The Vermeer Exhibition in Amsterdam: Searching for Clues for an Enigmatic Artist - Study Day (Online)

During the 17th-century, the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem and Delft were international hubs from where the Dutch – expert seafarers and skilled mapmakers – developed a far-flung colonial empire and achieved prosperity unparalleled in the 1600s. This economic Golden Age was matched by an explosion of creativity in art. Of the many great artists that rose to prominence in this period, Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (1632-1675), remains by far the most mysterious. Born in Delft, where he spent the entirety of his relatively short life, on his death he left behind a remarkably small oeuvre of about 35 paintings, which is perhaps the reason that history was so swift to forget him until his eventual ‘rediscovery’ in the 19th-century. In the spring of 2023, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, will present the largest retrospective of Vermeer’s work to date, uniting masterpieces on loan from around the world. Perhaps most exciting is the new research both museums are currently undertaking, which will shed new light on Vermeer’s artistry, his compositional motivations and his creative processes.