Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With A Pearl Earring” will come to the De Young Museum in San Francisco next January (2013), the first stop on a three-venue American tour of paintings from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, the Hague.
The Dutch museum announced Friday that it is sending 35 paintings on a two-year tour. The paintings will first come to the United States, then to two museums in Japan, while the museum undergoes renovations.
'Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis,' will run Jan. 26-June 2, 2013, at the De Young, then move to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Frick Collection in New York City (where the show will be scaled down to 10 works and presented as “Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis”).
“Girl With a Pearl Earring,” painted around 1665, was last seen in the United States in 1995 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in a 21-picture exhibition focused solely on Vermeer.
Reviewing that “once-in-a-lifetime….or even once-in-many-lifetimes” event, Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote that “sometimes, as in the exquisite 'Girl With a Pearl Earring,’ the sitter in the painting returns your focused gaze. An inexplicable charge rushes through the experience, as when an electrical circuit is suddenly completed.”
Forgotten for nearly two hundred years, the art critic W. Thore-Burger resurrected interest in Vermeer in 1866 when he published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him. Today only 35 paintings are definitively attributed to him.
Even in his lifetime he was relatively unknown outside of his hometown of Delft where he lived in near poverty, worked and died. Now he has become one of the most admired artists of the Golden Age of Dutch Art.
The show at the De Young also will include paintings by Rembrandt’s “'Tronie’ of a Man with a Feathered Beret,” Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch” and works by Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Jacob and Salomon van Ruysdael, Paulus Potter, Meindert Hobbema and Jan van Goyen.
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Johannes_Vermeer
The current exhibit at the de Young, “Masters of Venice,” closes February 12th
http://deyoung.famsf.org/
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