Baroque Art by Victoria Charles

Author:Victoria Charles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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AC Baroque 4C.qxp 1/14/2009 4:18 PM Page 110

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Rembrandt’s. Johannes Vermeer painted not only interior rooms with figures and furnishings but also the streets of Delft. Vermeer’s use of lighting of interior spaces is softer than that of his predecessors, and his figures are also adapted to this type of toning: Girl reading a Letter at an open Window (1659) (p. 109), Girl with a Wine Glass (c. 1660), The Letter (after 1664), Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1665), and the studio picture The Art of Painting (c. 1666). This last picture is taken by some experts as an allegory, sometimes called The Allegory of Painting. In any case, it is the largest and most complex of all of Vermeer’s works and has an unusual history. Vermeer never sold this picture despite being up to his neck in debt. After his and his wife’s death, his mother-in-law Maria Thins inherited the picture. Then for more than a hundred years it was stored away, unrecognized and undiscovered until its purchase in 1813 by the Hungarian Count Czernin for 50 Florins. In the 1860s it was ascribed to Pieter de Hooch but was eventually recognized as a Vermeer original by a French art critic, Théophile Thoré-Bürger. Whether this remains so is not yet certain, but in this way it gained attention and was displayed to the public in Austria in exhibitions in Vienna until the arrival of the Nazis in 1939. The leading Nazi figures, including the collection-mad former Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, showed a strong interest in this picture; it was finally sold by its owner the Count Jaromir Czernin on the twentieth of November in 1940 to Adolf Hitler for his private collection for a price of 1,650,000

reichsmarks. During World War II it was hidden in a salt mine to protect it from Allied bombardment. After the war, in 1946, the painting was handed over to the Austrian Government and is today in the possession of the Austrian State.

Landscape Painting

Things were much worse in landscape painting than in genre painting; those who had to battle their whole life to make a living are the ones whose paintings are sold at peak prices today. Haarlem was not only the centre but also the starting point of all Dutch landscape painting except for Rembrandt and a few of his successors.

Van de Velde

In Haarlem, Esaias van de Velde was the pivotal figure of the national school that found its subject matter exclusively in its surroundings: the villages, dunes, woods, 77. Johannes Vermeer,

meadows and canals. In genre paintings they developed a power, finesse and diversity View of Delft, c. 1660-1666.

in which the objects mattered little or nothing but the colouristic appearance meant Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 115.7 cm.

all. With Esaias van de Velde, the figures still played an important role, so that the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

connection of this Dutch style of painting with the

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