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[–] 37 points 3 months ago (4 children)

In my usual Wikipedia rabbit hole journey, I came across some lovely paintings the other day. I ended up going through the page of Johannes Vermeer, admiring a bunch of his works. Consider my surprise when I scrolled by a familiar painting, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Although the artist's name didn't ring a bell at first, that painting is famous enough that it stopped me in my tracks. Go figure, he's got all these detailed slice-of-life paintings that give a strong sense of what life was like for an average, middle class, Dutch person in the mid-1600s, and yet the only work of his I'd seen before was that one.

I guess it's kinda like how some musicians can put out multiple albums, yet be forever known as a "one hit wonder" because only one of their songs "made it big."

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I might be a little more informed because I'm Dutch, but Vermeer is fairly well-known, and e.g. The Milkmaid and View of Delft are, I believe, other fairly famous paintings of his (albeit less famous than The Girl with the Pearl Earring).

    Vermeer might have been a pupil of Carel Fabritius, who was a pupil of Rembrandt. The interesting thing about Fabritius is that many of his paintings got destroyed in an explosion (that also killed Fabritius), and only about a dozen remain. Which I think is also mind-blowing: this potential important link between two famous painters might very well himself have produced such wonders, but we'll never know.

    (If you're ever in the area, I would highly recommend a visit to the Mauritshuis in The Hague. And if you like reading, The Goldfinch (referencing the Fabritius painting) by Donna Tartt is the novel that got me into all this in the first place.)

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Vermeer is definitely famous worldwide. This person just didn't know him.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yep, my schools didn't teach art history. I only learned of French impressionalists in school, and that's just because I took French class. Even art classes didn't touch the classics, so I'm learning through my own studies now as an adult. This is what a typical American education system gives us. :(

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I know it's kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are "one hit wonders" in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.

    They'll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they've won you've never heard of, and tours they went on, and you're like "they wrote more than one song!?"

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Wanna have a ton of fun? Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, has a documentary following a guy who sets out in an adventure to prove that Vermeer used a primitive form of camera osbcura to make his paintings so realistic by making a painting himself in the theorized way. It's called Tim's Vermeer and it is incredibly fascinating as an insight into the obsession that Vermeer's work still creates today.

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