Johannes Vermeer - Legacy

Legacy

• Upon the rediscovery of Vermeer's work in the 19th century, several prominent Dutch artists, including Simon Duiker, modelled their style on his work.
• In the first volume of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, entitled Swann's Way, the protagonist Charles Swann is said to be working on an extended essay concerning Vermeer's art. In addition, Vermeer's View of Delft features in a pivotal sequence of a later volume, The Captive, in the same work.
• Salvador Dalí, with great admiration for Vermeer, painted his own version of The Lacemaker and pitted large copies of the original against a rhinoceros in some now-famous surrealist experiments. Dali also immortalized the Dutch Master in The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table, 1934.
• Han van Meegeren was a 20th-century Dutch painter who worked in the classical tradition. Motivated by a blend of aesthetic and financial reasons, van Meegeren became a master forger, creating and selling many new 'Vermeers' before being caught and tried.
• A Vermeer painting plays a key part of the dénouement in Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (1953).
• Peter Greenaway's film A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) contains a plot line about an orthopedic surgeon named Van Meegeren who stages highly exact scenes from Vermeer paintings in order to paint copies of them.
• Dutch composer Louis Andriessen based his opera, Writing to Vermeer (1997–98, libretto by Peter Greenaway), on the domestic life of Vermeer.
• Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and the film of the same name (2003) are named after the painting; they present a fictional account of its creation by Vermeer and his relationship with the model. The film was nominated for Oscars in cinematography, art direction, and costume design.
• Susan Vreeland's novel Girl in Hyacinthe Blue follows eight individuals with a relationship to a painting of Vermeer. The novel follows a reverse chronology from the current period to the time of Vermeer.
• The young adult novel Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett centers around the fictitious theft of Vermeer's A Lady Writing.
• Historian Timothy Brook's Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2007) examines six of Vermeer's paintings for evidence of world trade and globalization during the Dutch Golden Age.
• A 2010 Epsom Derby Favourite was named Jan Vermeer.
• The song "No one was like Vermeer" by Bostonian singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman pays tribute to Vermeer's painstaking technique.
• Bob Walkenhorst in his solo album The Beginner wrote a rockabilly song, "Jan Vermeer", which begins with "I wish I could dance like Jan Vermeer!"
• J.P. Smith's novel, The Discovery of Light, deals largely with Vermeer.
• The character of Barney, in Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal, 1999 has a goal to see every Vermeer painting in the world before he dies.