‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ coming to Atlanta in 2013

ATLANTA – The High Museum of Art in collaboration with the Mauritshuis, The Hague, will present a major exhibition of Dutch masterworks in 2013, including Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has not been on view in the United States for 15 years and has never been seen in the Southeast. Drawn from the Mauritshuis’s collection, “Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis” will highlight the artistic genius of Dutch Golden Age painters, including Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals and Jan Steen, through the presentation of more than 35 exceptional paintings. Opening in Atlanta on June 22, 2013, the exhibition will remain on view through Sept. 29, 2013.

“For a selection of works from this renowned collection to be shown in the Southeast is a rare and extraordinary opportunity,” said Michael E. Shapiro, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green Jr. director of the High Museum of Art. “Paintings of this caliber are underrepresented in this part of the country and this exhibition will create an opportunity for our community to study and admire these works of art that rarely travel outside of Europe.”

“Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis” will showcase such masters as Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Jacob and Salomon van Ruysdael, Paulus Potter, Meindert Hobbema and Jan van Goyen. Through landscapes and portraits, the exhibition will explore the idea that Dutch artists more readily embraced genre paintings of secular subjects than their southern European contemporaries and focused on capturing commonplace scenes of daily life. Dutch artists not only recorded representations of the domestic interior, still lifes and revelrous crowds, but often imbued these scenes with moral undertones and humorous, sarcastic wit.

Key paintings featured in the exhibition include:

• Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, circa 1665
• Carel Fabritius, Goldfinch, 1654
• Rembrandt van Rijn, “Tronie" of a Man with a Feathered Beret, circa 1635
• Jan Steen, The Way You Hear It, Is The Way You Sing It, circa 1665
• Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, 1670–1675

“Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis” is organized by the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and will premiere at the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Jan. 26, 2013–June 2, 2013). The exhibition will then travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (June 22, 2013–Sept. 29, 2013), and a condensed version will be on view at The Frick Collection, New York (Oct. 22, 2013–Jan. 12, 2014). Before traveling to the United States, the majority of the works will go to Japan, where they will be exhibited first at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and then at the Kobe City Museum, both in 2014.