![]() “It has a very subtle tonality,” Verslype said of the work, which was painted in the 1660s. "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter," by Johannes Vermeer. This time around, it’s been in the lab - on and off - for three weeks. Take “Woman in Blue reading a Letter,” which Verslype restored some 10 years ago. It’s as if you are looking over his shoulder and seeing what he’s doing.” “We can really follow him in his way of painting. “We really see the first creative steps of Vermeer,” she says. Rijksmuseum conservator Ige Verslype is thrilled. But the new research also suggests that he could be impulsive, spontaneous and impatient, attacking the canvas quickly with broad brushstrokes in sketches and underpaint. ![]() The conventional wisdom is that Vermeer took his time - perhaps no more than two or three pictures a year, across two decades of painting. There is this complete tranquility, this intimacy.” “Vermeer depicts those moments of intense happiness where time stands still,” Dibbits enthuses. He captures arresting domestic scenes: women reading or writing letters, a housemaid pouring milk, a woman playing a lute, a young girl wearing a pearl earring. Until now, we’ve known Vermeer as a methodical and sublime artist, a magical painter of light and luminous moments of 17th-century Dutch middle-class life. ‘It’s as if you are looking over his shoulder’ Museum scientists and conservators have been delving below Vermeer’s meticulously painted surfaces to examine his underpainting and, in a few cases, below that to his initial sketches. The methods involved are extraordinary: a kind of non-invasive archaeology, with techniques first pioneered by NASA to map minerals on Mars and the Moon. The re-attribution is part of a fascinating and exhaustive Vermeer research project involving not only the Rijksmuseum and National Gallery, but also the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ![]()
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