All of Vermeer's paintings in your pocket

[John F]

Want to See All the Vermeers in the World? Now’s Your Chance
By Nina Siegal
Dec. 3, 2018

AMSTERDAM — Johannes Vermeer, whose acute eye captured the quiet beauty of Dutch domestic life, was not a prolific artist: Just 36 paintings are widely acknowledged as his work. Still, anyone who wanted to see them all had to travel far and wide — to New York, London, Paris and beyond. Until now.

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which owns what is perhaps Vermeer’s best-known masterpiece, “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture in Paris to build an augmented-reality app that creates a virtual museum featuring all of the artist’s works.

For the app, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has contributed images of all five of its Vermeer masterpieces, while the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, each with four, have also given photographs of theirs. Two more have come from the Louvre, and three from the Frick Collection. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has shared an image of “The Concert,” the Vermeer that disappeared after being stolen from the museum’s collection in 1990. That painting will be on view once again in Meet Vermeer, the digital museum. Starting Monday, the free app will be accessible to anyone with a camera-equipped smartphone.

“This is one of these moments when technology does something that you can never do in real life, and that’s because these paintings could never be brought together in real life,” said Emilie Gordenker, director of the Mauritshuis.She explained that some of the 17th-century paintings were too fragile to travel, while some were in private collections, and the Gardner’s was lost. But even under different circumstances, it would be unlikely that all the owners would be willing to part with all of their prized Vermeers at the same time.The 18 museums and private collections that own Vermeer paintings, however, were willing to provide high-resolution digital image files of their Vermeers to the project.

Vermeer, a somewhat mysterious figure who lived and worked in Delft, the Netherlands, is thought to have created about 45 paintings during a career spanning nearly two decades. Some are believed to have gone missing. Besides the 36 works that a majority of Vermeer scholars accept as authentic, other paintings have been attributed to him. Because the art world continues to debate their authorship, Ms. Gordenker said this virtual museum would not include them.

Although many of these images are already on the museums’ websites, Ms. Gordenker said she wanted to give the public a sense of the paintings’ size in relation to one another — something that is hard to convey in a flat picture on a screen.

Opening the app, visitors gaze down at a museum with no ceiling. To enter one of the rooms displayed, they touch the phone’s surface, pinching their fingers together and then opening them. As they land in a gallery, the perspective shifts so that they face the walls, where the framed paintings hang. Zooming in, they can approach each work and examine it closely.

The first room is devoted to Vermeer’s earliest works. The rest of the museum is organized thematically, exploring subjects such as “contemplation” and the studies of faces known as “tronies.”

Paintings by Vermeer have long been reproduced in all types of formats, from posters to patterns on handbags and umbrellas. But as the technology improves and visitors have the artificial but intimate experience of seeing high-quality reproductions in a museum setting, does Ms. Gordenker worry that they will be less motivated to travel for the real thing? No, she said.

“The more information we share, including images, the more I think that people want to have the authentic experience of seeing the work in its home,” she said, “and seeing it as an actual physical presence. One of the reasons that museums have becoming increasingly relevant, and why attendance is going up, is that we’ve been able to harness these digital technologies. It breaks down barriers, and makes what we have much more accessible.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/arts ... shuis.html

[lennygoran]

Amazing-will there ever be an app to hear all of Beethoven's works? Regards, Len

[jbuck919]

Kissing your sister. Who still owns a Vermeer in a private collection?

[John F]

Who still owns a Vermeer in a private collection?

Last Privately Owned Vermeer Loaned to Philadelphia Museum of Art
By Andrew Russeth
10/28/13 1:00pm


'Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,' 1670-72. (©The Leiden Collection, New York)

It is shaping up to be a big winter for Vermeer here on the East Coast. The Frick is showing the artist’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665), which is on loan from Amsterdam’s Mauritshuis, and has hung its three Vermeers together in one gallery. Now the Philadelphia Museum of Art is joining the party, announcing that it will show the master’s A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (1670–72), which resides in a private collection, through March 2014.

A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal is the last painting by the Sphinx of Delft in a private collection. (Although the circa 1663–1666 The Concert, which was stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, is also presumably in private hands at the moment.) Including The Concert, there are only 36 known paintings by the artist.

The work is also the most recent Vermeer to be authenticated. When it was purchased in 1960 by the art collector Baron Frédéric Rolin, many scholars believed it was a forgery, though subsequent tests won over many experts. In 2004 it sold for $30.1 million at Sotheby’s London to a private collector. The loaner for the Philadelphia display is the New York-based Leiden Collection.