Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of 28 Vermeers on view at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum - Her, Again?

An unprecedented Vermeer exhibition is the latest “once-in-a-lifetime” retrospective of one of the most famous artists of the Western canon. Here’s why these shows keep coming

- James Tarmy

Johannes Vermeer’s output was so scant that for the past 350 years it’s been almost impossible to exhibit his work at any scale: Each of his about 37 known paintings was thought to be too valuable, too fragile—and, ever since The Concert was stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990, too jealously guarded by its owners—to travel much. Instead, the Dutch baroque master’s exhibitions tend to be padded with work by other artists. This results in shows that Taco Dibbits, general director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, calls “Vermeer ands”: “Vermeer and the Delft School, Vermeer and letter writing.”

But this month, for the first time in its history, the Rijksmuseum opened a show without any qualifications. Running from Feb. 10 to June 4 and titled simply “Vermeer,” its 28 paintings are the largest gathering ever showcased, with loans from around the world. “Museums realized that something like this would never happen again,” Dibbits says.

The thing is, once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions have been happening a lot lately. There was the Louvre’s 2019-20 Leonardo da Vinci show in Paris, which featured more than 160 objects, including 11 out of fewer than 20 acknowledged paintings by the artist; it attracted more than 1 million visitors, shattering records. In 2022 in London, after a Covid delay, the National Gallery opened a massive Raphael exhibition pegged to the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. Its 90 objects included 29 paintings, a tapestry on loan from the Vatican, and two bronze roundels from Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace, never before shown outside of Italy.