About
Photo credit.As of May 16, 2017—1 year, 9 months and 7 days after I started—I have seen all of the Vermeers. It took 15 museums and 7 countries. It was great!
In October 2018 I visited Vermeer's hometown of Deflt!
I'm always searching for BBC history documentaries on YouTube and one day in 2015 I landed on one by Andrew Gahram Dixon on Vermeer in his series The Secret Lives of Artists. I was drawn to Vermeer's story and it was my first real exposure to much of his work.
I really like the calm and architectural quality of his work. I watched and read more on him and as I was going to Amsterdam a month or so later I decided I'd visit the Rijksmuseum and see some of Vermeers work first-hand.
Seeing them first hand really sealed the deal for me. I loved going to a museum on my own, having a reason to push all the other works aside and sit and think about an artist and a few paintings.
Because his known work is so limited it's very possible to see all of the (known) Vermeers—and I decided that I would. Strangely, picking a goal like this has also helped with some anxieties I have. But that's another story. The details about each of my visits to see his work can be found on the visits page.
I'm lucky in that my work and life allows me to travel and within a year I have seen two thirds of his work. Wowowow! My progress on the stats page.
Finally, much of my visits and information has been fueled by the incredibly detailed site, Essential Vermeer. Another great site is the Vermeer page from Artsy. I've read and enjoyed the following books:
- Vermeer (Art and Ideas) by Wayne Franits
- Vermeer at Mauritshuis by Epco Runia (for Mauritshuis)
- Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing by Laura J. Snyder
- The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick
Site
I'm a web developer by day and enjoy making sites—how fun it is to build a simple site! The site's code is open and in a repository on GitHub, of course.
Data
My visits are turned into data for this site with a spreadsheet.
Me
I'm Jessica Lord.
Personal site—jlord.us
Twitter—@jllord
Instagram—#vermeergoals