• Henley DFAS

The Sublime in the Everyday: Vermeer and the Delft school of painting

Leslie Primo
Thursday 20th September 2018
Leslie Primo
This lecture will begin by tracing Vermeer’s origins, his early training and influences and how he came to the genre of painting domestic interiors. We will look at his earliest paintings and how he gradually migrated to the domestic set-piece paintings we know him for today. This lecture will also set Vermeer in the context of contemporaneous Dutch arts and contemporaneous Delft artists and we will see how Vermeer went from being referred to as ‘the excellent and famous Vermeer’ in 1669 to being declared bankrupt towards the end of his life in 1675. Finally this lecture will look at the late 19th century and 20th century revival of Vermeer that became the cult of Vermeer, and why this cult of Vermeer endures to this day.
 
 
Leslie Primo is a graduate in Art History and Renaissance studies.  He is a popular Arts Society lecturer and currently also lectures at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and teaches a variety of art history courses at Imperial College, London amongst others.