New York’s Frick Museum had a very special visitor recently: The Girl with a Pearl Earring graced its walls. The highly-regarded painting is on loan from the Maurishuis museum in the Netherlands, along with a collection of other paintings from the Mauritshuis, highlighting its collection through a carefully crafted exhibit titled Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, which closed on January 19th.
The Girl with a Pearl Earring was clearly the highlight of the exhibit, displayed by itself in the Frick’s Oval Room and always surrounded by a crowd of people vying for the best spot in order to gaze at the painting firsthand. Prints and reproductions fail to do justice to the actual Girl With a Pearl Earring, a fact that became quite clear when I found myself face to face with Vermeer’s most famous portrait, admiring that certain glow that she had, which I had never noticed before with such force.
Explanatory material displayed in the Oval Room along with the painting shed light on the cleaning process of the painting and what it unveiled. Conservation treatment in 1994 revealed that some of the details of the painting were actually not as Vermeer had intended but rather happened over time. For example, some of the subtle highlighting on the girl’s lip had been overpainted during previous treatments and was finally uncovered so as to present the painting as the artist originally intended it to appear. Another thing that was discovered during treatment was that Vermeer put translucent green paint over a dark underpaint for the background of the painting – this background, however, appears black to us because of the discoloration of the pigments over time.
In the adjacent East Gallery, other paintings from the Dutch Golden Age were displayed, including Nicholas Maes’s Old Lacemaker, Jan Steen’s Girl Eating Oysters and “As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young,” Gerard ter Borch’s Woman Writing a Letter, Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, and four paintings by Rembrandt, including Portrait of an Elderly Man and Susana, a classic Biblical scene from the Book of Daniel. Frans Hals’s Portrait of Aletta Hanemans was particularly attention-grabbing due to the artist’s meticulous attention to detail in his depiction of the lady’s dress, with ornate gold trimmings that contributed a tactile quality to the painting, making the trimmings seem as if they were popping out of the painting.
The Frick, which does not generally experience long lines or waits, found itself crowded to capacity as a result of the exhibit, whose popularity meant that visitors had to wait in line sometimes for hours to purchase a ticket. Timed tickets were instituted in response to the exhibit’s popularity but were quickly sold out online, remaining available only at the museum. However, this did not deter the crowds of people looking to see the famed Girl with a Pearl Earring in person.
Although the considerable crowds and timed tickets detracted from the experience of the exhibit, the exhibit allowed New Yorkers to finally view this impressive collection of Dutch masterpieces, an opportunity that many have been dreaming of for years.