Vermeer's Mistress and Maid (Frick Diptych)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Vermeer's Mistress and Maid (Frick Diptych) Details
About the Author James Ivory is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Films produced by his company Merchant Ivory Productions (producer Ismail Merchant and script writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvalar) won six Academy Awards. For his work on Call Me by Your Name (2017), which he wrote and produced, Ivory won awards for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Academy Awards, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Writers Guild of America, the Critics' Choice Awards, and the Scripter Awards, among others.Margaret Iacono is associate research curator at The Frick Collection. Her areas of interest include northern European painting of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and the history of collecting. Most recently she organized Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis (2014), and also served as the Frick coordinator for The Frick Collection: Art Treasures in New York, held at the Mauritshuis, The Hague (2015). Read more
Reviews
This is the second volume of the Frick Collection‘s Diptych Series. Personally I think it succeeded better than the first volume because of James Ivory’s contribution. Mr. Ivory imagines a storyline for the work that is compelling and even referenced other Dutch works. It’s a tale of youthful love and middle-aged regret. His writing is economical and moving.Like the first volume, the critical analysis (here provided by Margaret Iacano) is superb. She provides a background on Vermeer’s life and works, and then focuses on the historical context of the work in relation to Vermeer’s own work AND in relation to other Dutch painters at the time. I was surpringly interested in the brief account of recent x-ray and pigment analysis on the painting viewing it as an artifact, more than as art per se. The final few pages of the essay focused on the fascinating story of how Mr. Frick was able to bring the piece of work into the country from Germany despite the strict prohibitions of the American Trading with the Enemy Act which was still in force at the end of World War I.It’s a wonderful, richly-illustrated volume for the price!