Word: delft
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...there is another show in America dedicated in part to Vermeer--this time at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by a team of scholars led by Walter Liedtke, the Met's curator of European paintings, "Vermeer and the Delft School" sets itself the task of filling in Vermeer's immediate cultural background. In the 17th century the Dutch city of Delft was an art center, though not a big one. Its population at mid-century was only about 25,000. It had flourishing trade (much of it luxury goods, like the popular blue-glazed pottery that...
Because art follows patronage, artists who worked in Delft tended to pass through and move on. Towns in Holland were a lot closer together and rather more connected than in Italy or France. Artists circulated with more ease among them, so firmly shaped local "schools" are not so easy to find. But if there was one artist totally identified with Delft in the 17th century, it was Vermeer--the only great painter to be born there, live there and (in 1675, at the early age of 43) be buried there...
What other artists were working in Delft? What effect did they have on Vermeer and he on them? Little enough is known about Vermeer, but presumably he wasn't some sort of lonely angelic visitation, popping up from nowhere. Every artist has aesthetic parents, brothers and sometimes offspring. But genius tends to be unpredictable, and a puzzling thing about Vermeer is that artistically he had no real progeny and no certain parentage. Nobody knows who taught him to paint, and his influence on younger Delft artists is too slight to bother with. He did no teaching, and no one imitated...
...Delft had one outstanding painter of Protestant churches, Gerard Houckgeest, whose beautifully bare Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft with the Tomb of William the Silent, 1650, is composed with fanatical, emphatic strictness and gave rise to a whole dynasty of memorial church interiors. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would...
...innkeeper, Vermeer was the father of 15 children, a Roman Catholic-leaning Protestant and a home-towner who rarely left Delft. But this is about all we know; no character descriptions or other salient facts exist. In his short life - born in 1632, died in 1675 of unknown causes although his wife, Catharina, blamed "decay and decadence" - he was never particularly successful. It was not until 1866, when a radical French critic named Théophile Thoré wrote three articles about him, that the art world beyond Holland took much notice...