Word: vermeers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ideally, an exhibition of seventeenth century Dutch art would represent not only the three great masters--Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jan Vermeer--and the artists who influenced them, but also the breadth and abundance of high quality painting done in the Netherlands at that time. Such an exhibition would show Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer against a backdrop of Mannerist, Caravagguesque, and Italianate paintings; it would include a representation of the best still lifes, biblical and historical paintings, genre scenes, landscapes, marine paintings, and portraits...
...achieving esthetic order, music students at Garden City have been assigned the problem of writing operas of their own: in one, a hillbilly, over his mother's strong objections, goes to New York to pursue a career as a folk singer and becomes famous. Art students take a Vermeer masterpiece and, on a transparent overlay, convert his realism into a cubist painting, while trying to preserve the structure of the original...
Delft, today best known for its china, was then the home of many other important painters-notably Jan Steen, who recorded a lustier side of Dutch life, and Carel Fabritius, one of Rembrandt's pupils who may have been Vermeer's teacher. In fact, a local bard, on the occasion of Fabritius' early death, portrays Vermeer, then only 22, as the phoenix who would rise to greatness in his place...
Most Memorable. Other documents regarding Vermeer's life are scarce, testifying mainly to his baptism in 1632, his financial straits, and the fact that when he died in 1675, at 43, he left his widow and eleven children a bread bill of 617 guilders, for which two paintings were given in payment. For all that, it seems Vermeer enjoyed some celebrity while he lived: a French nobleman recorded in his diary in 1663 that he had made a special trip from The Hague to Delft just to visit Vermeer's studio. No self-portrait of Vermeer as such...
...rate, an uncharacteristic portrayal, for it is Vermeer's pensive, passive women that viewers have always found most memorable. None has caused more speculation than the portrait of a girl in a lemon yellow jacket and porcelain blue turban-Vermeer's favorite colors-with the inimitable pearl at her ear (opposite). Shy, sad, ingenuous yet intelligent, imbued with an air of mystery that has brought comparisons with the Mona Lisa and of devotion that matches a Bellini Madonna, she elicited Vermeer's greatest powers of portrayal-and through all the years kept the secret of her identity...