There are wall texts in the Oval Room, where Girl holds court (the 44.5-cm x 39-cm gilt-framed canvas is the only painting in this expansive gallery), with helpful background on the painting's style, restoration, provenance and subject. Viewers are urged to see Henry Clay Frick's three Vermeers in the West Gallery, all genre paintings that have been specially grouped together to form a mini-exhibit to contextualize the showstopper in the other room.
But all of the above, while adding to our understanding of the artist and his work, actually distracts from the main attraction, which ideally should first be experienced on its own — without audio phones or catalogues or side trips to other rooms.
Girl's head, shoulder, garments and accessories stand out against a dark, solid background, which is blackened now but once was translucent green. The effect is rather like the effect of looking at this painting in an otherwise empty room — just as everything is stripped away in the Oval Room so that our attention is laser-focused on Girl, so everything is stripped away in the background of the painting itself so that we zero in on the figure's physiognomy and accoutrements, which signal mercantile wealth and prosperity.
The star attraction of this quiet exhibition is flanked by a riveting side show in the adjacent East Gallery, where there are domestic interiors, a Rembrandt tronie, Frans Hals portraits, a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape, and Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch (1654), a small, realist painting that gives its name to Donna Tartt's new 771-page novel. (The book was released on the same day in October that the Dutch Masters exhibition opened at The Frick.)
Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), The Goldfinch, 1654, Oil on panel, 13 ¼ x 9 in. (33.5 x 22.8 cm). Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague Acquired in 1896.
Fabritius studied with Rembrandt in the 1640s and had a profound influence on fellow Delft-resident Vermeer, who adopted his "pristine lighting and composed tranquility," the curators explain.
Fabritius's bird portrait — an expert rendering of a goldfinch atop its feedbox — is regarded, they write, to be a "masterpiece of trompe l'oeil illusionism," "one of the greatest … of all time." Seen from a distance, it can be mistaken for the real thing. The panel's original function is unclear — perhaps a door in a piece of furniture, or a part of a trompe-l'oeil birdcage with painted bird.
Like Vermeer, Fabritius died prematurely. He was 32 when a gunpowder magazine exploded near his studio in Delft in 1654, the same year he painted Goldfinch. Centuries later, a Mauritshius director placed this mini-masterpiece directly below Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring when the museum acquired it in 1896.
So make that two pop culture sensations at Henry Clay Frick's Gilded Age mansion. Two.
Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, NYC. Admission to this exhibition is timed, with tickets to be purchased in advance. Go to http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/mauritshuis/tickets for further information.
©2013 Val Castronovo for SeniorWomen.com
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