VERMEER AND THE MAURITSHUIS
Date/Time
Date(s) - May 5, 2023
12:00 pm
Location
Zoom
Online
New York, NY,
Please join us for a special lunchtime webinar with Mauritshuis Paintings Conservator Abbie Vandivere and Senior Curator Quentin Buvelot.
The American Friends of the Mauritshuis is hosting a two-part lecture that delves deep into the work of Johannes Vermeer. With the blockbuster success of the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (on until June 4th) and the unleashing of a veritable “Vermeer-mania,” the Mauritshuis is turning its spotlight towards the artist and his superb paintings. Our iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring has returned to the Mauritshuis from the exhibition, offering us an ideal opportunity to share the results of various projects.
Friday, May 5, 2023, 12:00 – 1:00 pm EST/6:00 – 7:00 pm CET /4:00 pm GMT / 9:00 -10:00 am PST
For details and registration of this free Zoom Webinar, please sign up HERE.
Quentin Buvelot will give a lecture about Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. The museum’s curators secured an unprecedented 28 paintings for this blockbuster exhibition. How does the organization of such an exhibition of world-famous paintings work? What are the newest insights into these works and the artist who created them? And how has this exhibition been received critically, compared to the previous Vermeer blockbuster in Washington and The Hague in 1995-96? Quentin will share his observations on these topics and discuss the installation of the Rijksmuseum show.
Dr. Abbie Vandivere will give a lecture about the recent technical examination of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). In 2018, this painting was the subject of an in-depth scientific examination project, The Girl in the Spotlight. The technical examination was conducted over a 2-week period in front of the museum public. Abbie will present some results of this investigation, focusing on Vermeer’s materials and techniques, and how the painting has changed over time. She will end with new research into how the painting may have looked when it was fresh from Vermeer’s easel.
Quentin Buvelot has been the senior curator of the Mauritshuis, The Hague, since 2008, and has published extensively on Dutch 17th-century art and culture. He has organized numerous exhibitions for the Mauritshuis and elsewhere, including Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals (National Gallery, London). With Desmond Shawe-Taylor, he curated the exhibition Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer, which included Vermeer’s Music Lesson. In 2022 he worked with The Frick Collection on a show in the Mauritshuis, Manhattan Masters, which featured Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. This show was sponsored by the American Friends of the Mauritshuis.
Dr. Abbie Vandivere is a Paintings Conservator at the Mauritshuis, and was Head Researcher for the project The Girl in the Spotlight. She received her PhD in 2013: ‘From the Ground Up: Surface and Sub-surface effects in Early Netherlandish Paintings.’ Before this, she received her postgraduate diploma in Paintings Conservation from the Courtauld Institute in London, and her BA from Princeton University. In 2023, she was a judge on the creative competition reality TV show “De Nieuwe Vermeer” (The New Vermeer).
For more in depth information about the Vermeers in the Mauritshuis, see:
https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/our-collection/our-masters/johannes-vermeer/