Usually, when museums stage exhibitions of Johannes Vermeer, they are built around a few paintings by him and complemented with other genre paintings from the Dutch golden era. This is because there are only 37 known Vermeer paintings, and it is difficult to build a one-man show. Thus the 2021 Dresden exhibition was built around the restored ‘Girl reading a letter‘ (below left), and the Dublin/Washington/Paris exhibition of 2017 covered the other masters of the genre painting besides Vermeer (with eight of his paintings, including the ‘Milkmaid’, below right).
Now Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has managed to gather 28 Vermeers into one blockbuster exhibtion (the attribution of one of the paintings is suspect). Such is the popularity of the Dutch golden era art that although the exhibition is open until 4 June, it has been sold out.
After visiting, it must be said that the Rijksmuseum has managed the arrangements very well – there was no need to queue, there was enough space around the pictures for people to see and move around, and the number of visitors around was reasonable (below).
Vermeer is particularly popular as he manages to combine the sense of an acutely observed reality with the feeling of fiction and stories lurking behind the carefully constructed scenes – without ever explaining or preaching. Thus the interpretation of the story is left to the viewer. Below are the ‘Girl with a pearl earring‘ and the ‘Geographer‘.
This feasibility of open interpretation, and the fact that Vermeer is such a well-known part of the canon of Western art, have made it attractive for other artists to make references to Vermeer and expect the viewers to make the connection. As an example, below are the Vermeer and an interpretation of it by the Finnish artist Kaj Stenvall (1999) – all interpretations are left to the viewer.
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