Ruth Leon recommends… Secrets Behind ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ – Rijksmuseum
Ruth Leon recommendsSecrets Behind ‘Woman Reading a Letter’ – Rijksmuseum
The Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived and worked in Delft. His work is best known for his tranquil, introverted indoor scenes, his unprecedented use of bright, colorful light and his convincing illusionism.
Some of his most famous works are The Love Letter, The Little Street, The Milkmaid and Woman Reading a Letter all of which are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In this video, unusually, the experts take them off the wall and show how and why they photograph the paintings. They show us how they analyse the photo and what they do with the results.
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum has on display 8,000 objects of art and history, from their total collection of 1 million objects from the years 1200–2000, among which are some masterpieces by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Johannes Vermeer.
I can’t get enough of these short videos showing the “backstage” of the fine art world which highlight the care with which these paintings are preserved and shown. Here the presenters are Pieter Roelofs, Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, Anna Krekeler, one of the Museum’s conservators and Junior Conservator Mitra Almasium who uses a number of very high-tech pieces of equipment to measure the layers of paint which are invisible to the naked eye.
I was in Delft 3 days ago. What a lovely city like Den Haag.
The woman in the picture is actually a soprano who had had quite close encounters with the opera producer and is now being informed she has become less suited to the role of Salome.