The Disappearnce Of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring | Raiders Pf The Lost Art | Perspective

[Music] the girl with a pearl earring disappeared for hundreds of years but it came back with a bang the growth pearl earring has become an icon of dutch 17th century art it's a very expressive it's a mysterious painting you want to know more you want to know her story over the years there's been a lot of debate as to who the girl with the pearl hearing really is this small portrait has captivated people the world over and draws them into the even greater mystery of the man who painted it johannes vermeer i believe for me is one of the most mysterious artists of the dutch golden age vermeer himself dropped off the radar for 200 years and then you see him in the 19th century coming back he wasn't an artist who was particularly well known [Music] discoveries are still being made about the life of the elusive vermeer and other works from his era are starting to capture the public's imagination every discovery around vermeer is quite amazing we're talking about this tiny little ovary and it's very hard to come up with new facts and new figures and the obsession with vermeer will remain as the fame of the girl with a pearl earring continues to grow [Music] there is a purity about that gaze some private personal engagement with the viewer it's beauty it's enigmatic nature it's intriguing to look at and then the book and then the film i think it made her famous all over the [Music] world [Music] johannes vermeer is now considered one of the greatest artists of the dutch golden age of painting but in his lifetime he never reached the lofty status of his brilliant contemporaries rembrandt was the most important dutch artist of the golden age of course known for his brush strokes and his very inventive artistic minds there were many others and they include franz hal who did fantastic portraits and jan stain who owned an inn and who did rather bawdy pub scenes then you have painters like jakob fun at risdell he was doing new things with landscape so you really had a lot of different artists working in different genres across painting at that time there was an explosion of artists which was quite extraordinary actually vermeer's hometown of delft was producing numerous great artists as it became a focal point in the blossoming dutch republic and although a range of different artistic styles was emerging there was a clear hierarchy in terms of the subject matter of paintings history pieces paintings that are portraying stories from antiquity mythology or the bible were the most important paintings portraits probably came next and then genre paintings of everyday life then you have the landscape genre which is also ruins seascapes they all fit into there and then still life these kind of paintings were maybe not as high as seen by the theorists of the time but collectors really wanted them from the little evidence we have it seems that vermeer experimented with different styles and at first he attempted works that sat at the top of the established hierarchy we have a religious scene of christ in the house with mary and martha and a painting of the goddess diana and her companions but just as he began his career as an artist his hometown of delft was about to change drastically delphi is one of the main towns in the western part of the dutch republic quite an interesting time when you think about developments in scientific and scholarly professions so there was quite a lot going on delft today is not a particularly large city but in vermeer's time it was one of the major towns in the netherlands and it was comparatively wealthy which made it a very good place for artists to be based it had to do with trades there were chambers of the dutch east india company and the west india company so there was trade with asia and america but more importantly it was also an industrious city there was beer being made a different kind of fabrics and of course ceramics along with vermeer another great artist to be based in delft was carol fabricius but he would be killed when the city was devastated on october the 12th 1654 in an event that came to be known as the delft thunderclap the nation's gunpowder artillery was all being kept in the city center it's unbelievable but it's true there was this huge sort of gunpowder explosion quarter of the town was destroyed ferritius died in the studio collapsed while he was working on a painting for that reason we only know a few of his paintings about a dozen of paintings he was only in his early 30s he was really in the prime of his life i'm pretty sure that's fabricious he was so talented or even the most talented student of rembrandt who made this fantastic goldfinch which is also in the margaret's house that he would have been much more known nowadays i think he would have been world famous of course because i think he's a really excellent painter some scholars have suggested that fabricius was the master who trained vermeer but that's not at all certain their styles are quite different it's probably because of a poem that was published some years after fabricious death when it was suggested that vermeer had risen from the flames like phoenix to take over fabricius's role as the leading artist in delft after the shock of the delft thunderclap vermeer seems to have changed his direction as an artist and veered away from history and mythological painting he first moved on to a genre scene called the procureus which may include a self-portrait but with the maid asleep and a girl reading a letter by an open window he found his now quintessential style and many of his paintings from then on featured a single woman often wearing jewelry made from pearls almost all women vermeer painters are wearing pro earrings or pearl necklaces and for that reason of course vermeer is highly associated with pearls pearls were a luxury item and he tended to paint well-to-do ladies and of course visually it adds interest and you have an area of light and reflection a little dot which adds interest to a portrait i think it's really just showing this exotic travelling trading pioneering aspect to society that was really pervading then with this merchant class that took on new new powers and were art collectors and there was a time when people started hanging out in their homes normal people merchants bourgeois classes who had really come to the fore in the dutch republic started using paintings really as decoration and there became a secondary market rather than buying direct from the artist trade was enormous so people had money to spend and the fact that they had money to spend and were from a different starters of society meant that they were also wanting different types of decoration for their homes while vermeer became known for his calm domestic interiors he did also paint some exterior works including a landscape of his hometown of delft and a couple of small paintings of little streets within delft one of this pair of paintings has gone missing and the other has confused researchers for decades as to its exact location until now well something people have wondered about for many many years and there's been some very very detailed studies people looking at brick work people looking at maps and where gardens used to lie and now all of a sudden well we're here with what we believe is quite a conclusive answer an amsterdam art historian a professor made a very important discovery about where the little street was painted the professor found a ledger from the 1860s with tax records about how much house owners on the canals in delft had paid professor kaisenhout went into a part of the archives that no one had ever consulted registers about the maintenance of the canals in delft and the great thing is that these are very very detailed so they mention not only the houses and the width of the houses but also the gates in between houses and apparently there was just one location in delft where you could find two gates next to each other he then looked at the houses in the back of vermeer's painting and they matched up with what was at the back of this street so it does identify for the first time where the painting was done [Music] for me i knew this place his mother lived across the canal his sister was in the neighborhood his aunt lived in that particular house we know that the aunt worked in the tripe trade in the local market and they call it the tripe gate where the the house was is where she cut up and organized the try ready for market so yeah it was really quite a sort of poverty stricken area perhaps he was there sort of analyzing where he came from and his roots i think when you look at the earth of vermeer i mean you see that he made lots of interiors but he only made three townscapes big few on belft two depictions of houses and this is one of them and the other one is gone i mean we do not know where it is looking at this and a new discovery it makes clear that vermeer really looked for places that he knew that which were important to him so it would be interesting to go back to his interior scenes again and try to figure out if we can tell a little bit more about the significance of these locations for him as well vermeer would die suddenly in delft at the age of 43 not far from the location of his little street he would quickly fade into obscurity unlike many other artists of his era but nearly 200 years after his death his name started to re-emerge from the shadows but it would take even longer for his most iconic painting the girl with a pearl earring to be reclaimed by the world in the same year that johannes vermeer was born delft welcomed another of the netherlands most famous sons anthony van luenck the father of microbiology he likely knew vermeer and may have even featured in two of his paintings what we know for certain is that upon vermeer's sudden death van luinook would become executor of his estate but that estate was not worth much of the time and it would be nearly two centuries before the art world began to take another look at vermeer i think a lot of this is because vermeer himself was fairly well known he was well respected in his lifetime but he really just dropped off the map he was only discovered or rediscovered in the late 19th century and especially in the beginning of the 20th century people really tried to reconstruct his earth there's this still this hunger for new information about familia what he did who he was and what he made the girl with the pearl earring is now vermeer's most iconic work but it actually was one of the very last of his paintings to be rediscovered the existence of the painting was unknown for quite a long while in 1881 it was found at an auction in the ache by a collector on arnoldos andres de tomba and before that time nobody knew of the existence of the painting it was sold as an anonymous painting and torrey berger who was the art historian who'd rediscovered vermeer had done so 10 or 20 years earlier and he was dead by this time so he never saw the painting interesting that he didn't see it because actually he was a marvelous marvelous man i think and he was tracking all over the place looking for vermeers and was just so delighted when he discovered vermeer for himself and and was he was astounded that people hadn't really recognized this artist it was seen at the auction or sale by two people who thought it might be a vermeer nobody was interested so the collector could buy the painting for just two gilders and 30 cents that's like euro nowadays so that's nothing even at those times the painting was then cleaned and when they cleaned it the restorer noticed this vermeer signature and it was later accepted by bradys who was regarded as the most important dutch art historian in the late 19th century so it was then added to vermeer's over ever since the now iconic painting was unearthed people have been developing theories as to her identity over the years has been a lot of debate as to who the girl with the pearl pairing really is and some people have suggested that it could be vermeer's eldest daughter who would have been around 12. vermeer had 11 children and the house was full of people it seems it is possible that he would have been looking at his offspring and being able to recycle things that he saw in their young faces it would make sense that it was a family member someone that he didn't have to pay for their time they would sit down in front of him and he would have as long as he wanted but it's impossible to tell we don't know that's the thing with these kind of paintings the girl with the pearl earring isn't a true portrait it's what i called in the 17th century a so-called tony it's a dutch word it just simply means a face or a head it's a representation of a character quite often they have quite sort of vivid characteristics in their face or they're dressed in costume so you might have an elderly woman or a fisherman or someone who was representing something they weren't meant as actual identifiable likenesses of individuals but more like character studies just the face the girl with the pearl earring maintains an enigmatic quality to it even now especially in terms of the clothing that she's wearing everybody thinks that it's just a typical 17th century dutch girl but dutch girls didn't wear the kind of head scarves or a turban like headscarf the girl is wearing artists love painting something like a turban there are foals that you can really show your full artistic genius in showing this item and also it shows a bit of exoticism there was a lot of trade going in and out of holland in the dutch republic you can see the items like this were coming back from afar the dutch ruled the waves you know and they were bringing stuff like beautiful baroque pearl earrings back to their cities the painting is similar to another work by vermeer of a young girl that resides in the metropolitan museum of art in new york but this painting hasn't captured the modern public's imagination in the same way the study of a young girl at metropolitan is very similar to the girl with a pearl earring vermeer probably made that painting some years later than the girl at the mountain's house the young woman at the metropolitan is simply not as good a painting if you look at her her face is rather flat as is the dress that she's wearing it's a different face and the girl with a pearl earring has a much more idolized face which is still very appealing to most people i think people all over the world like to look at her i think she's beautiful a lot of people who visit the maui's house have never heard of the painting in the metropolitan and they are mostly quite amazed that vermeer did more of these throwny kind of paintings it just doesn't leap out with you at the same way it's a veneer but it's not of the same quality the girl with a pearl earring has traveled extensively around the world for over a century as it became more and more famous just like its creator but it's too fragile to continue travelling and will now remain permanently at its home in the newly refurbished moritz house in the hague maritz house has a small but fantastic collection of dutch golden age art the girl with the pearl earring was probably among the half dozen most important in the 20th century but it's rarely only in the last few years it has sort of become the icon it has to do with the impacts the painting has when you look at it it's beauty it's enigmatic nature it's intriguing to look at and that of course is the most important reason for her fame [Music] it is a wonderful image i mean it is very appealing the girl looking out against the dark almost black background we're not quite sure how old she is what she's thinking she was used as the poster girl for a vermeer exhibition at the national gallery in washington i also saw her used as a sort of poster outside the moritz hoose so it's an image that we're used to seeing of course it was tracy chevalier's novel and later film which has really made it even more well known it's just taking the painting and illuminating it and bring it to life with a completely fictional story but i think that's really caught people's imagination and made them wonder more about the works themselves movies and books do attract a lot of extra visitors to the museum and people want to see this this famous face in reality like she is some kind of a superstar from a movie johannes vermeer's legacy reflects that of his most beloved painting lost in the wilderness for centuries but now renowned the world over his paintings have gone from obscure curiosities to some of the most popular works of art in the world and it seems as if this process may also be happening right now to another of delfts artists the tragically short-lived carol fabricious and in particular his painting of a goldfinch it was used on the cover of this donna tartt book that book was the best seller and the painting is implicated in the story words like that in in in culture when people read about it they want to see it it's good for the painting because it's worth it it's a very interesting portrait of just the gold finch it's painted quite simply if you look closely the brush strokes are quite rough in a way and yet fabricious has managed to capture the atmosphere and you really feel it's a real bird that could almost fly off it has another life in the same way that the girl with the pearl earring had their life in books and film as well you know and i'm sure that the tart novel will end up as as a film the goldfinch has a way to go but the girl with the pearl earring has risen so far it's now referred to by some as the mona lisa of the north there are similarities of course between a girl with a pearl earring and a mona lisa in the louvre it has to do with effects on people nowadays looking at those paintings and getting completely intrigued by this mysterious face that's that's looking at them and with the mona lisa of course is the smile and with the girl with the pearl earring she looks at you but but why you want to know what's inside your head so it's this intriguing part that really connects those paintings to each other but also to the public you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 110,685

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, johannes vermeer, art history, art history documentary, history documentary, lost art, johannes vermeer paintings, johannes vermeer girl with a pearl earring, johannes vermeer documentary, iconic paintings, famous painting, vermeer paintings, vermeer, delft netherlands, dutch painting, girl with a pearl earring (artwork), mystery paintings, worlds best paintings

Id: eELs74YImaw

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020