Tag Archives: Vermeer

Friday Ravels in Review

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For a weekly recap, I’ll start with the best: the video I made about Whole in the Wall, a street art exhibit, although I did have to correct something I said in the video by noting some great street art blogs. In second place, inspired by a discussion about Francis Bacon, I was excited to see and write about his retrospective at the Met. Then yesterday I tried to explain why the film The Queen put me off with it mix of fact and fiction.

And then a long time ago, when it was May, we touched on some Vermeer forgeries via Errol Morris’s series of articles Bamboozling Ourselves. All 7 are now published, if you want to check out the full tale. I also got on my high horse about a poetry scandal in Britain. But that was long ago in May.

Now it’s June, and so I expect the weather will cease and desist with this dreary, cold rain. I keep giving it stern glances out the window.

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Bamboozling Forger Defends his Non-Nazi(?) Honor

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…by proving his forgeries were in fact his.

The story of Van Meegeren’s Vermeer forgeries is legendary. The New York Times has a series of in depth articles about his life, the forgeries that pulled the wool over the eyes of the biggest collector of the day, no less than Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, and how he later had to prove that the paintings he had sold were actually forgeries to escape charges of being a Nazi collaborator (which he likely was).Van Meegeren’s story is fascinating in all its details, likes how he mixed bakelite into his paintings and baked them to give them the appearance of age or the book of sentimental drawings he made Hitler.

The articles are based on two books that came out this past year, one of which, The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick, I read and would recommend. In fact, I did recommend it, and included an interesting side story to boot. Interviews with both authors were interesting, and I can’t wait for part 3 to come out.

You can also gawk at how bad some of Van Meegeren’s ‘Vermeers‘ were.


Just Kidding–the last one is a real Vermeer. And it’s actually coming to New York, as a loan to the Met for a Dutch painting exhibition in the fall.

That Girl With a Pearl Earring

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Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1662

Remember her? I know you know her, if only from that beautifully still 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring starring the beautiful Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. Tracey Chevalier also wrote a light novel of that name. Why nobody could think up another title, I don’t know.

But as my lovely avidly artsy readers are aware, both movie and book springboard off the gorgeous portrait above, whose subject is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa despite the touching intimacy with which she is portrayed.

Most people think of her when they think of Jan Vermeer, that moderately successful Dutch provincial whose interior scenes are infused with incredible light. They think of women near windows or reading letters. Within his works exists an intangible beauty that is not rooted in the woman or her pose or the room but in the quality of the painting that makes me assume that Vermeer had a beautiful mind and painted his simple genre scenes with great love.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the Rijksmuseum listed the painting below as a Vermeer. Referred to as The Little Street, this painting from 1658 is the only outdoor scenes by Vermeer. On second thought, it looks exactly like what Vermeer would paint if he painted the outdoors. A quiet little street with women and children happily employed. His version of the everyday is full of peace and light.