We live in superlative times, and thus the imminent exhibition on Johannes Vermeer (Delft, 1632-1675) is destined to break records from the moment it was announced a year and a half ago: more than 100,000 tickets have already been sold in the month since for sale, and given the avalanche, those responsible for the Rijksmuseum have decided to open until ten at night three days a week during the duration of the exhibition. All to be able to contemplate the maximum number of Vermeer paintings ever collected: 28, of the 37 established by the (current) canon.
Because these exhibitions destined to make history are accompanied by research work in which there are always works that fall and others that rise, see what happened during the commemoration of the V centenary of the death of Bosch in 2016, when just before the opening of the great exhibition in the Museo del Prado, the Dutch co-organizers withdrew the authorship of the brilliant painter from three works that are preserved in our country.
How many paintings came from Vermeer’s hands? Very few, since according to some scholars he was only a painter, it could be said that part-time. His figure is surrounded by questions, because unlike his contemporaries such as Frans Hals or Jan Steen, he did not engage in civic themes that could bring him large commissions and compensation; As a young man he leaned towards religious painting and later on interior, domestic, intimate scenes. For the portraits of women surprised doing very personal tasks, writing a letter, reading it.
Also unlike other painters of his time, he had no followers or models, since it is considered that he portrayed friends and family, his wife Catharina, his eldest daughters, Maria and Elisabeth, and his maid, Tanneke Everpoel, is not known either. a workshop or studio, he did not leave drawings or engravings and he is barely mentioned in documents. He converted to Catholicism, had eleven children and died at the age of 43 full of debt.
However, he also had a patron in life, Pieter Van Ruijven, a Delft merchant who came to lend the artist 200 guilders. The merchant’s daughter inherited the paintings bought by her father; At her death, she had 21 Vermeers, which were sold by her husband, Jacob Dissius. Then the spread. And with this, the subsequent doubts about the authenticity of his works, because it is a question of establishing a chain of owners, just as in police evidence, the chain of conservation of the evidence must be guaranteed.
That was all until the 19th century, when it was rediscovered after two centuries of oblivion. The elusive Vermeer connected with a modern feeling and his interiors with bourgeois life. Then he began the validation of his works and with it the problems. In 1866, Théophile Thoré-Bürger, the art critic to whom we owe Vermeer’s revival, established a list of 70 works that he attributed to the Dutchman, although he himself acknowledged that he was only sure of 49.
Over the years this figure has been decreasing, and also increasing: the great Vermeer exhibition in Washington and The Hague in 1995-1996 brought together 23 works of the 35 then considered safe. What happens that this number has been going up and down? Technology now makes it possible to enter paintings without damaging them, to analyze not only the pigments, but also the mixtures, the brushstrokes, something especially interesting when a work does not conform to the artist’s usual characteristics.
And that’s when technology gives you surprises, but also dislikes. Among the surprises, The Milkmaid (1657–1658), in which advanced Macro-XRF and RIS scanning methods have revealed the existence of another painting underneath and caused quite a stir among scholars, who already have years to review. his views on Vermeer’s way of painting.
Among the disappointments, that a few months after the great exhibition, the National Gallery of Washington has decided that The Girl with the Flute (1664-67) did not come from Vermeer’s brushes, but from a contemporary of his. Something that means opening a new and interesting path of investigation into the hitherto belief that the painter always worked alone has made the Rijksmuseum fatal, which continues to include it in the sample as an authentic Vermeer.
It is surprising that North American specialists have made themselves a Bosco, just like the Dutch at the time, and the timing has certainly not been good, because two other at least doubtful paintings have also been included, Santa Praxedes (1655) and Seated Young Woman before a virginal (1670-72). Curiously, these last two works underwent an identical authentication process: after decades of doubt, they were finally attributed to Vermeer shortly before their respective auctions, the first at Christie’s and the second at Sotheby’s, by technicians from the Rijksmuseum.
The aim of the organizers has been to collect as many Vermeers as possible. Now they have set 37 paintings for which there is total certainty, including the three doubtful, of which 28 will be in Amsterdam: although talks to increase their number have been maintained until the last moment, a spokesman for the Dutch museum confirmed this week to this supplement that last-minute additions are not expected. Focused on the works to come, they have not provided a list of those that are missing, referring to the analysis carried out by The Art Newspaper.
The reasons for the nine that will not travel are of different kinds, from legal problems to their delicate state of conservation, but in the end they can be summed up in one: parting with a Vermeer for six months is very hard, especially for the museums that have in these works his great claim. The Kunsthistorisches musem in Vienna, for example, did not want to specify to this supplement the reasons why The Art of Painting (1666-1668), one of Vermeer’s seminal paintings, will not travel to Amsterdam.
As the spokeswoman for the German Herzog Anton Ulrich museum, Annika Beckmann, explained to Cultura/s, Young man with a glass of wine “is the most famous work of art in our collection, people from all over the world travel to Brunswick to see it and the local population he identifies very much with this masterpiece, which is also part of the curriculum of graduates from Lower Saxony. We have a great responsibility and we are convinced that our colleagues understand this.” But they regret it.
