How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..
One of the vistas through which I judge a painting is how much I’d want to see it hanging in my office. Judged in this way, The Astronomer is one of my favorite paintings. For me it would be almost like an apology to any visitors.
“I am sorry and I also wish my office looked like the scene from this Vermeer painting.”
What would I or an astronomer be doing with a globe? That’s anyone’s guess. But I’d look cool. It’s provocative.
The realism and the details of this painting are genuinely incredible. So too is this painting’s history. While it resides now in the Louvre, it was once owned by the Rothschild banking family. During their provenance, it was seized for a few years by the Germans at the onset of WW2 – whereupon they stamped their famous… logo (?) … onto the back in black ink. It is said that this painting was particularly and personally prized by the failed Austrian Painter. Well, he didn’t get to keep it and after it was returned to its actual owners, it was eventually given to the French state and placed at the Louvre, where hopefully it will remain.
I supposed we just need to hope that nobody parks a crane outside the building, next to a window where it is located, and just walks in through a non-ground floor window and takes it.
For more on the painting and its history, let me direct you to more information! (via wiki)
Portrayals of scientists were a favourite topic in 17th-century Dutch painting and Vermeer’s oeuvre includes both this astronomer and the slightly later The Geographer. Both are believed to portray the same man, possibly Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. A 2017 study indicated that the canvas for the two works came from the same bolt of material, confirming their close relationship. It has been proposed that Vermeer used a camera obscura as an aid to reconstruct the geometry of the rooms and the objects in his paintings. Both paintings portray the same room and furniture, slightly rearranged.
The painting shows an astronomer looking at a globe. The astronomer’s profession is shown by the celestial globe (version by Jodocus Hondius) and the book on the table, the 1621 edition of Adriaan Metius‘s Institutiones Astronomicae Geographicae. Symbolically, the volume is open to Book III, a section advising the astronomer to seek “inspiration from God” and the painting on the wall shows the Finding of Moses—Moses may represent knowledge and science (“learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians”). It is notable that a telescope is absent from the scene; Jacob Metius is credited by his brother, Adriaan Metius, as the inventor of the telescope. Art historian Julian Jason Haladyn has suggested that this conveys interiority.
Provenance
1720 catalog listing the work.
The provenance of The Astronomer can be traced back to 27 April 1713, when it was sold at the Rotterdam sale of an unknown collector (possibly Adriaen Paets [nl] or his father, of Rotterdam) together with The Geographer. The presumed buyer was Hendrik Sorgh, whose estate sale held in Amsterdam on 28 March 1720 included both The Astronomer and The Geographer, which were described as ‘Een Astrologist: door Vermeer van Delft, extra puyk‘ (‘An Astrologist by Vermeer of Delft, top-notch’) and ‘Een weerga, van ditto, niet minder‘ (‘Similar by ditto, no less’).
Between 1881 and 1888 it was sold by the Paris art dealer Léon Gauchez to the banker and art collector Alphonse James de Rothschild, after whose death it was inherited by his son, Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild. In 1940 it was seized from his hotel in Paris by the NaziEinsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenbergfür die Besetzten Gebiete after the German invasion of France. A small swastika was stamped on the back in black ink. The painting was returned to the Rothschilds after the war, and was acquired by the French state as giving in payment of inheritance taxes in 1983 and then exhibited at the Louvre since 1983. In 1997, The Astronomer was displayed alongside its pendant piece, The Geographer, for a temporary exhibition first at the Louvre, then later at the Städel Museum. This exhibition was the first time the two pieces had been reunited since their separation in 1797.
The video below is an *excellent* review of the painting:
