Pratiksha Shome
With 650,000 visitors from 113 countries over the course of its 16-week run, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is describing its Vermeer show as “the most successful in its history.”
The show was the biggest ever devoted to Vermeer and included 28 of his works. Among those pieces were well-known paintings like The Milkmaid and The Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Seven of the 28 pieces, including three from the Frick Collection in New York and others from the National Gallery of Art, which held its own Vermeer mega-exhibition in 1999, had never been on view in the Netherlands.
The Rijksmuseum extended its hours of operation for the exhibition, but claimed to have purposefully capped the number of guests in order to provide “the best experience possible.”
According to a news release from Taco Dibbits, the general director of the Rijiksmuseum, “Vermeer is the artist of peace and intimacy.” “We wanted the guests to take full advantage of it. Only by limiting the number of guests was this made feasible.
Tickets sold out within days of its February debut due to intense public interest. A few days after the exhibition opened, the institution stopped allowing general online purchases. Unreliable eBay postings advertised tickets with a maximum price of $2,724.
Because there were so few available tickets, more than half (55%) of those who attended the Vermeer exhibition were from the Netherlands. France (17%), Germany (16%), the United Kingdom (16%), and the United States (14%) were the top five foreign countries for visits.
The French President Emmanuel Macron on his formal state visit, the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the actors Gillian Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis, and the author of Pachinko Min Jin Lee were notable visitors.
The Rijksmuseum website being frantically checked by thousands of people also helped draw visitors to the show’s website. According to the museum, approximately 800,000 people used the interactive online component, which featured all of the artworks and was narrated by actor Stephen Fry.
The Vermeer catalogue has also sold more than 100,000 copies, “more than any other exhibition catalogue in the history of the Rijksmuseum,” according to the museum’s press office. Irma Bloom, a Dutch graphic artist whose works are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, created the catalogue.
Along with the children’s book Miffy x Vermeer, the Rijksmuseum also released the book Vermeer. Faith, Light, and Reflection by the co-curator of the exhibition and the museum’s head of fine arts, Gregor J. M. Weber. For these two additional books, the museum did not offer sales data, however the latter is currently unavailable online.
Source: ARTnews
