Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The past 150 years have seen Johannes Vermeer steadily ascend from lesser-known Dutch painter to one of the world's most popular artists, beloved of cognoscenti and the general public alike, and celebrated by everyone from Proust and Dali to Peter Greenaway and Tracy Chevalier (whose bestselling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring offered a fictional portrait of the enigmatic artist). Considered purely in terms of his subject matter--women reading letters, artist's studios, servants at work--Vermeer conformed entirely to the genre repertoire of Dutch Golden Age painting. What he brought to these genres was a realism so powerful that it captured the subtlest effects of light, opened up thrilling psychological tensions and disclosed incredible serenities of indoor reverie. Vermeer is also surely one of the most sexual painters of all time, with the sly expressions of his subjects and their whispered intimacies, and his focal points of almost excruciating tenderness and precision--an earring, a wineglass, a pin. Of Vermeer himself almost nothing is known, and his oeuvre, or what survives of it, is one of the most condensed in the canon: just 34 works, every one of them a masterpiece. This volume--the new standard Vermeer monograph--reproduces all 34 paintings, augmenting each with close-ups that lay bare the loving care Vermeer lavished upon each painstaking work.
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft, Holland, and lived his entire life in the city. He married Catharina Bolenes in 1953, fathering 14 children with her. In his lifetime he saw only moderate success, perhaps in part because of his relatively small output, and when he died in 1675, he left his wife and family in debt.
Synopsis
An affordable volume gathering all 35 paintings by the beloved Dutch master
This fully illustrated volume collects the complete works of Johannes Vermeer (1632-75). Published in Pol grafa's affordable Old Masters series, it captures the deep blues and transparent yellows of the 35 canvasses that comprise the known work of one of the most popular artists in history.
In his lifetime, Vermeer's fame barely extended beyond his native Delft and a small circle of patrons; even in the decades after his death, his name was largely forgotten. It was not until the mid-19th century that Vermeer was rediscovered and his mastery rightly vindicated.
All of his work, created throughout the second half of the 17th century, is linked to the emergence of the new bourgeois class that provided his main clientele and the subject of many of his paintings. His evocative repertoire of everyday actions--the reading of letters, kitchen tasks, playing music--was animated by his tremendous ability to depict indoor light atmospherically.