Huwaida Hassan (Eye)
Life is not always at the same pace, sometimes it may give generously to those who do not possess intelligence or talent, and sometimes withhold its gifts from the real talented people, so they live their lives in loneliness and isolation without receiving the appreciation they deserve, as happened with one of the most important pioneers of plastic art throughout history Arts Johansen Vermeer, or Jan Vermeer as some critics call him.
Dutch School
And Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) is considered one of the poles of the Dutch art school, whose creativity flourished in the seventeenth century, and he lived in the city of Delft in southwestern Holland, a city that he did not leave throughout his life and was not famous as one of the art geniuses outside it, and he lived in poverty for long periods of his life He died young at the age of forty-three, leaving behind a large family consisting of a wife and ten children burdened with debts and material burdens.
Although Vermeer was a member of the Society of Artists, and became its president after that for four consecutive terms, fame did not know its way to him throughout his life, and he painted only three paintings every year, which explains the small number of his paintings that do not exceed forty paintings. Vermeer was interested in portraying middle-class men, women, and children, but women had the largest share in his paintings. He painted women writing letters, playing music, or even performing routine household chores such as knitting and pouring milk. He also painted portraiture with its fine details, and perhaps one of his most famous paintings Portrait of the girl with a pearl earring. His genius was not discovered until very late after his death, so that Arnold Hobraken, in his book “The Great Theater of Dutch Painters and Women Artists” in which he reviews the flags of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century, hardly mentions Vermeer’s name shyly without indicating his importance and fame Which he had later when Gustav Frederick and Theophile Thorburger rediscovered it more than two hundred years after his death. His works were rediscovered retrospectively, collected and studied, especially since he was ahead of his time in his use of shadow and light techniques.
Outstanding talent
The French art critic and collector Theophile Thorburger collected Vermeer’s works and published them in 1842 in a catalog that contained sixty-six paintings, but only thirty-four paintings were confirmed to be attributed to Vermeer with certainty. His studio in front of him is a model of a woman he paints, a painting of a maid pouring milk, a painting of a girl with a pearl earring, and paintings depicting women in routine scenes from their daily lives, such as paintings of a girl wearing a blue dress reading a book, a woman holding a pot of water, a woman writing a letter, a woman holding a scale, and others. The paintings depict the normal daily lives of middle-class people, especially women.
The value of these paintings is now estimated at millions of dollars, even though it is for an artist who was exhausted by poverty throughout his life, and was absent from ignorance and lack of recognition of his unique and unique talent that immortalized his mention in the history of art.
2023-06-30 21:42:30
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