I Was Vermeer

Hey pals, I don't only have favorite movies and TV shows. I'm like, way cultured, too! Well... I have a favorite painting, anyway. It's called The Girl With The Pearl Earring and it's by Johannes Vermeer. It hangs in a museum in Holland called Mauritshuis (which I've actually been to). It's forbidden to take pictures there, so please take a moment to view a picture of me with the painting.

What a lot of people don't know about Vermeer is that when he was young, his style was much different than what he became famous for, and that there's no appreciable link connecting the early work to his later style. Early on in the last century there was a very talented and inventive artist named Han van Meegeren who created a series of paintings that mixed the two styles and he very successfully passed the paintings off as authentic Vermeers. He became filthy rich, swindled the Nazis and eventually found himself in court trying to prove that he HAD actually forged priceless works of art and become almost limitlessly wealthy selling them. It's a long and tangled story that's a whole lot of fun to read about. 

The book I learned all this from is I Was Vermeer by Frank Wynne. There's a little section of photos in the middle, like you get with some biographies. There are quite a few pictures and they all help to tell the story. The art history is fascinating and the man himself was really an interesting guy with an unbelievable life. I hope you all check it out, and that you love it as much as do. Happy reading!