The Frick Collection’s own three splendid Vermeers and three Rembrandts joined briefly by 15 works on loan from one of the world’s best Dutch collections, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, including one of the most famous faces in Western art, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” coalesce this Thanksgiving in New York City.
A halo surrounds Golden Age paintings from the Northern Netherlands more than almost any period of art. The Dutch masters of the 17th century — among them Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Fabritius — draw loyal and obsessive museumgoers.
They arrange their vacations, their business trips, their reading, their friends and a good portion of the rest of their lives around seeing the quiet masterpieces created during one of the high points in painting’s history. The Frick show “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals” — made possible because the Mauritshuis is loaning out its treasures during an extensive renovation — broke a single-day attendance record during the exhibition’s first weekend. But a convergence is also driving traffic to the exhibition: With four Vermeers at the Frick through Jan. 19, five in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, four at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and one attributed, in whole or in part, to Vermeer now on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Eastern Seaboard temporarily features 38.8 percent of all known Vermeers, accessible by Amtrak.
A show of Mauritshuis works on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum last year, including “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” drew more than a million visitors over just two and a half months. Tracy Chevalier, who wrote “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” the 1999 historical novel that inspired a movie and transformed the painting into a bona fide cultural phenomenon, has seen 36 Vermeers in her travels around the world and recently came to New York for the Frick show.
“The opportunity to see four Vermeers in one building was too good a chance to pass up,” she said in a telephone interview from London, where she lives and often goes to see the four Vermeers in and around her own city. “I think one of the reasons people are drawn to Dutch painting now is because it’s not religious, by and large,” The line forms early, in rain or bitter cold, for the Frick show, whose timed tickets cost $20 and include the audio guide. (Admission this Friday night and other selected Friday nights is free.)
In addition to general Dutch masters mania, the show is also benefiting from the popularity of “The Goldfinch,” the new novel by Donna Tartt; the book is inspired by a small, powerful painting of the same title, on loan from the Mauritshuis, by Carel Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt who died young. Heidi Rosenau, a spokeswoman for the Frick, said that the museum has felt the newfound popularity of the Fabritius painting: For every 1,000 postcards it sold of “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” about 800 of “The Goldfinch” have been sold since the show opened on Oct. 22.
Jonathan Janson, an aficionado of Dutch painting who is behind the most popular and perhaps most obsessive amateur Vermeer website, essentialvermeer.com, said that, in his experience, a love of Dutch painting tends to peak with Vermeer and Rembrandt.
Excerpted from Randy Kennedy,
The New York Times, November 27, 2013
Artlinkglobal Advisory 