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It's only February but already Vermeer And The Masters Of Genre Painting, which opened Wednesday at the Louvre Museum in Paris, is being lauded as the “Exhibit of the Year" and expected to be a major success.
This remarkable exhibition is a unique chance to see together in one location 12 of Johannes Vermeer’s most precious paintings - about one-third of the entire surviving body of his work - alongside many of his contemporaries from Holland’s Golden Age.
Vermeer produced only 40 paintings during his lifetime (1632-1675), mostly at his workshop in the picturesque city of Delft, in southern Holland. Given that limited output, it's extraordinary that today he enjoys such worldwide celebrity, and that some of his paintings are even more famous because they have become icons of modern day film and advertising - such as Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been compared in fame and ubiquitousness with the Mona Lisa and The Milkmaid from 1660, lent by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and which, for good or bad, became the logo of Nestlé and is globally recognized.
Then there are the other enigmatic Vermeer women like Woman Holding a Balance from 1664, lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Woman with a Lute from 1663 on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum.
While Girl with a Pearl Earring is the big missing link in the Paris show, the others - along among others, with The Letter (La Lettre) from the National Gallery of Ireland, and The Lacemaker (La Dentellière) from the Louvre collection - are stars of the exhibit, which was assembled with loans from major American, British, German and Dutch museums and institutions.
Also included are The Geographer from Frankfurt's Städel Museum and The Astronomer from the Louvre, side by side for the first time.
“His genius is light, still light and always light," Le Point's critic writes. "His characters - small people - often stand in front of a window, their complexion bathed by an unreal light. One could spend hours admiring the delicacy of this paintings so full of sensibility.”
Le Monde calls Vermeer “the Great Master of Enigmas,” and the The Guardian's art critic refers to the works of the master and his contemporaries as “The Birth Of The Cool.”
"The exhibition is not a monograph,"explained Blaise Ducos, curator of Flemish and Dutch paintings at the Louvre. "It presents Vermeer among his peers, rivals, colleagues and followers."
Alongside Vermeer’s treasures are the “Masters of Genre Painting” as the show's name specifies, and features more than 70 works by his 17th century Dutch contemporaries including Jan Steen, Gerard ter Borch, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Nicolaes Maes, Hendrick Martensz Sorgh, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher, and Frans van Mieris.
A Woman Reading a Letter by Gabriel Metsu, National Gallery of Ireland Photo: National Gallery of... [+]
”Through comparisons with the works of other artists of the Golden Age, the exhibition brings to light Vermeer’s membership to a network of painters specializing in the depiction of everyday life while admiring, inspiring, and vying with each other,” the museum's curators note.
The “genre painting” refers to the realistic painting that illuminates the moods of domestic life and the ordinary beauty of its characters, so different from the style of portraiture of kings, gods and goddesses of the times.
In the affluent society of the Netherlands of the mid-1600s, a "new wave" artistic niche was born: The scene of a refined genre of which Vermeer was one of the protagonists. These were paintings intended for an elite - rich merchants, bürgermeisters, shareholders of the India Company - the new aristocracy of the young Dutch republic. "Holland of the time is New York," according to Blaise Ducos.
“They tend to have women as their central characters," The Guardian explains. "More clearly than ever before, this exhibition reveals the feminisation of art in 17th-century Holland. Genre painters take us into the domestic world, behind the windows of merchant houses, into the spaces in which women spent their lives 300 years ago.”
The Vermeer exhibition is part of a Louvre season dedicated to the Dutch Golden Age, which is also featuring the exhibition The Masterpieces of the Leiden Collection, by Thomas Kaplan, the francophile New York businessman who owns it and has the world’s largest private Rembrandt collection.
The Masterpieces of Leiden includes 11 Rembrandts, some of which have never been exhibited in a large museum.
After Paris, the show - minus the iconic La Laitière (The Milkmaid) - will travel to the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin from June 17 to September 17, and to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, from October 22 to January 21, 2018.
