Word: vermeers
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...first rule of artistic survival is to leave a large mass of output when you die--though this, mercifully in some cases, does not always succeed. Vermeer painted very little--or at least very few of his paintings have survived. The present count is about 34. And because his work had little influence on younger artists, and wasn't much written about even in Holland until the early 19th century, and was seen by so few people, it languished. His reputation didn't really revive until the late 19th century, helped (as old painting so often is) by enthusiasms...
...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...
...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...
...idea of "Vermeer and the Delft School" is a harmless red herring, a pretext for looking at Vermeer and a few lesser artists who happened to be around in the same town at the same time. There was no distinctive Delft school. In the 17th century the place harbored only one artist whose talents approached Vermeer's--the slightly older Pieter de Hooch (1629-84), who was originally from Rotterdam but worked in Delft for about five years in the 1650s. Vermeer and De Hooch had several things in common, the main one being that nothing at all is known...