![]() ![]() From the start, however, the exhibitions were also something of a publicity stunt, about numbers as well as art. What were these Vermeer shows about? In structure, both – especially the one in Boymans – were instructive and exploratory, Hannema and Schmidt-Degener were in search of a spirit of Delft that informed Vermeer’s art, and they placed him, properly, in that environment. Of course it helped that the show ran concurrently with the last weeks of the Rembrandt exhibition, but still… “The exhibition has been admired by 123,000 visitors, including the Royal Family.” In two weeks, then, the Rijksmuseum had twice as many visitors to its Vermeer show as the 61,749 Boymans drew to its own in three months. In all of his thank-you notes to the lenders, after the exhibition closed, Schmidt-Degener wrote (quoting from the one to Lady Beit): Yet, the success was mind-bogglingly phenomenal. The show of forty-one paintings to which the Rijksmuseum gave the title “Vermeer exhibition,” including several from the Rijksmuseum that had not been in Rotterdam, had only six Vermeers, two of them from the Rijksmuseum. The house was packed, with the burgomaster of Amsterdam lending cachet to the event. The change of venue was accomplished in a day, and on the evening of October 21st Dirk Hannema delivered a lecture on Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum, for the Royal Antiquarian Society (Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap, or KOG). It was even given the same title page, changing only the name of the artist, with the dedication to the founding of the Rijksmuseum. In two weeks at most, the Rijksmuseum produced a Vermeer catalogue twinned to the one for the Rembrandt show. Between closing time in Rotterdam on the 20th and the Rijksmuseum opening the next day thirty-five paintings had to be crated, transported to Amsterdam, unpacked and hung. The Rembrandt exhibition was extended to 3 November, and that in Boymans, which was going to be extended to 30 October, was now curtailed to 20 October. The first loan letters went out to the owners on 7 October, for an opening on the 21st! Both museums went into revamp mode and changed their closing dates. He agreed with Hannema that thirty-five of the 140 paintings in the Boymans exhibition would come to Amsterdam for an impromptu Vermeer exhibition to accompany the one on Rembrandt, which was about to close. Using the clout of the Rijksmuseum to force the hand of his successor at Boymans, he finessed an amazing deal. Schmidt-Degener decided to harness some of that glory for his own museum. Vermeer had been a hot-ticket item for years, and Hannema was making a big splash internationally with his show. ![]() (Initially it was supposed to open on the first of June, but the building took longer to finish than anticipated.) The timing had a four-day drop on the Rembrandt exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, with a scheduled opening date of 9 July and a closing on 9 October 1935. Vermeer, his predecessors and followers, especially Carel Fabritius (Barent was also included), Pieter de Hooch and Emanuel de Witte. (A modern landmark, now closed for renovation for the foreseeable future.) This was the first exhibition ever held with the name Vermeer in the title: Vermeer, oorsprong en invloed: Fabritius, de Hooch, de Witte. Now his successor there, Dirk Hannema, was holding a museum-glorifying exhibition of his own, in honor not of an anniversary but of the inauguration itself of a new building. Before coming to the Rijksmuseum in 1921, Schmidt-Degener had been director of the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam. But at the beginning of the month, he got a better idea. Upon opening, it was scheduled to close three months later, on 13 October. He had a Rembrandt exhibition going, which in honor of the museum had opened on 13 July, exactly fifty years after the inaugural ceremonies for the building itself. In the early days of October 1935, the director of the Rijksmuseum, Fritz Schmidt-Degener, was seized with a fit of ambition. ![]() Another reason to be glad that I hadn’t been born yet. ![]() The 1935 exhibition was on view for only 13 days, and drew 123,000 visitors, about nine and a half thousand a day. Some people, like me, find it too crowded. For the 114 days that the present exhibition is running, the Rijksmuseum is admitting 450,000 visitors, about 4,000 a day. The current Vermeer exhibition in the Rijksmuseum is the second one ever to be held there. ![]()
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