The Last Vermeer

The day finally came: on November 1st I saw my 35th Vermeer,  which means I've seen all the Vermeers that can be seen, and I've done it in seven years, and before I turn 30.

However, I've hardly been able to do it alone. Huge thanks to my mother for accompanying me on this final trip to Germany and to my father for supporting me through all of my many trips over the years, not to mention Ann and Bryce who have accompanied me on their fair share of viewings as well.

Last year, when we went to Germany with the object of seeing the last six Vermeers needed to round out my collection, we were foiled by the unfortunate occurrence that one of the paintings at the museum in Berlin had been sent to Japan the week before we arrived. In the year and a half since that trip, we tripled check with the museum and my favorite Vermeer resource, Essential Vermeer, to be sure that the painting would in fact be back in Berlin for our quick late autumn jaunt. Thankfully, it was indeed present and accounted for, or I would have been SOL.

I expected that the experience of seeing this one straggler would be rather anticlimactic, and in fact it was. Woman with a Pearl Necklace is not one of Vermeer's stronger or more detailed works. While I normally have no trouble in finding one or two details that captivate me from the beginning, I had to study this one a while to pull out my favorite bits of the painting.

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue_xl/xl_necklace.html

One of the handicaps of this work is the dark cloth in the left foreground. While Vermeer certainly renders this cloth with great skill, it is not as visually interesting as the tapestries in some of his other works like The Geographer, Girl Reading a Letter, or The Music Lesson. Of course the woman's outfit in Pearl Necklace isn't all that interesting either, since it can be seen in four of Vermeer's other paintings. Finally, the stained glass window is at such an acute angle, that it's glass (so richly detailed in many other works) is barely visible.

In the end, I decided that the highlights of Woman with a Pearl Necklace are the luminous reflections in the vessel on the left hand side, just in front of the window, and the coral-colored hair ribbon adorning our woman's coif -- an unexpectedly bright pop of color just off-center, which adds weight and balance to the dichotomy between the woman and the window.