I guess that you could say that we are fans of Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch artist who lived from 1632 to 1675 and who has a relatively small set of surviving works, perhaps as few as 34. We’ve made a point of visiting museums with his paintings on our travels, including in Washington DC, in an earlier trip to Amsterdam in 2016, and in Vienna. On our recent trip to cruise along the Elbe in December, I even wrote ahead to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections) to find out if Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window would be on display when we visited the city. We were especially interested in this painting because a recent restoration had revealed a portrait of Cupid that had been painted over for three and a half centuries. Unfortunately, it was out on loan to a museum in Japan at the time.
We tried to remember when we first became interested in Vermeer and initially thought that it might have been when Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring came out in 1999, or the movie adaptation of that book in 2003. I didn’t read the book or see the movie until after I saw the documentary film Tim’s Vermeer about an inventor’s quest to prove that Vermeer painted his almost photorealistic works using optical devices, an idea that is still in dispute. We live near Boston, but it took us a while to realize our interest might have sprung from the 1990 theft of one of his precious few works in the night-time heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. His painting The Concert was stolen along with a dozen other works including those by Rembrandt, Manet, and Degas in what is considered the highest-value museum robbery in history, with the Vermeer worth about half of the heist’s total value at over a quarter billion dollars on its own! (None of the stolen objects have ever been recovered.)
When we read in early 2022 that the Rijksmuseum was pulling together the largest Vermeer exhibition ever with 28 of his 34 paintings, we made plans to attend and signed up for an alert from the museum for when the tickets would be going on sale. That alert came in September 2022 and we bought tickets the next day. It’s a good thing that we did it so quickly because all the tickets were sold out by the second day of the exhibit that opened on February 10, 2023 and closed on June 4. The Rijksmuseum extended their hours at the exhibit to allow for a total of 650,000 visitors, the biggest show in the Rikjsmuseum’s 148 year history.
Visiting a Girl in The Hague
We bought tickets for mid-April so that we could also be in the Netherlands at the peak of the tulip season. Not very long before we left for Amsterdam we learned that one of the stars of the show – Girl with a Pearl Earring – would be returning to the Mauritshuis, her home museum in the Dutch city of The Hague at the beginning of April. We immediately decided that we would start our Vermeer viewing by traveling to the Mauritshuis on what is supposed to be an easy 32 mile trip that normally takes less than an hour from Amsterdam’s Central Station. However, the line from Amsterdam down the coast had been badly damaged in a train collision that forced us to switch to a bus in Leiden. That bus took us on a long winding route through the Dutch countryside to another train station on the outskirts of The Hague from where we could then finish our journey. We shared the misery/joy of the trip with a pair of ladies from the Seattle area who had already been to the Rijksmuseum show and who also wanted to see the Girl.
The Mauritshuis is a lovely museum that is a fairly short walk from the train station. Their star attraction is featured on the entrance signage:
We made our way through several of the galleries before finding the Girl in her third floor home:
Though she is sometimes called the Dutch Mona Lisa, she doesn’t attract the selfie snapping mobs that the Louvre often suffers. Her gallery was much more modest and subdued:
Her next door neighbor to the left portrays a mother picking lice from head of her child:
One thing that was really cool is that in the gallery right next door hangs The Goldfinch that is featured as the title (and as part of the cover image) of a well-known novel by Donna Tartt and that like the Girl with a Pearl Earring was also made into a movie. The painting’s artist, Carel Fabritius, was a student of Rembrandt and like Vermeer lived in Delft. His life was cut short when a gunpowder magazine exploded and leveled a quarter of the city in 1654. (Could that have been the inspiration for the bombing that opens Tartt’s book?)
Our return trip to Amsterdam was a lot longer but quite a bit smoother as we took one train through Gouda to Utrecht, and then switched to another train to take us back to Amsterdam – no bus rides required.
The Big Show
The next morning we walked the short distance from our hotel to the Rijksmuseum to line up for our timed entrance to the special exhibit right at that day’s opening. The lines were long but moved quickly.
In spite of the large crowds attending the show, we did not feel crowded inside the exhibits. The paintings were spread out across many spacious rooms with just a few canvases per room.
Here are the other 27 Vermeers that were on display when we attended. They are presented in roughly the order that we encountered them at the exhibit. (Click any picture to see a larger version.)
With our attendance at this show, we have seen almost all of the acknowledged (and disputed) Vermeers in person. Unless it is miraculously recovered, we’ll never see The Concert – we should have gone to the Gardner sooner! We did see The Art of Painting in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2017 and the Louvre’s The Astronomer at the National Gallery show in 2018, but there are a few Vermeers left on our bucket list, including two (A Maid Asleep and Study of a Young Woman) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that can’t leave the Met per donor’s bequests. Of the remaining three that we have not yet seen, one is on display in London and one isin Braunschweig, Germany. The last might require a royal invitation since it is currently hanging at Windsor Castle.
The Rijksmuseum also has a beautiful virtual tour of Vermeer’s paintings that we think you’d enjoy.
Doubling Down on Delft
As soon as we bought our Vermeer tickets and booked our hotel and flights, I booked a bus tour from Amsterdam to the Keukenhof Gardens that also included a visit to Delft. Months later I had completely forgotten about the Delft part of the bus tour. We decided to go to Delft on our own the day after attending the show at the Rijksmuseum so that we could also visit the Vermeer museum in the artist’s hometown. The “mistake” of traveling someplace twice actually worked out quite well for us.
On our first visit we took the train from Amsterdam’s Central Station but from our experience traveling earlier to The Hague we knew enough not to go via the still-closed route through Leiden and instead went via Rotterdam. Other than the Vermeer Museum, we hadn’t planned any other stops in Delft, but the very helpful workers at the tourist information booth inside the Delft train station strongly recommended a visit to the Royal Delft Museum and factory. After our visit to the Meissen porcelain factory and showroom during our Viking cruise on the Elbe, we thought that we knew all about porcelain, but Royal Delft had a very different vibe. For one thing, we could actually afford to buy something from Royal Delft (a platter featuring Girl with a Pearl Earring, of course!), but they also have a history of creating porcelain-based building materials.
Here are some shots from the Royal Delft tour:
Walking from the Royal Delft museum to the main square, we were charmed by the homes and canal views:
Even though it housed none of his works (except in reproductions), the Vermeer Centrum Museum was super informative, with background on artists guilds, the symbolism of his paintings, and insight on his techniques. They also weren’t afraid to have fun with some of his iconic imagery:
One of our favorite parts of this museum was the mockup of how Vermeer’s home/studio might have been configured for so many of his works, complete with an intricate tapestry, a background painting, flowing curtain, and light streaming through a stained glass window:
I call this Woman with Shopping Bag.
We had to leave Delft that day much sooner than we would have liked (still not remembering that we’d be back in just two days) because I had booked a night-time photography tour back in Amsterdam that I didn’t want to miss. When we did come back to Delft after our tulip tour at Keukenhof Gardens, we learned (re-discovered?) along the way was that one of the sights we’d be visiting would be a porcelain factory. Fortunately, it was not a re-run of our trip to the large Royal Delft factory but instead to the one other surviving enterprise that still does all the steps of making Dutch porcelain or Defltware in-house. Unlike the number of shops that merely paint and fire pieces made in China, the small shop De Candelaer located in the shadow of the medieval Nieuwe Kerk (“New Church”) makes their own on-site:
The extra trip to Delft also gave us opportunity to sit and have an early dinner seated outside at a restaurant in the old town market square that’s bookended by the Nieuwe Kerke and the town hall:
Next up: Amsterdam @ Night – shots from my night-time photography tour.
Dick this is awesome. I learned so much and laughed out loud keep th
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