The Dutch Are Going Wild for a Reality TV Show Where Artists Compete to Paint Vermeer’s Lost Masterpieces

Fall short to snag tickets to the bought-out, when-in-a-lifetime Johannes Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum? There’s also a new fact collection on Dutch television, in which contestants compete to make paintings that could go for the work of the Golden Age master.

Titled The New Vermeer (De Nieuwe Vermeer in Dutch), the 6-episode series premiered on February 12, two days after the blockbuster museum display, and has been an fast strike. Hosted by Dionne Stax, the pilot episode drew 1.3 million viewers—over 7-and-a-50 {61098da95f7e9566452289a1802d8d1a52c0e4ce3811e4bc55deae57fae5622a} p.c of the nation’s 17 million populace. (The finale will air March 19.)

“This application scores much better than most of the other courses we broadcast — documentaries and drama collection integrated,” Jan Slagter, main government the program’s community, Omroep MAX, instructed the New York Periods. “What’s essential is that it is about artwork and lifestyle, but that it’s designed in a pretty available way.”

The intercontinental excitement about the museum blockbuster is doubtless encouraging Dutch viewers to tune in, as they try to study far more about the artist who is drawing so a lot of worldwide site visitors to the nation.

At the Rijksmuseum, the display unites 28 of Vermeer’s 37 identified extant paintings—the most ever proven alongside one another at one time. An initial batch of 450,000 tickets bought out in fewer than four days, leaving the museum scrambling to fulfill desire.

The program is to release far more tickets on March 6, possibly with prolonged going to hrs or by growing capacity for each individual time slot.

In the meantime, there’s usually The New Vermeer, which every single week troubles two expert to recreate a single of the six known-but-shed Vermeer paintings, together with The Concert, stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the infamous 1990 heist.

Abbie Vandivere, a conservator from the Mauritshuis museum in the Haugue, teaches contestants on The New Vermeer about how Vermeer built his perform. Image by Mark de Blok, courtesy of Omroep MAX.

That piece was very well documented in pictures, but for other lost Vermeers we only have a published description from inventories or auction records.

Making an attempt to appear up with a convincing Vermeer duplicate devoid of figuring out what the primary really looked like is a tall buy, the natural way, but the competition get four months for the challenge.

They also have assist from the series’ specialist judges, Pieter Roelofs, head of painting at the Rijksmuseum, and Abbie Vandivere, a paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. (The latter establishment owns Woman with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer’s most well-known portray.)

A “Second Very little Street” by Titus Meeuws from The New Vermeer. Courtesy of Omroep MAX.

Even though the experienced painters are carrying out their most effective to faithfully replicate Vermeer’s portray approaches and artistic materials as well as interval-acceptable props, a parallel competitors pits 4 contemporary artists from one an additional in the “free category” that aims to channel the Dutch master’s spirit in their own individual design.

That has led to Vermeer-inspired works in all method of unique mediums, like printmaking and stained glass, as perfectly as Lego sculpture and an assemblage manufactured from toys and knickknacks.

In the premiere, painter Nard Kwast bested Maudy Alferink with a canvas of a gentleman washing his palms. The second episode saw artists Titus Meeuws and Kim van den Enden attempt to paint a function that could be Vermeer’s “view of some residences in Delft,” which would be the artist’s third city scene, just after his masterpieces Check out of Delft and The Little Street.

This week, Arjan van Gent and Adrian de Wolf tackled Vermeer’s lacking mythological scene of Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury.

The profitable Vermeer recreations will go on look at at the Mauritshuis, though the judge’s favored modern day-design is effective will go on demonstrate at the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft, the artist’s hometown. (The Mauritshuis is also presently displaying supporter versions of Girl With a Pearl Earring in the “My Female With a Pearl” exhibition by means of June 4.)

You can’t at present view the sequence in the U.S., but the community is streaming a weekly YouTube “Masterclass” from Roelofs and Vandivere with stage-by-phase guidelines on how to how develop your have Vermeer canvas.

There’s also a podcast, in addition an online gallery displaying all the functions from every episode and an possibility for viewers to deliver in their possess get on a vintage Vermeer work to be shared on the collection website.

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