Twenty-eight paintings, 10 rooms, and hundreds of metres of velvet curtain: the Rijksmuseum has unveiled a Vermeer exhibition that it calls ‘not just once in a lifetime’ but ‘a now or never’.

The show, which opens on February 10 and runs until the start of June, is the national museum’s first retrospective of one of the country’s most famous painters.

It features celebrated images created by the Delft-based, 17^th century painter, Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid, from Dutch collections, but also loans from France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The majority of Vermeer’s 35 extant works are on display together.

‘For the first time, in the Rijksmuseum: Vermeer,’ said Taco Dibbits, director general of the Rijksmuseum. ‘The only other [Vermeer retrospective] was in Washington and the Mauritshuis in 1995 and 1996, 30 years ago, and people who saw it still rave about it…

‘Twenty-eight paintings in 10 rooms of the Philips wing convincingly show the audience the intimacy of Vermeer. Never before have so many tickets been sold before an exhibition: we are now at 200,000. This is not just a once in a lifetime: this is a now or never.’

Girl with a Flute

The exhibition includes a controversial painting on panel, Girl with a Flute, which the National Gallery of Art in Washington last year announced fell ‘short of Vermeer’s standards’, demoting it to the ‘studio of Vermeer’. However, the Rijksmuseum stands by its own assessment that it is indeed by the Dutch master, listing it as ‘attributed here to Johannes Vermeer.’

Pieter Roelofs, head of paintings and sculture, said that the two galleries had agreed to disagree for now – but was hopeful that more research during the exhibition might convince everyone.

‘We were not there when it was made, and our colleagues in Washington have done an unbelievable job in the research and their collaboration between conservators, curators and scientists,’ he told Dutch News. ‘We are looking at the same [painting], but we are seeing something different.

‘They point out characteristics they think are atypical, and we believe we see some or most of them in other paintings as well. That’s a wonderful game. We agree to disagree, but by collaborating, we believe we will bring the field forward.’

‘Studio’

Previously, he said that the painting would lose its doubtful status in its trip over the ocean. ‘That’s metaphorical,’ he explained. ‘But when you think of these two paintings on panel [Girl with a Flute and Girl with a Red Hat] we think of them as study heads, tronies, made with another purpose.

‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring was a painting, fully signed, made for a client. These paintings were made to experiment, to study a light source from the right lower corner, playing with reflections or colour. If there are two paintings in the world that relate most to each other, it’s these two.’

He said that there had been a lot of debate historically, though, about their authenticity, which was not helped by deterioration in their condition and restoration through the years. Observers also point out that Vermeer did not have an artistic ‘studio’: he painted at home, was survived by 11 children, and died at just 43.

Research

The Rijksmuseum will use the most modern, non-invasive techniques to continue to study all of the paintings on show in Amsterdam and hopes to publish new findings about how Vermeer innovated with technique, materials and composition.

‘I’m thrilled about the exhibition,’ added Roelofs. ‘It’s unbelievable that our colleagues have been so generous. These are all highlights of the collections where they are normally kept, and bringing together 80% of his oeuvre is unbelievable.

‘Even Vermeer probably never saw this many of his paintings together!’

Vermeer runs from February 10 until June 4