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.”
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.)
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. :(
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!?”
And then there’s Toto, who actually have a million hits, but each of them feels like it must be some band’s one-hit wonder, until you find out that it’s another Toto song.
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.”
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.)
Vermeer is definitely famous worldwide. This person just didn’t know him.
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. :(
Any age is a good time to learn anything! Most people stop caring after school and you don’t, and that’s fantastic.
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!?”
And then there’s Toto, who actually have a million hits, but each of them feels like it must be some band’s one-hit wonder, until you find out that it’s another Toto song.
And this is why I love Todd in the Shadows’s One Hit Wonderland.
a-ha and their eleven studio albums have entered the chat
remembering the concert from their farewell tour where I spent 1,5 hours to hear both of their songs.