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Exposition : “Jacobus Vrel. Enigmatic Forerunner of Vermeer and Rein Dool. Drawings”, Paris, Fondation Custodia, du 17 juin au 17 septembre 2023

This monographic exhibition, the first to be devoted exclusively to the painter, brings together major works kept in the great museums of Amsterdam, Brussels, Detroit, Munich, Vienna, etc., as well as from prestigious private collections. On show also is one of the best-known – and most surprising – genre scenes to be found in the Fondation Custodia: A Seated Woman Looking at a Child through a Window.

At first glance, nothing seems to link Jacobus Vrel to the famous Johannes Vermeer except their initials ‘JV’. Nevertheless, many of their paintings share the same contemplative calm, the central role played by the female figures and, very often, a certain air of mystery. For these reasons, many works by Jacobus Vrel were for a long time attributed to Vermeer. Unfamiliar to the wider public, they have been intriguing and fascinating art historians for more than a century. Who then was this enigmatic seventeenth-century painter?

It was in an attempt to solve the mystery of Jacobus Vrel that an international research project was set up in 2018. Close examination of the archives unfortunately produced no information on the painter’s birthplace, or where he died, nor on his activity.

On the other hand, dendrochronological analysis undertaken for the project (i.e. the dating of the wooden panels on which the paintings are executed) established that Vrel painted his first cityscapes in about 1635 and his interiors in about 1650. This means that he was not a follower of Vermeer, as had long been surmised, but a forerunner.

In order further to highlight the originality of the works of Jacobus Vrel, three galleries in the exhibition are devoted to Dutch contemporaries of the painter who dealt with similar subjects: town views and genre scenes.

Vrel’s street views appear to offer us a glimpse of urban life in seventeenth-century Holland, but they arrest our attention because of their unclassifiable architecture. Vrel is the first painter of the Golden Age to have chosen as his subject views of streets and buildings with no historical or important event in progress. This type of painting was to experience far-reaching developments in the second half of the seventeenth century in the hands of artists such as Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712) or Jan Abrahamsz. Beerstraaten (1622–1666).

With regard to Vrel’s interiors, they are also difficult to fit into the context of Dutch art. These empty rooms – empty apart from the scrap of paper on the floor bearing his signature, bounded by equally empty walls and a window, behind which the pale face of a child looms from the darkness, have no equivalent in the art of his century.

However, in his interiors, Vrel has recourse to a repertoire of subjects already well established in Dutch art. His figures of women cooking, sewing, ministering to the sick or minding children have many parallels. From the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the exhibition presents the magnificent painting by Pieter Janssens, known as Elinga (1623–1682) whose interiors populated with female figures invite the same reverie as those of Vrel.

The graphic arts do not lag behind in the eulogy of daily life offered to posterity by seventeenth-century Dutch artists. On view for example is the drawing from the Rijksmuseum in which a woman seen from behind leans out of a Dutch door, a subject very dear to Vrel. This drawing was attributed to Rembrandt for many years but is nowadays ascribed to Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), one of the master’s brilliant students.

The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the artistic production of the Dutch Golden Age, at the heart of which Jacobus Vrel both fits in and stands out.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it was on show from 16 February to 29 May 2023, and the Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, which was part of the research project.

 

Source


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Fiammetta Campagnoli (9 juillet 2023). Exposition : “Jacobus Vrel. Enigmatic Forerunner of Vermeer and Rein Dool. Drawings”, Paris, Fondation Custodia, du 17 juin au 17 septembre 2023. Collectif d'Historiens de l'Art de la Renaissance. Consulté le 12 novembre 2024 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mp87


Fiammetta Campagnoli

Fiammetta Campagnoli est doctorante en histoire de l'art moderne à l'Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Ses recherches se concentrent sur la perception et sur la réception de la spatialité de l’image mariale au XVe et au XVIe siècle.

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