The Fitzwilliam Museum Hosts "Vermeer’s Women ~ Secrets and Silence" & Dutch Golden Age Painters

Written by Laurel Takashima Thursday, 01 December 2011 00:32

Cambridge, UK.- The Fitzwilliam Museum is proud to host a new exhibition on the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, which will explore the mysterious appeal of the women in his paintings. "Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence" features 28 works by master painters of the Dutch Golden Age and four iconic works by Johannes Vermeer, including "The Lacemaker" from the Musée du Louvre in Paris, on show in the UK for the first time. Women are one of the key subjects in Vermeer’s works:  whether gazing out wistfully at the viewer, or focusing on an activity with an almost eerie calm, they possess a powerful allure. This exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum is the first to focus on Vermeer’s domestic interiors and, by examining them in the context of paintings by other Dutch Golden Age masters, explores the enigma of these women who seem crystallised in a moment in time. "Vermeer's Women" will be on view at the museum through January 15th 2012.

The vivid realism of these paintings provides a remarkable window into the private world of women in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. These scenes about the home seem hauntingly familiar even today: from the meditative calm of needlework, playing music, reading or simply daydreaming to such mundane domestic activities as cooking, shopping, washing and dressing, minding children, gossiping and eavesdropping. Often framed with a painted window or doorway, the viewer has the impression of having stumbled upon a private moment hidden behind closed doors. Revealing the Dutch Golden Age ideals of the home, feminine beauty and domesticity, the exhibition also explores how artists subtly altered and augmented reality to enhance the magnetic appeal and symbolic import of these painted worlds. At the heart of this stunning exhibition is Vermeer’s extraordinary painting "The Lacemaker" (c.1669-70), one of the Musée du Louvre’s most treasured works, rarely seen outside Paris and now on loan to the UK for the first time.

Complementing this painting are three further works representing the pinnacle of Vermeer’s mature career: A lady at the virginals with a gentleman ‘The Music Lesson’ (c.1662-5) on loan from The Royal Collection; A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (c.1670) from the National Gallery, London; and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (private collection, New York).  Joining these are 28 masterpieces of genre painting from such artists as Cornelis de Bisschop, Gerard ter Borch, Esaias Boursse, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Nicolaes Maes, Cornelis de Man, Eglon van der Neer, Jacob van Ochtervelt, Godfried Schalcken, Jan Steen and Jacobus Vrel. The exhibition is guest curated by Dr Marjorie E. Wieseman, Curator of Dutch Paintings at the National Gallery, London. Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence features works from museums and collections around the world, including the National Gallery, London; The Royal Collection; the Musée du Louvre; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Fitzwilliam Museum was described by the Standing Commission on Museums & Galleries in 1968 as "one of the greatest art collections of the nation and a monument of the first importance". It owes its foundation to Richard, VII Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion who, in 1816, bequeathed to the University of Cambridge his works of art and library, together with funds to house them, to further "the Increase of Learning and other great Objects of that Noble Foundation". Fitzwilliam's bequest included 144 pictures, among them Dutch paintings he inherited through his maternal grandfather and the masterpieces by Titian, Veronese and Palma Vecchio he acquired at the Orléans sales in London. During a lifetime of collecting, he filled more than 500 folio albums with engravings, to form what has been described as "a vast assembly of prints by the most celebrated engravers, with a series of Rembrandt's etchings unsurpassed in England at that time". His library included 130 medieval manuscripts and a collection of autograph music by Handel, Purcell and other composers which has guaranteed the Museum a place of prominence among the music libraries of the world. In 1848 the Founder's Building, designed by George Basevi (1794-1845) and completed after his accidental death by C R Cockerell (1788-1863), opened to the public. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collections have grown by gift, bequest and purchase; their history is a continuous one which traces the history of collecting in this country over the last two hundred years.


If the Museum owed its foundation to a Grand Tourist, it went on to benefit from the shift of taste towards the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance for which the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century was responsible. By the same token, many of the Museum's early twentieth century benefactors may be counted among the heirs to the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements. In recent years, the Museum's traditional base of support from alumni and private collectors has been augmented by generous provision from the National Art Collections Fund and other charitable organisations and public bodies, including H M Treasury (under the provision for the allocation to Museums of works of art accepted in lieu of capital taxes). Today, the Museum pursues a vigorous acquisitions policy as one aspect of its abiding commitment to hold the nation's "treasures in trust". Few museums in the world contain on a single site collections of such variety and depth. Writing in his Foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition for Treasures from the Fitzwilliam which toured the United States in 1989-90, the then Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, wrote that "like the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam addresses the history of culture in terms of the visual forms it has assumed, but it does so from the highly selective point of view of the collector connoisseur. Works of art have been taken into the collection not only for the historical information they reveal, but for their beauty, excellent quality, and rarity... It is a widely held opinion that the Fitzwilliam is the finest small museum in Europe". Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

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