Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition breaks visitor record

The Vermeer exhibition is the most visited exhibition in the history of the Rijksmuseum, reports the Amsterdam museum.

Today is the last day that the collected works of the painter can be seen there. The museum closes at 11 p.m. to give as many visitors as possible the chance to see the exhibition.

Thanks to loans from museums all over the world, more works by the seventeenth-century painter had been brought together than ever before. Of the 37 known works by Vermeer there were 28 on display. This led to a great deal of interest from the Netherlands and abroad.

A total of 650,000 people came to the Rijksmuseum for this. The majority of them came from the Netherlands, but the museum also had many visitors from France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the museum reports today.

Although the Rijksmuseum previously made no statements about the number of visitors, it was already clear that the exhibition would become one of the most popular in the Netherlands. Even before the exhibition opened, 200,000 tickets had been ordered. And on the second day of the exhibition, all tickets were sold.

Due to the great interest, additional tickets were made available in March, but they were also available again in record time sold. The previous visitor record was for the exhibition Late Rembrandt in 2015. Got there in three months 520,698 visitors off. That was 60,000 more than the previous record, held by a Rembrandt exhibition in 1969.

From 7 June to 10 October, six paintings by Vermeer will remain on display in the Rijksmuseum. The girl in the red hat (National Gallery of Art, Washington) en Young woman at the virginal (The Leiden Collection, New York) will then be shown together with the four works by Vermeer from the own collection.

According to the Rijksmuseum, the exhibition has led to more insights into Vermeer’s working process and his life in Delft, among other things. The research into Vermeer’s work will continue even after the exhibition.

The Rijksmuseum will examine the paintings in the coming weeks View of Delft, Let them be Praxedis in Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. All paintings are on loan from other museums. The results of the study will be presented in 2025. Then it will be 350 years since the world famous painter passed away.