Vermeer fever doesn’t seem to be abating in Holland, and even the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague bears the title of its beautiful spring exhibition, which focuses on one of the lesser-known Dutch artists of the 17th century, ‘Vrel, the forerunner of Vermeer’. Housed in one of the most impressive historic buildings in the city, the Dutch Museum awaits the return of the The girl with the pearl earring Part of the Rijksmuseum’s “Vermeer” exhibition, has seen fit to broaden Vermeer’s horizons by exhibiting 13 works by Jacobus Vrel from Dutch and foreign collections, such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which loaned two exceptional paintings one of which, “Woman at the Window” (1654), is the artist’s only dated work.
The mystery deepens
If Vermeer is considered ‘the Sphinx of Delft’, we know even less about Jacobus Vrel (c. 1630–c. 1680), but the similarities between the two artists are certainly not small, and several paintings by Vrel have in fact been attributed for a long time to Johannes Vermeer. The two artists represented the same subjects and shared the same initials: JV and the full signatures of Jacobus Vrel were in some cases even transformed into Vermeer’s signatures and some paintings in the exhibition, such as: Street scene with oven on the city wall or Old woman reading with a child behind the windowswere sold as genuine “Vermeer” in the 19th century.
The other Vermeer
As noted, many of the settings in Vrel’s paintings overlap with those typical of Vermeer, often showing a woman standing at a window in a high-ceilinged room or seated by a fireplace. The often unadorned rooms are illuminated by a diluted light, which, in addition to a realistic starting point (the typical Northern European blue-grey light), emits the calm probably desired by a large part of the population, despite the historical-political turbulence of the country in which he lived. These canvases not only represent an intimate escape into private life, but also reveal a slightly unsettling feeling, a subtle tension of waiting for an imminent threat.
clothing and social class
The study of clothing, much more modest than that of Vermeer’s characters, suggests a different socioeconomic class of the painter’s clientele: dark clothing, light-colored cloths, and faces often hidden from the viewer’s view. With these characteristic features, Vrel creates its own world. The perspective, sometimes imperfect, gives the paintings a naïve charm that encourages the viewer to pay closer attention to the details: the broken glass of a window or a small piece of white paper in a corner of the room, very often bearing the painter’s signature, an unmistakable mark . Another characteristic practice of Vrel, but common among other 17th-century Netherlandish painters and portraitists, was to paint several very similar versions of his own work, probably with the aim of simply increasing his own production.
International research on the identity of the painter
But who was Jacobus Vrel? The mystery surrounding the painter’s life and, to a certain extent, his work forced them to join forces and an international research project was launched involving three museums: the Alte Pinakothek, the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich; Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection in Paris and Museum Mauritshuis.
