Frick’s Vermeers
Reunited
Extended through November 23, 2008
Vermeer — who had become, in 1653, at
the age of twenty-one, a master in the local
Saint Luke’s Guild — left a small body of
work when he died. The artist crafted his
compositions carefully and slowly. It has
been estimated that it took him three to
four months to finish a single picture, and
his entire oeuvre may have consisted of only
about fifty to sixty paintings. At present,
thirty-five or thirty-six works are regarded by
most scholars as autograph Vermeers, while a
few additional pictures are subject to debate
and several others are considered lost. No
drawings or etchings by Vermeer are known.
(By comparison, Rembrandt, who died in
1669 at the age of sixty-three, left a much
larger oeuvre. According to recent scholarship,
250 to 300 of his paintings survive, in
addition to a few hundred prints and an even
larger number of drawings.)
While Vermeer
was a well-respected artist in Delft — he was
named headman of Saint Luke’s Guild in
1662, 1663, 1670, and 1671 — it seems his work
was not known outside his native city. One
reason for this may lie in the fact that a good
number of Vermeer’s paintings, possibly as
many as twenty-one, most likely were concentrated
in one local collection, that of
Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven (1624–1674), a
wealthy art collector and investor, who, it is
thought, bought the works directly from the
artist. Little is known about van Ruijven’s
patronage of Vermeer, but it has been suggested
that he may have helped the artist
gain access to Delft’s circles of discerning
connoisseurs. It also is believed that it was
van Ruijven who was the first owner of the
three paintings by Vermeer now in The Frick
Collection, Girl Interrupted at Her Music (above right), Officer and Laughing Girl (above left), and Mistress and Maid (above center).
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