Vermeer exhibition in the Louvre is ‘victim of its own success’

Opened on 22 February, the show of 12 of Johannes Vermeer’s works at the Louvre in Paris has already been hailed as the Paris museum’s greatest exhibition of the year.

French newspaper Le Figaro said that the exhibition is a ‘victim of its own success,’ with the Louvre imposing time slots to view the paintings for the first time in its history.

When the exhibition opened last Wednesday, a record 9,000 visitors saw it. A maximum of 250 visitors is allowed into the museum’s Napoleon Hall, where the Vermeers are on show, at any one time.

The Milkmaid, which normally hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is the star attraction of the exhibition. Completed in about 1658, the Milkmaid is rarely lent out and was last seen in Paris at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1966.

There are two exhibitions of Dutch art in the Louvre at present – ‘Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting’ and an exhibition drawn from the collection of an American couple Thomas and Daphne Kaplan. Both close on 22 May.

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