Vermeer masterpiece loaned to UK museum for first time | Art and design | The Guardian
It was, Timothy Potts admits, an audacious request to the Louvre: that it lend what is arguably its second most important painting to the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge. But then, "what you don't ask for, you don't get".
The result is the arrival in the UK for the first and possibly only time of Vermeer's enigmatic masterpiece of a young woman at work, The Lacemaker.
Potts, the Fitzwilliam's director, said the Louvre had asked for the loan of the Fitzwilliam's Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia.
"I saw perhaps an opportunity," said Potts. "It was an extremely important exhibition and it would be good for our painting to be part of it. But it was also an opportunity to negotiate a loan from the Louvre that we would never normally be able to achieve. To our delight, the Louvre generously agreed to lend us The Lacemaker."
From that base, a show was created which opens to the public on Wednesday and which delves in thrilling detail into the private world of women in the late 17th-century Dutch republic.
"It is a landmark for the study of Vermeer," said Potts, "and it is a landmark in the history of the Fitzwilliam museum. I have every hope that it will be the most visited exhibition we have ever done."
There are expected to be crowds to a show with four Vermeers – the others are from the Queen, the National gallery and a private collection in New York – as well as 28 other knockout Dutch golden age works by painters including Pieter de Hooch, Samuel van Hoogstraten and Jan Steen. The show is also free, benefiting from sponsorship given precisely because people do not have to pay.
The show explores the late 17th-century Dutch trend of women being painted in domestic interiors, whether they are sewing, getting dressed, peeling apples, scraping parsnips or just looking enigmatically out of the window.
The domestic interior paintings in the show were an "extraordinary phenomenon", said Potts, "which gave rise to some of the most famous and admired paintings in art history".
Not least a painting which Renoir considered the most beautiful of all, which takes pride of place in the Cambridge show. The exhibition's curator, Betsy Wieseman, said she had spent a long time just looking at the painting, "trying to get to the root of its extraordinary beauty and appeal".
The surprisingly small painting is certainly a mystery. "Now matter how close you try and get to her, how intimately you try and connect with her, she denies you that attachment," said Wieseman.
Looking at Vermeer's paintings was like "trying to catch smoke", she added. From a distance they look extremely realistic. Look closely at The Lacemaker and it could be Jackson Pollock who has paint-dribbled those threads of lace.
Other highlights include an extraordinary work by Jacobus Vrel, one of the most curious of any 17th century paintings, said Wieseman – whose day job is as curator of Dutch paintings, 1600-1800, at the National Gallery. Woman at the Window shows just that, a lady seen teetering on her wooden chair, waving at a ghostly child looking in from darkness. It is a strange work from one of the most mysterious Dutch artists. "We don't know when he was born, where he lived, when he died – we just have this body of about 40 paintings from him," said Wieseman.
Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence is at the Fitzwilliam museum, Cambridge, until 15 January
