Word: delft
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...typical Dutch town - a canal, two town gates, a bridge and church steeples, a wide majestic sky, and over all a warm light dipping here and there to touch the waves, the boats and a little patch of yellow wall with a special brilliance. Jan Vermeer had painted Delft and the river Schie with all the sureness of one who had spent his entire life there. And even though his name was all but unknown, the painting was recognized as an "extraordinary" landscape (see color pages), purchased by The Hague in 1822, and hung next to a Rembrandt...
...light that enabled Thoré-Bürger to bring recognition to Vermeer's art where others had failed. Long a victim of mistaken identity, Vermeer had been confused with Jan van der Meer of Utrecht; moreover, his paintings had often been attributed to a better-known Delft artist, Pieter de Hooch, who also painted immaculate Dutch interiors. But in the late 19th century, the French impressionists, seeking to present light through color rather than a painted effect, were astonished to discover Vermeer's virtuosity with the same technique two centuries before...
...Astronomer, for instance, they noticed how Vermeer illuminated a dim interior with a brilliant shaft of light falling through a window. In View of Delft, his only known landscape, they discovered Vermeer's use of pointillé-tiny dabs of pigment that look like crystals of light. In portraits, his delicate lighting seemed to illuminate the very soul of his subjects. The age of Manet was understandably dazzled...
Gone Again. Police whisked him off to a hospital, where he was identified as Hsu Tzu-tsai, chief of Red China's nine-man delegation to the International Congress for Welding Technique at the nearby University of Delft. He had a fractured skull. "This man has been maltreated," said the examining doctor, "possibly even tortured...
There are only about 40 works in the world solidly attributed to Vermeer, fewer than half a dozen outside of museums. Highly esteemed while he lived, the 17th century master of Delft was forgotten from his death until the 19th century, only to be rediscovered by the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan, who bought A Lady Writing in 1907. Vermeer, who usually showed his women in profile or looking away, made this lady all the more appealing by turning her full face to the viewer...