Some years ago I was in Amsterdam on business. Thankfully we finished early and our host suggested we might like to view an art exhibition which had just opened. It was entitled 'The Golden Age' and featured some amazing paintings from Dutch masters.
This was my first introduction to the art of Johannes Vermeer and it was love at first sight. I adored the way in which he gave us glimpses of private, domestic tasks undertaken by women of that era. Of course I met him again through Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of his most famous paintings and subject to both a fictional account by Tracy Chevalier and also 2004 film starring Scarlett Johansson .
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has an exhibition running until January entitled 'Vermeer's Women' which features a number of his and his contemporaries' paintings from that time. These include the famous 'The Lacemaker' (above), on loan from the Louvre in Paris and which was painted in about 1670. We saw it again today and the detail of it and many others in this exhibition is quite exquisite.
Of course the usual Cambridge art intelligentsia aka 'deluded through a misguided sense of self-importance' were out in force but they could only see what we mere mortals saw: genius.
0 comments:
Post a Comment