![]() ![]() ![]() Hockney, people said, was just jealous because he lacks the old masters’ skills. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings-at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909-their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.ĭespite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photo-realistic Sphinx of Delftis rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. ![]() Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel.
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