painted.

Although art theft is a fairly fashionable topic, it is not one of my favorites most likely because it has less to do with art and more to do with theft. So the upcoming book about the sordid Gardener theft (which netted Vermeer’s Concert among its victims) is off my reading list for the time being.

Moreover, the loss of The Concert saddens me in particular because it was the first Vermeer I ever saw and one that taught me a big, free lesson as an art student at RISD.  The painting convinced me that, instead of opening doors, my painting teachers had more simply replaced old dogmas with new dogmas which were more or less as restrictive as the first.

Then, as throughout most of the 20th c., one of the most entrenched mantras of realist painting technique was that black pigment would single-handedly destroy the luminosity of shadows. Black was in fact an inexorable sign of the Sunday painter.  But even after my first glance at the real Concert, it seemed obvious that Vermeer had made abundant use of it to render the play of light on the background wall lending this passage a rare pearlessence full of mystery and nuance. Moreover, black was one of the principle components of the composition’s deepest shadows. Scientific analysis reveals that in one form or another, black is the only pigment which can be found in every canvas by Vermeer.

Back to the book:

PW Daily lets us know about the upcoming The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser. In a pill, here’s the story.

BBC’s Simon Worrall reports that the faceless, special Agent Robert “Bob” Wittman retires. Why should this regard anyone who reads an art blog?

Vermeer’s Concert, stole on March 18, 1990 has yet to be recovered.

Read the Worrall’s article here.

Although the European Union’s new Europeana digital library may be a boon for art historians, it will remain shut down until January instead of mid December as previously announced. Inspired by nothing less than the ancient Library of Alexandria, the ambitious project will eventually employ the state-of-the-art technologies allowing users to access to films, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers, and documents as well as books held in European libraries. A quick search on “Rembrandt,” for instance, turns up 1,747 paintings, etchings and drawings all in one place.

The downed prototype contained roughly two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain. However, some will be inevitably be plagued by issues linked to copyright and online use.

If you happen to be interested in the tech side of Europeana’s setback, this article is reveals what went on behind the scenes: Obvious Mistakes Caused Europeana Site Failure.

Philip Steadman, the English architect who stirred up so much discussion with his book about Vermeer and the camera obscura, will be giving a lecture called Anamorphosis in Holland in the 17th Century: Van Hoogstraten, Fabritius and Vermeer at the National Gallery in London, Saturday 13 December, 10.30am – 4pm.

I expect he will be examining the intriguing lid of the painted virginal in Vermeer’s Lady Standing at a Virginal.

See my interview with Steadman here.

The other evening I attended the opening night of an exhibition of 25 oils which I have painted in the last three years.

Openings have their pros and cons. One valuable pro is that they have taught me that is it possible for a painter to form a realistic idea of his works only when they have been taken from the studio, framed and hung on the stark white walls of a distant gallery.

The moment I first set foot in the gallery (an hour or so before the public started to trickle in) it was apparent which were the most autonomous pictorial statements able to fend for themselves deprived of my personal expectations, affections and prejudices.

Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the public generally concurs with my view.

Above, I believe, is one of the mores successful works (Girl Writing an Email, 2008). Click on the image for an enlargement.

If my math skills are not as bad as I suspect, within two years 13 canvases by the Vermeer will have collectively travelled no less than 98,179 miles (see the post below with a list of travelling paintings and their destinations). To give you a more tangible idea of the distance involved, the circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles. Don’t forget, 98,179 miles is nearly half way to the moon.

On the other hand, the longest documented trip made by the artist was Delft-Amsterdam. That’s 66 miles round trip, as the crow flies.

The first time I saw the Woman with a Pearl Necklace was at the block-buster exhibit of 21 Vermeer paintings in Washington. The room where it hung was so congested that I barely resisted an hour. Under the circumstances the work left no impression and the mental image I had previously drawn from scores of reproductions remained unscathed.

My next encounter was 7 years later at the Madrid Vermeer and the Dutch Interior exhibition. Again, it was a jam-packed event with a minimum of 5 viewers per painting. This time, however, I was resolved to make the best of the situation and held my viewing ground as much as good manners permitted.

The picture made an unforgettable impression but one particular passage left me puzzled: on the left-hand side the girl’s gray gown was a dark rectangular area that made little sense (it cannot be seen in any reproduction). At first glance it suggested a dark recess in the woman’s gown but, in effect, it was far too wide and too dark for that. Was it Vermeer caught in an off-moment, the consequence of decay, faulty restoration or something else?

Recently, I was once again able to observe the picture which is on temporarily loan here in Rome. Even though the lighting is dreadfully low, a pair of strong reading glasses allowed me to draw close the canvas without tripping the alarm and see more than I had before.

The paint layer of the passage in question does not appear flawed; on the contrary, it seemed to have been deliberately and carefully executed. After a few moments of close inspection I noticed the presence of a very fine blurred line of light gray paint that runs parallel to the area’s right-hand edge dividing the dark into two parallel strips. Click on the schematic drawing above for an enlargement and see what I mean.

It struck me that instead of representing a part of the girl’s gown altered by some variance of illumination or fold, this passage might describe two decorative strips of black or near-black fabric sewn down the front of the gown. One such gown is worn by the seated lady in Gerrit Terborch’s Lady Peeling an Apple in Vienna (see detail left). Vermeer himself may have rendered a similar, but darker garment in his early Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

While knowing exactly what kind of gown the young lady adorns hardly alters the “meaning” of the painting, to me it helps to underline the care with which Vermeer treated the accouterments of the women he loved to paint.

“When Johannes Vermeer painted Girl With a Pearl Earring more than 300 years ago, he couldn’t have foreseen how his iconic portrait would one day be reproduced - or just how tiny that portrait could be.

How tiny? A University of Montreal researcher has rendered the famous image within a single drop of liquid vitamin on a microscope’s glass slide, reducing the portrait’s dimensions to a mere 200 microns - about the width of two human hairs.”

If that is not enough, read the whole article.

In a recent post I wrote that there are virtually no art history blogs of the net. Instead, two interesting ones have been brought to my attention: The Art History Newsletter by Jonathan Lackman and The Art Tribune by Didier Rykner. Keep them coming.

The Louvre will be sending about 70 artworks to Japan in 2009 for a special exhibition of 17th c. paintings, The Louvre Museum Exhibition: 17th Century European Masterpieces. The exhibition will be held at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and will include Vermeer’s dazzling little Lacemaker.

Not all are elated as the NTV who sponsors the event. Read Didier Rykner’s The Louvre without Vermeer at the Art Tribune.

The Lacemaker’s voyage adds a notch to the current “travelling-Vermeer count, 2008-2010″ which now stands firm at 13 (two pictures make two trips each). This boils down to the fact that one third of Vermeer’s known artistic output will be travelling tens of thousands of miles within the span of a mere two years.

1. The Astronomer – Atlanta 2008
2. The Little Street – Tokyo 2008
3. Diana and her Companions – Tokyo 2008
4. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary – Tokyo 2008
5. Young Woman Seated at the Virginals – Tokyo 2008
6. Woman with her Maid – Tokyo 2008
7. Girl with the Wineglass – Tokyo 2008
8. Lady Writing – Pasadena 2008
9. Woman with a Pearl Necklace - Rome 2008
10. The Lacemaker - Tokyo and Kyoto 2009
11. The Astronomer - Minneapolis 2010
12. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary - The Hague 2010
13. The Procuress - The Hague - 2010

Although the signature on Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace cannot be made out in any reproduction, one has no problem finding it when directly viewing the work. It is discreetly positioned on the side of the massive extendable oak table (parallel to the picture plane) slightly to the right on the slate-blue tablecloth (click on the image to the left to enlarge the schematic drawing I recently made of the area in question). It is executed with a delicate but firm touch using a slightly darker pigment than the base tone of the background. The typical monogram (IVM in ligature) is a bit clearer than the following ”eer”.

On those mature canvases which bear signatures, Vermeer declined to adopt the conventional formulae of signing in the lower left- or right-hand corner where it presumably might not disturb the aesthetic balance of the composition. Instead he positioned it in assorted places subtly varying its size, tonality and style. At times it is more prominent and at times more discreet always but it is always done with an infallible sense of pictorial design.

One senses that for Vermeer, the signature may have had an additional function other than simply claiming authorship.

Another curious little “secret” in this work that cannot be seen in reproductions is the presence of two circle-like forms to the right of the signature. Although they are clearly deliberate, they are so faint that they can easily be missed, I failed to spot them both times I had previously viewed the canvas. On close inspection, the upper one is composed of two tiny concentric circles which suggest a doughnut like form. The lower one appears to describe a delicately semi-spherical relief.

I have not a clue what these forms represent but they must have meant something otherwise Vermeer would not have painted them with such finesse.

The Mauritshuis (home of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, View of Delft and Diana and her Companions) has launched their own blog which is perhaps a first for such a prestigious collection. For the moment it can only be accessed from the Dutch website but is nonetheless it is written in English.

Presently, it not quite clear how the Mauritshuis counts on handling public interaction. There appears to be no way to leave comment from the blog’s platform and, in effect, the blog’s author(s) remains anonymous.

Since the Mauritshuis prizes public dialogue and has such excellent organizational capabilities, I imagine that their objectives will be more precisely defined in the near future.

Museums have been painfully slow to develop blogs and community sites which would seem a logical (and incredibly inexpensive) extension of their goal of public awareness.

Although I had seen the Woman with a Pearl Necklace in temporary exhibitions in Washington and Madrid, both times viewing conditions were near prohibitive due to crowds. Consequentially, my understanding of the picture effectively relied on a dozen or so reproductions.

This situation has improved with the current exhibition in Rome, where one may pretty much have the work to himself from 2 to 3 pm and 7 to 8 pm on weekdays.

Having spent some hours in front of the painting, I hope to share a few of its “secrets” which are not evident from reproductions. Nothing astounding mind you. Art historians need not tremble, I am talking about details. But still, if these details were important enough for Vermeer to paint, perhaps they are important enough to consider.

First of all, in reproductions we see only half of the painting: the upper half to be precise. The lower half, even in state-of-the-art reproductions, results as a dark uniform void. This demonstrates one of the limits of photography (which painting does not have) and one that even amateur photographers are aware of. In conditions of extreme contrast of light, if you correctly capture the lights the darks are sacrificed and vice versa.

In reality, the lower half of Vermeer’s composition is not at all a dark void, it is a penumbra teaming with life. Even at first glance we can clearly make out the massive extendable table with all its ornaments, Vermeer’s signature, a few marble floor tiles and a leather covered chair, perhaps one of the most suggestive passages in the painter’s oeuvre.

The posts which follow will inspect some of the details of the painting’s lost half and how they might influence our perception of the picture as a whole.

Europe thought too big. As soon as the mother-of-all digital library Europeana.eu got launched 20 November, 10 million hits per hour caused the entire system to crash. If curious, check out their laconic apology.

For a timely Google alert and quirk of fate I was able to view all the Vermeer images before the site struck ground and I can guarantee the wait will be worth it for scholars and public alike.

If you want to know exactly what Europeana is, click here.