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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chasing Vermeer'
In the classic tradition of E.L. Konigsburgs From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, debut author Blue Balliett introduces readers to another pair of precocious kids on an artful quest full of patterns, puzzles, and the power of blue M&Ms. Eleven year old Petra and Calder may be in the same sixth grade class, but they barely know each other. Its only after a near collision during a museum field trip that they discover their shared worship of art, their teacher Ms. Hussey, and the blue candy that doesnt melt in your hands. Their burgeoning friendship is strengthened when a creative thief steals a valuable Vermeer painting en route to Chicago, their home town. When the thief leaves a trail of public clues via the newspaper, Petra and Calder decide to try and recover the painting themselves. But tracking down the Vermeer isnt easy, as Calder and Petra try to figure out what a set of pentominos (mathematical puzzle pieces), a mysterious book about unexplainable phenomena and a suddenly very nervous Ms. Hussey have to do with a centuries old artwork. When the thief ups the ante by declaring that he or she may very well destroy the painting, the two friends know they have to make the pieces of the puzzle fit before its too late!
Already being heralded as The DaVinci Code for kids, Chasing Vermeer will have middle grade readers scrutinizing art books as they try to solve the mystery along with Calder and Petra. In an added bonus, artist Brett Helquist has also hidden a secret pentomino message in several of the books illustrations for readers to decode. An auspicious and wonderfully satisfying debut that will leave no young detective clueless. --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Delft Masters, Vermeer's Contemporaries: Illusionism Through the Conquest of Light and Space'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Delft Masters, Vermeer's Contemporaries: Illusionism Through the Conquest of Light and Space'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dutch Art and Architecture:1600 to 1800: 1600 to 1800'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue'
There are only 35 known Vermeers extant in the world today. In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland posits the existence of a 36th. The story begins at a private boys' academy in Pennsylvania where, in the wake of a faculty member's unexpected death, math teacher Cornelius Engelbrecht makes a surprising revelation to one of his colleagues. He has, he claims, an authentic Vermeer painting, "a most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rust-colored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window." His colleague, an art teacher, is skeptical and though the technique and subject matter are persuasively Vermeer-like, Engelbrecht can offer no hard evidence--no appraisal, no papers--to support his claim. He says only that his father, "who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment." Eventually it is revealed that Engelbrecht's father was a Nazi in charge of rounding up Dutch Jews for deportation and that the picture was looted from one doomed family's home:
That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We'd almost missed him.By the end of "Love Enough," this first of eight interrelated stories tracing the history of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," the painting's fate at the hands of guilt-riddled Engelbrecht fils is in question. Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the probable destiny of the previous owners, the Vredenburg family of Rotterdam, who take center stage in the powerful "A Night Different From All Other Nights." Vreeland handles this tale with subtlety and restraint, setting it at Passover, the year before the looting, and choosing to focus on the adolescent Hannah Vredenburg's difficult passage into adulthood in the face of an uncertain future. In the next story, "Adagia," she moves even further into the past to sketch "how love builds itself unconsciously ... out of the momentous ordinary" in a tender portrait of a longtime marriage. Back and back Vreeland goes, back through other owners, other histories, to the very inception of the painting in the homely, everyday objects of the Vermeer household--a daughter's glass of milk, a son's shirt in need of buttons, a wife's beloved sewing basket--"the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home." Girl in Hyacinth Blue ends with the painting's subject herself, Vermeer's daughter Magdalena, who first sends the portrait out into the world as payment for a family debt, then sees it again, years later at an auction.
She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.In this final passage, Susan Vreeland might be describing her own masterpiece as well as Vermeer's. --Alix Wilber [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'
With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.
Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss:
I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Johannes Vermeer'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Johannes Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Joven De La Perla/girl With a Pearl Earring'
La joven de la perla centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, La joven de la perla does contain a final delicious twist.
Blurb in Spanish:
En la segunda mitad del siglo XVII, el pintor holandés Johannes Vermeer inmortalizó en una tela a una bella muchacha adornada con un turbante y un pendiente de perla. Sus labios parecen esbozar una sonrisa sensual, pero sus ojos irradian la tristeza más profunda.
Conocido como La Mona Lisa holandesa, detrás de ese enigmático rostro que esconde Griet, una joven de origen humilde que a los dieciséis años entra a trabajar como doncella en casa del artista a cambio de un mísero salario.Su extraordinaria sensibilidad y el cuidado que pone en todo lo que toca atraen al maestro, quien poco a poco la introduce en su mundo, un paraíso inundado por una luz mágica y poblado por criaturas femeninas de singular belleza. La joven de la perla es la historia de una fascinación, de cómo surge un sentimiento que se mueve entre la admiración y el amor. La luz en los ojos de Griet, la sirvienta convertida en musa, encierra el misterio más profundo en el proceso de creación de una obra de arte. Tracy Chevalier evoca la vida cotidiana en el siglo XVII holandés en esta hermosa novela sobre el despertar a la vida y al arte. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Masters of past Time: Dutch and Flemish Painting from Van Eyck to Rembrandt'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Music Lesson'
Patricia Dolan defines herself by her job as an art historian and her identity as an Irish American. When she is 41, the combination of the two proves explosive, leading her to a rough cottage in West Cork. In Ireland she has for company only her own words, one elderly neighbor, and "The Music Lesson," a beautiful Vermeer executed on wood. As she anticipates the arrival of Mickey, her distant relative and lover, Patricia slowly, tantalizingly reveals the events that have led to her isolation. Before Mickey had appeared one day outside her office at New York's Frick Museum, she had become inured to loss and death, a high-functioning depressive. But her 25-year-old third cousin once removed reawakens her. Alas, his interest is both personal and political, and she is soon involved in a plot to kidnap and ransom the Vermeer, property of the Queen. The painting, she tells herself fervently, "is an instrument of magic. Perhaps now it is also an instrument of change, a talisman, the charm that will force powerful people to pay attention and take decisive action at last."
The Music Lesson is far from your everyday, action-packed IRA saga. Instead, Katharine Weber's second novel is very much like the intimate portrait her heroine so lovingly describes--an exquisite miniature in which images, ideas, and deep emotions keep coming out of the woodwork. --Kerry Fried [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting'
From Siri Hustvedt, author of the bestselling novel What I Loved, comes this inspired collection of essays on painting. Here, Hustvedt concentrates her narrative gifts on the works of such masters as Francisco de Goya, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, Gerhard Richter, and Joan Mitchell.
Hustvedt is concerned with the very act of looking and the limitless rewards to be gleaned from sustained, careful attention. Unlike film and books, which progress over time, "Painting is there all at once," she writes, it is only with patience and repeated viewings that elusive meanings present themselves.
Through her own personal experiences, Hustvedt is able to reveal things until now hidden in plain sight: an egg like detail in Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the many hidden self-portraits in Goya's series of drawings, Los Caprichos, as well as in his infamous painting The Third of May. Most importantly, these essays exhibit the passion, thrill, and sheer pleasure of bewilderment a work of art can produceif you simply take the time to look. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Red Hat'
The Red Hat in question in John Bayley's novel is the headgear worn by a young woman in a Vermeer masterpiece; it is also the McGuffin that gets the plot rolling. At the center of Bayley's tale is Nancy Deverell, a rather androgynous young woman who travels from London to the Netherlands with two friends to view the Vermeer exhibition. Nancy's companions are Charles, a gay man, and Chloe, Nancy's best friend and Charles's fiancée. Once at the exhibition, Nancy realizes she could be the twin of the woman in Vermeer's Girl in a Red Hat. Before you can say chapeau, Nancy finds herself involved with a mysterious stranger who might be a secret agent or possibly a bellboy and up to her neck in kidnapping, terrorism, and murder--or maybe not. Bayley, a leading British critic, plays an energetic literary shell game with his characters which may have fans of postmodern fiction clamoring for more. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters'
British painter David Hockney, well known for his cool and lovely paintings of California pools, has taken on the new role of detective. For two years Hockney seriously investigated the painting techniques of the old masters, and like any admirable sleuth, compiled substantial evidence to support his revolutionary theory. Secret Knowledge is the fruit of this labor, an exhaustive treatise in pictures revealing clues that some of the world's most famous painters, Ingres, Velázquez, Caravaggio (just to mention a few) utilized optics and lenses in creating their masterpieces. Hockney's fascination with the subject is contagious, and the book feels almost like a game with each analysis a "How'd they do that?" instead of a whodunit. While some may find the technical revelation a disappointment in terms of the idea of genius, Hockney is quick to point out that the use of optics does not diminish the immensity of artistic achievement. He reminds the reader that a tool is just a tool, and it is still the artist's hand and creative vision that produce a work of art. (296 pages, 460 illustrations, 402 in color.) --J.P. Cohen [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Study of Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
The series has always been highly regarded for its insight and authority, providing an invaluable introduction to key artists and movements in art history. Each volume contains an introductory essay, forty-eight full-page colour plates, accompanied by extensive notes, and numerous comparative illustrations in colour or black and white. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: The Complete Paintings by the Master of Light'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer 1632-1675: Veiled Emotions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: A View of Delft'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer and His Contemporaries'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer and the Delft School'
In recent years, Johannes Vermeer has become established as one of the greatest of all the Old Masters. In Vermeer and the Delft School the renowned curator Walter Liedtke confirms Vermeer's stature, and in the process elegantly recreates the world of Vermeer's adopted home town of Delft. Written to accompany a major exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London, Vermeer and the Delft School brings together eight experts on 17th-century Dutch art to produce a magnificent book that modifies "the popular image of Delft, which seems to be that of a most sweet town with maids pouring milk, sweeping courtyards, and conversing with cavaliers".
Offering a panoramic survey of the history of the town and its art from 1200 to 1700, Leidtke and his contributors suggest, "Delft was a rather small world in the sense that everyone interested in the arts knew everyone else, but at the same time the small world had wide horizons". The idea of a Delft School is meant to be provocative, but the contributors make a convincing case for the town's tradition "of exceptional craftsmanship, of refined and often conservative styles and of sophisticated subject matter and expression---all of which reveal a tendency toward understatement, a certain reserve" among the tapestries, bronze statuary, silver gilt, Delftware, glass and paintings analysed throughout the book. There are fascinating articles on architecture, genre, printmaking, patronage, and collecting that include detailed reassessments of artists like De Hooch, Bramer, Fabritius, Houckgeest and Steen. Sixteen of Vermeer's paintings are beautifully reproduced, and although his work rightly takes centre stage, the 225 colour illustrations reproduced throughout Vermeer and the Delft School show that there was much more to Delft than Vermeer. --Jerry Brotton [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: Faith in Painting'
Through a historical analysis of Vermeer's method of production and a close reading of his work, Daniel Arasse explores the originality of this artist in the context of 17th-century Dutch painting. Arguing that Vermeer was not a painter in the conventional, commercial sense, Arasse suggests that his confrontation with painting represented a very personal and ambitious effort to define a new pictorial practice within the classical tradition of his art. By examining Vermeer's approach to image-making, the author finds that his works demonstrate the concept of painting as a medium through which the viewer senses the presence of life. Not only does this concept of painting carry on the traditions of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, but it also relates to Catholic ideas about spiritual meditation and the power of images. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer In Bosnia: Selected Writings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: The Astronomer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: The Complete Works'
Following the thrilling blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this book presents the complete works of the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Oversize, fullpage colorplates of each of Vermeer's 35 known masterpieces capture the luminosity and the remarkable originality of the paintings and make this the next best thing to actually having attended the sold-out show.
Vermeer's gorgeous interiors and his mastery of light's expressive qualities make the everyday world shine with a jewel-like freshness. Most of his paintings were recently restored, and all have been newly photographed, so the 44 full-color reproductions in this book show their brilliance -- and Vermeer's genius -- to the best advantage. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces'
Philip Steadman's remarkable book Vermeer's Camera cracks an artistic enigma that has haunted art history for centuries. Over the years, artists and art historians have marveled at the extraordinary visual realism of the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. The painter's spectacular View of Delft, painted around 1661, and the beautiful domestic interior The Music Lesson seem almost photographic in their incredible detail and precise perspective. Since the 19th century, experts have speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura, an early precursor of the modern camera. However, conclusive proof was never discovered, until now. In Vermeer's Camera, Steadman proves that Vermeer did indeed use a camera obscura to complete his greatest canvases. Part art-historical study, part scientific argument, but mainly a fascinating detective story, Vermeer's Camera argues:
Vermeer had a camera obscura with a lens at the painting's viewpoint. He used this arrangement to project the scene onto the back wall of the room, which thus served as the camera's screen. He put paper on the wall and traced, perhaps even painted from the projected image. It is because Vermeer traced these images that they are the same size as the paintings themselves.Steadman painstakingly develops his argument through careful study of the history of the camera obscura, an exploration of 17th-century optics, and a detailed study of the light, optics, perspective, and measurement of a series of Vermeer's paintings. He goes to remarkable lengths to reconstruct Vermeer's studio and its furnishings, down to the angle of the light from its windows. The science is complex, but always clearly explained. This is not an attempt to reveal Vermeer as an artistic "cheat." Steadman convincingly argues that "Vermeer's obsessions with light, tonal values, shadow, and colour, for the treatment of which his work is so admired, are very closely bound up with his study of the special qualities of optical images." Vermeer's Camera is a wonderful book that shows the ways in which, during the 17th century, art and science went hand in hand. It offers an enlarged, rather than reduced, perspective on Vermeer. --Jerry Brotton. Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer: La Quieta Dolcezza Di Un Raggio Di Luce'
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