1655
oil
canvas
From the collection of National Museum of Western Art
Saint Praxedis is a 1655 oil by Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch Golden Age work, held at National Museum of Western Art.
Saint Praxedis is a painting by Johannes Vermeer. It's an oil painting. The attribution of this work to Vermeer has often been questioned. This painting is believed to be a copy of a work by another artist, Felice Ficherelli, which depicts an early Roman martyr. To learn more about the style and techniques that might be used in this painting, look up the technique of glazing.
Saint Praxedis is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer. This attribution has often been questioned. The painting is believed to be a copy of a work by Felice Ficherelli that depicts the early Roman martyr, Saint Praxedis or Praxedes. In 2014, the auction house Christie's announced that their investigations had established it to be a work by Vermeer. Before a 2023 exhibition of Vermeer's work at the Rijksmuseum, the museum announced it had confirmed the attribution to Vermeer. The painting is believed to be one of Vermeer's earliest surviving works, created in 1655.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The painting depicts the saint squeezing a martyr's blood from a sponge into an ornate vessel. It is closely related to a work by Ficherelli from 1640 to 1645, now in the Collection Fergnani in Ferrara, and is generally assumed to be a copy of it (though see below for an alternative interpretation). The most obvious difference between the two is that there is no crucifix in the Ferrara work. It is Vermeer's only known close copy of another work. This is one of only four dated Vermeer paintings, the others being The Procuress (1656), The Astronomer (1668) and The Geographer (1669). Vermeer's…
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The painting's provenance before the mid-twentieth century is unknown. The collector Jacob Reder bought it at a minor auction house in New York in 1943. It first received significant attention as a possible Vermeer when being shown as a part of an exhibition of Florentine Baroque art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1969. The exhibition catalogue drew attention to the signature "Meer 1655" and Michael Kitson, reviewing the exhibition, suggested it could be a genuine Vermeer on the basis of stylistic similarities to Diana and Her Companions. Following Reder's death (also in…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Johannes Vermeer ( vər-MEER, vər-MAIR, Dutch: ; see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life.
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