Vermeer's 'Lacemaker' coming to UK
September 29 2011
Picture: Louvre
Vermeer's Lacemaker will go on display in the UK for the first time for a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. Vermeer's Women opens on 5th October and runs until 15th January. Betsy Wieseman, the curator of the exhibition, says:
The Louvre very rarely lend this painting because it's almost as important in their collection as the Mona Lisa. It is a painting that people make a trip especially to the Louvre to see.
Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Jonathan Jones asks:
Did the 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer use a camera obscura – an early photographic instrument in which light is concentrated through a tiny aperture to cast a bright image on a surface in a darkened room – to help him create his mesmerising paintings of life in the tranquil city of Delft?
Undoubtedly. You can see microscopic highlights, lifelike perspectives and shadows in his paintings that strikingly resemble camera images and have no other reason to be there. It's more likely that he used a camera obscura than that he somehow "thought like a camera". Does this precocious photographic technique explain the power of Vermeer's paintings? Not really.
