MADRID, SPAIN.- The Museo del Prado presents today the exhibition “Vermeer and the Dutch Interior,” on view through May 18, 2003. Vermeer and the Dutch Interior is one of the most ambitious exhibitions to be organized by the Museo Nacional del Prado in recent years. It brings together 8 works by the celebrated artist Johannes Vermeer whose notably small output (only 34 paintings are now known) is not represented in any Spanish collection. Amongst the paintings loaned to the Prado is Girl reading a letter at an open window from the Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, a painting that has not traveled at all for about 30 years. The aim of Vermeer and the Dutch Interior is to contribute to a better understanding of the art of Vermeer, whose career is still in many respects enigmatic due to a lack of surviving information and to his very limited oeuvre. The exhibition therefore focuses on the artistic relationships between Vermeer and some of his contemporaries, namely Gerard ter Borch, Gabriel Metsu and Pieter de Hooch. It compares paintings by Vermeer of specific themes (interiors with women, for example) with works by other artists of the same subjects with the intention of revealing how Vermeer’s art differed from that of his contemporaries, and highlighting more clearly its unique nature.
The exhibition is particularly significant given that no museum in the world has more than three paintings by Vermeer, making exhibitions devoted to his work of exceptional interest. Despite the scant presence of works by the great 17th-century Dutch masters in Spanish museums, few exhibitions have been devoted to them in that country. Both facts, together with the remarkable success of two recent exhibitions (Johannes Vermeer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Hague in 1995-1996, and Vermeer and the Delft School, which in 2001 brought a record audience to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), indicate that Vermeer and the Dutch Interior at the Museo Nacional del Prado will attract exceptional interest. In the preparation of the exhibition the Prado has been able to count on the essential collaboration of the leading museums in Europe and the United States who have generously loaned around 40 works of the highest quality. These include some of Vermeer’s most important paintings such as The Art of Painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the Woman weighing Pearls from the National Gallery, Washington, and the Young Woman with a Water Jug from the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The selection of works will allow for an appreciation of the variety within 17th-century Dutch genre painting and the outstanding quality of the individual artists selected.
The exhibition is curated by Alejandro Vergara, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Museo Nacional del Prado.