Tag: Vermeer

One of Vermeer’s most popular works, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, had already been taken out of the exhibition in April to return to its place at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in time for the tourist season. Although I have seen this painting in the Mauritshuis before (it is very beautiful)...

Days after I posted the final chapter of Maestro Keys, The Fabulous Wife and I went on our first extended trip since before the pandemic. I’d been wanting to return to Europe for a while, but The Fabulous Wife was more Covid-averse — until she learned that the Rijksmuseum in...

Knowing that I will likely not be able to see the unique Vermeer exhibition that opens today in Amsterdam, I visited the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague when I was recently in the Netherlands. It is one of my favorite museums in the world, and I can highly recommend it to all readers of this newslet...

When I teach my Art History survey, my students are often shocked to hear that an artist like Johannes Vermeer wasn’t especially famous during his lifetime. Even if they don’t know his name, most of them have seen Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring before. It’s bee...

A lot of this comes down to how the art market functioned in the workshop and guild system. In the early modern period (by this I mean roughly the 15th-17th centuries, from the Renaissance through the Baroque) there were certain market conditions that impacted who would become well known as an artis...