photo: Pixabay, Ellen26
What's happening under the surface of the Dutch painter's canvases offers insights into his enigmatic oeuvre.
The Sphinx of Delft is a fitting moniker for Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch artist about whom, despite his wild fame, so little is actually known. His oeuvre was small—only 36 extant works are known or agreed upon— but over the course of the centuries intervening since his death in 1675, it has sparked seemingly boundless fascination, speculation, and analysis.
The French art historian Théophile Thoré-Bürger bestowed the “Sphinx” nickname onto Vermeer in the 19th century. Thoré-Bürger had plucked Vermeer from semi-obscurity—though moderately successful in his lifetime, the artist fell out of fashion soon after his death—and used the nickname to describe the enigmatic, strangely modern, and even literary feel of the work.
Vermeer’s paintings depict deceptively simple scenes—a woman reading a letter at a window, a maid pouring milk, a music lesson—but Thoré-Bürger’s intuition that they were keeping back untold secrets was absolutely correct. Over the centuries, conservators, scientists, curators, and art historians have discovered a number of surprising mysteries, tricks, and changes in Vermeer’s paintings.
Below we’ve pinpointed a few favorites that have allowed us to see Vermeer’s work in a whole new way.
Full text: available here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/scholars-5-secrets-vermeer-2032943