Essential Vermeer
One of the reasons I set up this blog was the hope that visitors would share their links to great art websites I hadn't come across. Sid, a Flemish webmaster despite the English-sounding name, has kindly sent me a link to Essential Vermeer "The Complete Oeuvre of Vermeer in Scale", a gem of a website and most unusual (title link). Its thumbnails are all to scale. The dimensions of Vermeer's paintings are in inches as well as Euro thingies, and it's surprising how small many of his masterpieces are. I've seen only three "in the flesh": A Lady Standing At A Virginal (c. 1670-1673) and A Lady Seated At A Virginal (c. 1670-1675), both in the National Gallery, London, and one of my favourites The Guitar Player (c. 1669-1672) in Kenwood House, London (CLICK). Thanks, Sid.
posted by Unknown @ 5.8.08
15 comments
15 Comments:
You're welcome. I really like the website.
If only they had paintings from different artist too (like Van Gogh, Dali (so people can see how tiny The Persistence of Memory really is), Caravaggio, Rubens, ...), you could even compare paintings from different artist with each other.
I'm glad I found out trough EssentialVermeer.com, that the Girl with the Pearl Earring isn't that big as I imagined. Saves me from a future dissapointment. (like the classic one with the Mona Lisa).
Btw, I'm from Belgium (Flanders), so I'm Flemish. Dutch people are from The Netherlands, though we speak the same language (different accent, like American and English British)
Whoops! Sorry about the "Dutch". Most Brits are clueless about the Low Countries. We think they're all Dutch tulips and windmills. And Flanders is a place in France where World War I was fought! Every year we're told to buy plastic red poppies and remember the fields of Flanders (in France, we assume) where so many British and Commonwealth soldiers died pointlessly.
I'll make the correction.
Greatest of them all, Vermeer (IMHO)
Hi, Lennard
Yup. An absolute master. You'll enjoy that website. Thanks to it I discovered that we have 4 Vermeers in the UK. Three I mentioned. The fourth is in the Royal Collection.
Not about Vermeer, but art in London in general: Two of the exhibitions I've seen in the past week were ones I thought you might find interesting. One is the Hammershoi show at the Royal Academy. The other is of the entries for the Darwin-related art installation at the Museum of Natural History. The first is just tranquil and lovely and I think you'd appreciate the classical elements. The second is fun because you get to look at the work and try to decide who should win and why. There's a fair number of proposals that just make me roll my eyes (and I'm sure one of those will be selected!) but even critiquing those can be enlightening.
I love your blog, by the way.
-A
Hi.
Thanks for the compliment and the info.
The Hammershoi show at the Royal Academy seems to have passed me by. I'll check that out. Sometimes I ignore a show if I can't find a good graphic to illustrate the post.
I'm ahead of you on the Darwin Canopy show. It was won by Tania Kovats with Tree. If you copy and paste Darwin Canopy Chosen into my Blogger search box, you'll find it, complete with graphic.
Great post Ian, the size comparisons is fascinating, how many of us have seen them altogether like that before. Indeed a great service here!
BTW Sid with great respect, there is English and English (American), sorry if we get muddled; but I have found a number of extremely talented Belgian Sculptors who Chris Miller talked about a few months ago. I'll dig them up again soon and do a post on them for you as the have been sadly neglected.
Glad you liked it, Robert. As Sid says, wouldn't it be great to have a few more websites like this, putting the works of the masters into scale? One that always amazes me is the Arnolfini Marriage Group in the National Gallery. So much detail in such a small painting!
If you click on Sid's name, you'll find his website:
www.gotart.be
I'm sure he'll appreciate those Belgian sculptors you mentioned.
Hi Robert - what do you mean with there is English and English (American)? Do you mean the English I speak isn't part of both :)
Thanks for the tip, I'm curious after those sculptors. Did you know that sculpting was an Olympic Discipline until 1920 or so?
I'm seriously thinking of making such a website. It would ask a lot of research but it will be so worth it.
P.S. to Anon.
I've just checked. I previewed the the Hammershøi exhibition on 26 June. (I'd forgotten all about it.) Copy and paste Poetry of Silence into my search box to read it. Thanks anyway. I'm sure I miss loads of interesting exhibitions.
Forgive me Sid for my naughty (English) sense of humour. I can't miss an opportunity to tease my friends over there. I have discovered on a number of occasions just how different my English is to theirs, indeed we have had one or two laughs and had to resort to the English / American dictionary - one here;
http://english2american.com/dictionary/c.html
One word I used was chuffed, harmless word meaning 'very pleased', but not in English (American), if you look it up you will understand why I can't put it in here!
We also say things quite differently; they are two different languages but most of the time we understand each other.
Your English is excellent; typically English, I only have a little French so please forgive me.
Chris Miller has an excellent site which catalogues 20th C figure sculptors. There are a lot of Belgium ones there; see here
http://www.ilovefiguresculpture.com/masters/belgium/belgium.htm
I have some more that do not fit his criteria which I will try and find amongst all my files on disk and post for you.
Great site you have there at gotart.
Thank you Ian.
Another problematic word is "fag." In working-class English English it means a cigarette, in upper-class English English it means a public schoolboy used as a servant, and in US English it means a homosexual. Not a word to be used without due consideration!
Thanks Robert, I'll take a look later (I'm at work now). Thanks for the compliment. I work hard on the website. Going to give it a makeover in September. I doubted a long time whether I should write in Dutch or English, but I can't express myself as good in English as in Dutch and I think it would be a restriction. The disadvantage of writing in Dutch is you have a smaller audience. Only 25 million people speak Dutch, I think and only a few are interested in art. The bright side of all that is the fact that the website is pretty unique.
People from Belgium and the Dutch have the same problem. A lot of words have different connotations. Studying in the Netherlands, I enjoy the diversity. All those differences.
Ian, that reminds me of an A Little Bit of Fry & Larie sketch, where they complain that they can't use the word 'gay' anymore because nowadays, people think you mean poofy. Another word, they say, you can't use anymore without people thinking you mean homosexual. Where is the time you could normally say: Gosh, my garden looks quit homosexual today. But no! Now people think you mean arse-bandit! And that's another word you can't use anymore in a proper English sentence, and so on...
Yes, Sid, gone are the days when lady novelists could describe "gay chintz curtains". Sad loss of a useful English word.
Political correctness drives us crackers over here. What the exponents of this nonsense forget is the political correctness of Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. No matter where it comes from, political correctness is always the enemy of truth and democracy.
Here here (!)
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