Word: delft
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...pooch) was the greatest Dutch genre artist of the 17th century. Very little is known about his life. He was born in Rotterdam in 1629. He learned painting by apprenticeship there, probably to Nicolaes Berchem. By 1655 his name shows up on the rolls of the artists' guild in Delft. There he must have known the slightly younger Johannes Vermeer. Five years later, he was working in Amsterdam. He married and had seven children. None of his letters survive, and no drawings either. In 1684 he died in a madhouse. Whatever his affliction may have been, it left no interpretable...
Winslow Homer was, along with Thomas Eakins, the greatest American painter of the late 19th century. Vermeer of Delft was the greatest Dutch one of the late 17th century. Both are the subjects of extraordinary retrospective shows at the National Gallery in Washington. But because the Republicans' zeal to pressure Bill Clinton into signing their balanced-budget bill has closed the National Gallery (along with the whole Smithsonian complex, and much else), nobody can see Homer in Washington, though the show will travel to Boston in February and New York City in June...
...Vermeer's images. Like Piero della Francesca, Vermeer was a highly inexpressive artist. He didn't even paint a self-portrait, as far as anyone knows. You come out of the exhibit knowing almost as little about Vermeer the man as when you went in. Biography, faint: Lived in Delft, a backwater. Son of a silkworker. A Papist in a Calvinist town. Quite successful nonetheless. Married Catharina Bolnes, about whom equally little is recorded. One of the few sure facts is that he had 11 children, all of whom faced destitution after he died in 1675, at the depth...
...darks shine. The late 17th century in Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures the image of a scene on ground glass. It may be that the circles of confusion--the luminous spots caused by imperfections of the lens--gave him the idea for his poignant highlights, the liquid white dots...
...Francisco Graphic Designer Michael Vanderbyl looks to Europe for inspirational rigor. The checkerboard fields and two-tone corded trim of Vanderbyl's bed linens for Esprit recall Josef Hoffmann. The palette (peach, delft, ash) is sober and cool, Wiener Werkstatte monochrome given a pastel California ruddiness. Vanderbyl sheets would go nicely in a Christopher Alexander house. Alexander, a Berkeley architect and urban theorist, has lately turned his militantly humanist attentions to office furniture. No workstations or open plans for him. Instead, Alexander and his colleagues have designed mass-production desks and bookcases that are solid and reassuringly old-fashioned, classic...