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The Miracle Of Vermeer

Lucky New Yorkers! There’s an exhibition at the Frick now featuring paintings from the Mauritshuis in The Hague — including Vermeer’s imperishable “Girl With Pearl Earring.” I hope my business requires me to travel to NYC before the show ends. If you’ve never seen a Vermeer, please do not miss this opportunity. A decade ago, […]

Lucky New Yorkers! There’s an exhibition at the Frick now featuring paintings from the Mauritshuis in The Hague — including Vermeer’s imperishable “Girl With Pearl Earring.” I hope my business requires me to travel to NYC before the show ends. If you’ve never seen a Vermeer, please do not miss this opportunity. A decade ago, I was in the Netherlands on business, and had the chance to go to the Mauritshuis to see the Vermeers. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a museum. The sublime luminosity of those canvases! Trying to describe the Vermeers makes me feel like Dante trying to describe entering Paradise: To soar beyond the human cannot be described in words.

To behold a Vermeer is to gaze on perfection. There are only 36 Vermeers in the world. If you have the opportunity to see some of them, you will always remember it. Go. Today’s Times talks about Vermeer lovers and how they’re flocking to the East Coast now:

Jonathan Janson, an aficionado of Dutch painting who is behind the most popular and perhaps most obsessive amateur Vermeer websiteessentialvermeer.com, said that in his experience, a love of Dutch painting tends to peak with Vermeer and Rembrandt.

“For example, there really aren’t a lot of Frans Hals people out there, besides scholars and dealers, that I’ve found,” said Mr. Janson, an American painter who lives in Rome and also maintains a Rembrandt site. “After the big two, there’s sort of a ledge.”

But that said, Dutch painting fans of all sorts seek him out as something of a high command of amateur ardor, which makes sense given that he says he sometimes spends five hours a day working on his Vermeer site.

“It might be hard to believe, but there are people traipsing around the world all the time in search of these kinds of paintings,” he said. “And I guess I hear from them because they want to find somebody else who knows why they’re doing this kind of crazy thing.”

With longing, he added, “I wish I could be in New York right now.”

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