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Amsterdam: The largest ever retrospective exhibition dedicated to the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer has finally opened in Amsterdam, in an event that brings together a large part of the artist’s paintings in the museum itself.
The exhibition includes famous masterpieces, including “The Milk Wheel” and “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, among 28 paintings on loan from galleries and private collections around the world.
The Rijksmuseum, where the event will be held until June 4, had sold more than 200,000 tickets even before the exhibition opened on Friday, which is unprecedented in the museum’s history.
“Tickets for February and March have been exhausted, while tickets for April are on the way out,” a spokesman for the museum, which had queues at the opening on Friday, told AFP.
Tickets sold out
“We don’t mind standing in line, but I came here to see my favorite painting in the whole world, ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’,” said Athos Millington Ward, 83, from Augustegest, in the western Netherlands.
This painting, one of the most famous in the history of painting, is usually displayed at the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague.
Vermeer did not paint many paintings in his career, numbering close to 35, and little is known about his short life (1632-1675).
The director of the Rijksmuseum, Taco Dibbets, told AFP earlier this week that Vermeer’s paintings are famous for their luminosity and local scenes of Dutch life in the seventeenth century, and the “extreme beauty” in the scenes in which time appears to have stopped.