Essential Vermeer

Vermeer painting goes to Detroit

Detroit Institute of Art
August 8 - Labour Day (about), 2012

On loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance will take center stage in a tightly focused exhibition, flanked by two similarly intimate scenes painted by Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch, two of Vermeer's contemporaries and stars of the DIA's Dutch collection. The painting is the first Vermeer to visit Detroit in probably 65 years.

click here for a super his resolution image of the painting

Major Vermeer exhibit in Rome, Italy

Vermeer. Il secolo d’oro dell’arte olandese (in italiano)
(Vermeer and the Golden Age of Dutch Art)
Scuderie del Quirinale
Rome, Italy
1 ottobre 2012 – 20 gennaio 2013

from the exhibition website:
Vermeer and the Golden Age of Dutch Art is the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to one of the foremost Dutch painters of the seventeen century, and perhaps one of the general  public’s most beloved artists.

Organized by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and co-porduced with MondoMostre, the exhibition is curated by Arthur K. Wheelock, Curator of Northern Baroque Paintings - National Gallery of Art in Washington, Walter Liedtke, Curator of European Paintings Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Sandrina Bandera, Soprintendente per il Patrimonio Artistico Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantopologico di Milano.

Other than a number of select masterworks by Vermeer, many paintings by the key protagonists  of the seventeenth-century Dutch genre school  will be on display.

(Vermeer paintings to be announced.)

museum website: https://www.scuderiequirinale.it/categorie/mostra-003

Vermeer's View of Delft goes on display at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
The Hague, Netherlands
24 April 2012 - mid-2014

The Mauritshuis is embarking on a unique collaboration with the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. From 28 April 2012, around 100 highlights from the Mauritshuis collection will go on display at the Gemeentemuseum for a period of about two years. The paintings include View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer, The Bull by Paulus Potter and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn. The collaboration is the result of the Mauritshuis’s plans for expansion and renovation, which is due to take place between 28 April 2012 and mid-2014.

museum website: http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/index.php?id=037129

Rijksmuseum publishes new bulletin with two articles on Vermeer's newly restored Woman in Blue Reading a Letter

The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 2012 - 1

"The restoration of 'Woman in Blue Reading' a Letter by Johannes Vermeer"
by IGE VERSLYPE

"A Question of Framing: On Vermeer’s 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter'"
by GREGOR J.M. WEBER

to order, click here: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/lezen?lang=en

Rijksmuseum sends Vermeer's Love Letter to Turkey for the first time

Where Darkness Meets Light...Rembrandt & his Contemporaries
Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul
21 February - 10 June 2012

from artdaily.com:
For the first time, the Rijksmuseum is organising an exhibition on the Dutch Golden Age in Turkey, including five paintings by Rembrandt and Love Letter by Vermeer. Over 100 masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum collection will be on display in Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul from 21 February to 10 June 2012. The exhibition is part of the festivities marking 400 years of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands.

http://muze.sabanciuniv.edu/page/where-darkness-meets-light

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in the United States in 2013

Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis (35 works)
de Young - San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts
San Francisco
Jan 26 - June 2, 2013

Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis (35 works)
High Museum of Art
Atlanta
June 22 - Sept. 29, 2013

Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis
(10 works)
Frick Collection
New York
Oct. 22, 2013 - Jan 12, 2014

press release:
Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis will be exhibited at three museums in the United States from January 2013 to January 2014. The Mauritshuis has agreed to send more than thirty works to the de Young/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the tour will finish with a smaller selection at The Frick Collection in New York. Among the paintings going on tour are the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, neither of which will have been seen by American audiences in ten years. Furthermore, this is the first occasion since the mid-1980s that a substantial group of works from the Mauritshuis has come to the United States. The decision to organize a major international travelling exhibition of a select group of paintings from the museum’s rich collection was prompted by the large-scale renovations to its premises, which will be finished in 2014.

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring & Diana and her Compansions in Japan 2012

Masterpieces from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
June 30 - Sept. 17, 2012
http://www.asahi.com/mauritshuis2012/

This exhibition will mark the reopening of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, which has been closed for renovations for two years.

This show will feature Vermeer's masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring and the early Diana and her Companions while many other masterpieces are already on display at a separate Vermeer show (continuing through March 14) at Tokyo's Bunkamura.

video presentation :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZalFLhX0_o0

Vermeer’s Late Young Woman Seated at a Virginalexhibited in Oxford

Ashmolean Museum of Art, Oxford
Jan. 23 - Sept., 2012

http://www.ashmolean.org/news/?id=171

Vermeer’s Early Christ in the House of Martha andMary to be exhibited in Italy

Da Vermeer a Kandinsky. Capolavori dai musei del mondo a Rimini
Jan. 21 - June 3, 2012

Castel Sismondo
Piazza Malatesta
47900 Rimini, Italy

http://www.lineadombra.it/da-vermeer-a-kandinsky/la-mostra

Vermeer’s Guitar Player to be exhibited at the
National Gallery in 2012

With the closure of the Kenwood House for urgent restoration in 2012, the museum was posed with the dilemma of what to do with their masterpieces. The Kenwood has just announced that Vermeer’s Guitar Player will be displayed at the National Gallery in London. The exquisite work, never before relined, will also be examined by the National Gallery's conservation department. Keeping it in storage was ruled out because it was the most costly alternative.

Vermeer Exhibition Catalogue

Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence
by Marjorie E. Wieseman, Mr. Wayne Franits & H. Perry Chapman
2011
224 pages, Yale University Press

purchase exhibition catalogue from Fitzwilliam Museum online shop

product description:

Focusing on the extraordinary Lacemaker from the Musée du Louvre, this beautiful book investigates the subtle and enigmatic paintings by Johannes Vermeer that celebrate the intimacy of the Dutch household. Moments frozen in paint that reveal young women sewing, reading or playing musical instruments, captured in Vermeer’s uniquely luminous style, recreate a silent and often mysterious domestic realm, closed to the outside world, and inhabited almost exclusively by women and children.

Three internationally recognized experts in the field explain why women engaged in mundane domestic tasks, or in pleasurable pastimes such as music making, writing letters, or adjusting their toilette, comprise some of the most popular Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Among the most intriguing of these compositions are those that consciously avoid any engagement with the viewer. Rather than acknowledging our presence, figures avert their gazes or turn their backs upon us; they stare moodily into space or focus intently on the activities at hand. In viewing these paintings, we have the impression that we have stumbled upon a private world kept hidden from casual regard.

Multi-media Vermeer Catalogue

The Interactive Vermeer Catalogue
html-based interactive catalogue for all browsers
Jonathan Janson (author and webmaster of Essential Vermeer)

THE COMPLETE INTERACTIVE VERMEER CATALOGUE offers both enthusiastic new-comers and seasoned art historians the chance to delve into Vermeer's paintings as never before. Through an innovative system of image mapping, theme boxes and the familiar internet browser navigational format, each of the artist's 37 surviving paintings can be effortlessly explored according to the particular interests of the individual navigator.

(available at
Lulu.com)

Vermeer-related publication

How to Paint Your Own Vermeer: Recapturing Materials and Methods of a Seventeenth-Century Master

by Jonathan Janson

2006
(289 page)

Which materials and techniques did Johannes Vermeer use to create his masterpieces? Is it still possible to emulate those methods today? Contemporary American painter Jonathan Janson offers straightforward, practical advice on how to reproduce Vermeer's day-to-day working procedures as closely as possible in your own studio. Detailed explanations document each and every step, from the stretching of the canvas to the three-step method used by Vermeer and his contemporaries including indispensable historical and theoretical background regarding the art and craft of Northern seventeenth-century painters.

In the first part, Vermeer's palette, drawing, pigments, brushwork, mediums, glazing, grounds are thoroughly analyzed as they are gradually encountered during the painting process The second part contains insights into crucial stylistic components which, together, make a Vermeer a Vermeer, such as color, composition, camera obscura vision and perspective.