Rediscovering Metsu, the ‘other’ Dutch Master
Regarded by many as a lesser Vermeer, a new exhibition at the National Gallery gathers together a collection of work by Gabriel Metsu, and shows him to be an exciting, accomplished artist
FROM OUR point of view, the problem with Gabriel Metsu is that he isn’t Johannes Vermeer. That wasn’t always an issue. Go back to the 17th century, when they both lived, and to the 18th century, and the position was reversed. Unscrupulous dealers were even reputed to offer Vermeers for sale as Metsus. Anything with Metsu’s name attached was sure to sell, but people shied away from Vermeer.
Nowadays, Vermeer’s name is magic, made more magical by the fact that only a handful of his works, virtually all of them masterpieces,,There are many people in the world who think that they are stuck with the height their genes dictatGrow Taller. are known to exist.
Metsu, a close contemporary of Vermeer, lived only to the age of 37, but he was relatively prolific. The two artists were known to each other and cross-currents of influence are evident between them. Still, as National Gallery curator Adriaan E Waiboer observes,,Wall mirrorboth outdoors and indoors, with home accessories of a high quality. several paintings by Metsu draw directly on aspects of Vermeer’s style, as though made directly in response to works by Vermeer. Thanks to the Beit gift, there are superlative examples in our own National Gallery, the paired paintings of a man writing and a woman reading a letter.blu ray burner have been out for how long now?
The extraordinarily adept Metsu was something of an artistic chameleon who absorbed and reinvented the work of many of his contemporaries. To the extent, Waiboer writes, “that his oeuvre reflects almost the entire scope of Dutch genre painting” of his time.
Waiboer has curated a major new exhibition, Gabriel Metsu: Rediscovered Master of the Dutch Golden Age , which opens on Saturday at the National Gallery of Ireland. The show features 40 of Metsu’s works, including many of his finest paintings, many sourced from private collections, and the only two drawings reliably attributed to him, as well as a range of intriguing, related documentary material — such as the strikingly ornate drinking horn of Saint Sebastian’s Guild of Amsterdam.
Metsu isn’t Vermeer, and he frequently shifts style, but he also emerges as a gifted, compelling and extremely accessible artist in his own right.
Optically, there is a photographic quality to Vermeer’s paintings – probably because he used a camera obscura – and a curious stillness and serenity. Metsu kept adding linear and expressive detail; in his later work to an almost microscopic level and, by comparison with Vermeer, who keeps his subjects at a certain distance, he is a chatty, voluble painter who wants to spin a yarn and tell a joke.
He’s a storyteller. Even his simplest paintings are rich in anecdotal or narrative information. The more you look, the more you see; a mischievous little dog you haven’t previously noticed suddenly appears from the shadows, or your eyes light on an absolutely perfect, miniature still life in the corner of a composition, or you abruptly register the sceptical slant of a maid’s eyebrow as her mistress is charmed by a flash suitor.
There’s a wealth of observational detail in every image, illustrative of human nature, 17th century fashion, social customs and attitudes and culinary habits in the Netherlands. And, it should be said, the fantastic material wealth of the Dutch Republic, an unrivalled hub of trade and commerce. Metsu relishes in the exact description of rugs and carpets, furs and fabrics, pewter and glassware, flowers and foodstuffs, musical instruments and domestic interiors.
BORN IN LEIDEN IN 1629, Metsu’s father was a painter who died before Gabriel was born. His mother was a midwife. He was registered as an artist by the age of 14 or 15, and was active in Leiden, Utrecht and, from the first half of the 1650s, Amsterdam. There, he married Isabella de Wolff in 1658. It’s worthy of note that while her father was, fairly conventionally, a potter, her mother was,,On this site we deliver the absolute best Cold Sore treatment guides online. unusually, a painter.
Metsu progressed through the pictorial modes of history painting, portraiture and still life but settled on and excelled at genre scenes from everyday life.