With only 35 works to his credit, Johannes Vermeer is now one of Amsterdam's most celebrated painters.
Here are five things you need to know about the Dutch Baroque artist, who is the subject of a major retrospective at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.
Vermeer in Amsterdam: article summary
Vermeer: the Sphinx of Delft
Nicknamed the "Sphinx of Delft", Vermeer is one of art's great enigmas. The artist offers only a handful of known works from his 43-year career.
Born into a bourgeois family of Calvinist merchants in 1632, his father was also an art dealer.
For reasons unknown, the artist shortened his surname "Van der Meer" to "Vermeer".
He converted to Catholicism, married a wealthy woman with whom he had 11 children, but on his death left a mountain of debt from his own art business.
To pay him back, his widow sold two of his paintings to a local baker. for the equivalent of two to three years' bread.
From minor figure to great name in painting
During his lifetime, during the "golden age" of Dutch art that also produced Rembrandt, Vermeer was a respected artist with a number of wealthy patrons, but apart from a few astute collectors, his work was largely forgotten after his death.
It wasn't until the 19th century that it emerged from obscurity, thanks in particular to the interest shown in by French journalist and art critic Théophile Thore-Burger.
Vermeer's rapid rise to fame led the public to regard him as one of the great masters of art history. This led to a frenzy of interest in Vermeer's work. for his relatively small body of work.
Vermeer Amsterdam: a large number of fake paintings
Fame brought a rash of fake Vermeers to the market as art forgers sought to cash in on the painter's celebrity.
Visit Rijksmuseum claims that his "remarkably small oeuvre" consists of 35 to 37 paintings, but only around 30 have been certified as his own. To this day, the debates continue to debate the authorship of several other works.
The Girl with the Flute is a good example. The painting is in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, but its owner, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, assures us that it is probably the work of one of Vermeer's students.
Near-photographic quality
Vermeer's canvases have an almost photographic quality, all the more remarkable given that the artist apparently made no preparatory sketches.
His perfectly rendered interiors are reinventions of real places, with objects that move or disappear. Specific details become central, like a single piece of thread or a glittering earring.
Some biographers have raised the possibility that Vermeer and other Dutch masters used pinhole cameras to draw their compositions, rather than relying solely on their talent for drawing.
Vermeer in other popular works
The Dutch master's work was part of the plot of the Agatha Christie mystery After The Funeral. He is also the artist at the center of one episode of the hit TV series Sherlock.
Meanwhile, The Girl with the Pearl, one of Vermeer's most famous works, owes some of its monumental fame to the fact that to a best-selling 1999 novel by American author Tracy Chevalier.
The book was adapted by Hollywood in 2003, with Colin Firth as painter and Scarlett Johansson as muse, triggering a wave of interest in Vermeer across the Atlantic.
Vermeer has a special place in Amsterdam. With the inauguration of the exhibition in honor of his life's work, you'll be able to discover the few works created by the artist. Enjoy of the exceptional skills of this painter whose talent was too long ignored.
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