The Dutch Enigma: Revealing Vermeer

Johannes (Jan) Vermeer remains the most enigmatic of Dutch ‘Golden Age’ painters. Born in 1632 and dead by 1675, a native of Delft where he spent his entire life, we know very little about him, his training and the influences which shaped his art. To coin a phrase that might equally describe his paintings, his biography is ‘glaze-like in its opacity’. All but forgotten after his death, he was ‘rediscovered’ in the mid nineteenth century and recent scholarship has identified about 34 paintings as from his hand. His wider fame has grown more recently due to the success of the book devoted to one of his magical and mysterious paintings, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Due to the rarity and fragility of his paintings, exhibitions devoted to Vermeer usually contain only a handful of his works. This is what will make this year’s much anticipated exhibition in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum (10 February – 4 June 2023) an unprecedented event. The largest number of his works ever assembled will be on display. These will include The Girl with the Pearl Earring (The Mauritshuis, The Hague), The Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), Lady Writing a Letter (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), Woman Holding a Balance (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) and the newly restored Girl Reading a Letter (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). Stimulated by this unique opportunity to look at this most mysterious of artists, I will give a pair of webinar lectures on The Dutch Enigma: Revealing Vermeer, 21 & 22 February by way of introduction to the painter and his milieu.