Vermeer and his contemporaries at the Frick

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A small but highly select group of Dutch ‘Golden Age’ masterpieces are currently on loan to New York’s Frick Collection. Victoria Keller reports

An old family friend, an artist, now 85, spent the years of he Second World War with her family in German-occupied Netherlands, specifically in The Hague, where the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis is located.  Every day in the winter, after school – she was a teenager – she would go to  the Mauritshuis, where it was warm, and look at the paintings.  Her favourite picture was The Goldfinch, painted in 1654, a very small, delightful painting (about the size of four postcards) by Carel Fabritius, which is one of 15 paintings from the Mauritshuis currently on display at The Frick Collection in New York until early January 2014.

The most well-known painting in this show, though, isn't The Goldfinch, but Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the title of the publication that accompanies the exhibition.  The exhibition itself is called  ‘Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis’.  Currently, while the museum is undergoing an extensive refurbishment, it sent out a number of paintings on a tour that will finish in Bologna at the Palazzo Fava in the spring of 2014.

The Frick's chosen 15 paintings are not merely a selection of highlights from an important museum, but focus on the subjects that engaged artists' and collectors' during the Dutch Golden Age.  Over the course of the 17th century the Dutch nation became one of the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, dominating international trade and creating a vast colonial empire through naval prowess.  There was money to spend on art and, while the church was no longer a major sponsor of the arts, the Dutch citizenry became enthusiastic purchasers.

There were categories of paintings, some more important than others.  History painting topped the list, with religious subjects such as Rembrandt's Simeon's Song of Praise, belonging to this category.  Many artists aspired to be history painters but a lack of patronage for these subjects often compelled them to undertake portrait painting, for which there was a steady clientele.  The Frick exhibition includes two portraits by Frans Hals as well as Rembrandt's Portrait of an Elderly Man.

Sometimes mistaken for a portrait, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, belongs to a distinctly Dutch category known as the ‘tronie’, which was popularized in the 1630s by Rembrandt and other artists.  Tronies represented stock characters and depicted idealized faces or exaggerated expressions, often with subjects wearing exotic costume, as in this case: a turban and the massive pearl earring. 

There are no Vermeer tronies in the Frick's collection, but it does possess four very beautiful genre scenes by Vermeer, which are hung in a nearby room.   Genre scenes used everyday subject matter to tell stories, such as Gerard ter Borch's Woman Writing a Letter, in which the demure lady has pushed aside a carpet covering the table in order to have a smooth surface on which to write. 

Landscape paintings were first produced as independent subjects in Flanders during the 16th century and the genre flourished during the Golden Age with skilled practitioners such as Jacob van Ruisdael.  View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds splendidly conveys the sun-drenched countryside and the city's valued linen industry, with the imposing Cathedral of Saint Bavo silhouetted against the cloudy sky.  Ruisdael repeatedly depicted his native city from afar, but never within its walls.

The genre of still-life painting occupied many of the Dutch Golden Age painters, among them Carel Fabritius.  The Goldfinch is normally considered part of this genre, though it's likely it was the portrait of a specific little bird, chained to his feed box.  Fabritius studied with Rembrandt and was a contemporary of Vermeer.  When the painting entered the Mauritshuis collection in 1896 it was hung beneath Girl with a Pear Earring, whose beautiful lighting and composed tranquillity The Goldfinch echoes.

To further enhance the exhibition in its US debut, the Frick is showing a contemporary loan from the Mauritshuis, Transforming Still Life Painting, a digital work by British team Rob and Nick Carter.  The work is directly inspired by Ambrodius Bosschaert the Elder's Vase of Flowers in a Window, of about 1618, in the Mauritshuis collection.  The Carters' film literally transforms the genre by animating it.  Over three hours, Bosschaert's image changes gradually before our eyes:  flowers wilt, a fly flies in through the window, a snail climbs up the vase and darkness descends on the distant landscape.

Both the beautifully produced and well-illustrated book and the exhibition are an introduction to Dutch 17th-century painting, as well as to the Mauritshuis itself, the building and the collection.    The book's chapters explain the foundations of Dutch 17th-century painting (a map showing all the towns discussed would have been helpful) and the history of the Mauritshuis, which, a bit like the Frick,  was a grand town mansion. The Mauritshuis was built between 1633 and 1644, very much of a period with many of the paintings in the collection.  Just as the Frick is named after Henry Clay Frick, so the Mauritshuis is named after its first occupant, Johan Maurits.

Further chapters describe the major renovations the Mauritshuis is undergoing, as well as a chapter devoted to conservation and a description of the technical research undertaken at the museum, with examples drawn from the paintings  in the exhibition, such as  Girl with a Pearl Earring, two portraits by Frans Hals, Rembrandt's Simeon's Song of Praise and The Goldfinch.

There is a chapter devoted specifically to Girl with a Pearl Earring, with a description of Vermeer's career  and the development of his style, technical handling and the subjects he chose to paint.  The catalogue at the back handsomely illustrates each of the 35 paintings in the touring show, with very readable texts.

The book and the exhibition do an excellent job at describing the Mauritshuis and The Hague, its home, particularly for those of us who have never visited either the city or the museum. But these paintings, many of them well over 300 years old, still capture our imagination and keep us enthralled, much as The Goldfinch once fascinated a teenage girl, keeping warm on a winter's day during war.

Girl with a Pearl Earring:  Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis, edited by Lea Van der Vinde, with contributions by Quentin Buvelot and othersis published by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Del Monico Books, Prestel, 2013. 144 pp.Fully illustrated, hardcover, $34.95. ISBN 978-3-7913-5225-1