Museum goers here in Philadelphia will have a rare opportunity to see a Vermeer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as the painting Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, along with work by Frans Hals and Rembrandt pupil Gerbrand van den Eeckhout will be on loan from the Leiden Collection until March, 2014.

Those of us who live in Philadelphia and love Vermeer have the geographical advantage of being within a few hours travel of twelve of his 36 known works: four in D.C. at the National Gallery and eight in New York (five at the Met and three at the Frick, plus one if you count the current loan of Girl With a Pearl Earring); but it’s rare, if ever, that we get to see one here in town. I haven’t been in to the Museum to visit it yet, maybe this weekend.

Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (as distinguished from A Lady Seated at a Virginal in London’s National Gallery) is one of his smaller works, at less than 10×8″ (25x20xm), and is believed to be one of last he painted. It is also the only Vermeer still in a private collection. There was some controversy about the attribution of this work over the years, but it has now come to be accepted as an authentic Vermeer.

For more on the painting, see the description on the Essential Vermeer website.

Noted portrait painter Nelson Shanks, who I have written about previously, has recently completed a life size group portrait of four female justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The painting, which is titled Four Justices (no, not The Supremes — grin) will hang in the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. for three years before going to the collection of the collectors who commissioned the work.

Dutch landscape painter Meindert Hobbema was a student and apprentice of Jacob van Ruisdael, and initially painted very much in the style of the older master.

There are few records and not much written about Hobbema. He apparently was not very successful in his own time. Records indicate that he worked as a wine gauger for the city of Amsterdam for over forty years, though he continued to produce many paintings.

For a time after his death, Hobbema fell into almost complete obscurity. Many of his paintings in the early style of Van Ruisdael were passed off as Van Ruisdael’s by dealers. His work came into favor in the subsequent 18th and 19th centuries, and was influential on a number of other landscape artists. This 1894 article from Century Magazine by engraver Timothy Cole, makes clear that the shift in valuation of his work was dramatic when it happened.

Hobbema was remarkably productive, given his full time job and the sometimes astonishing level of detail in his work. I can only imagine that he must have worked in a zen-like state for hours on end while of painting the leaves on his intricately detailed trees and shrubs. His paintings were reasonably large, but not dramatically so — usually about 40×60″ (100x145cm).

The detail is such that viewing images of his paintings as small reproductions doesn’t tell you much. I’ve provided some detail crops of the first three images above, and tried to list some of the resources for high-resolution images below. Also, as convenient as images collections like Wikimedia are, you’ll find better color on the sites of the museums listed on Artcyclpedia.

The Hobbema currently on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (above, top with two details), has become a regular must-see on my visits to the museum.

[Suggestion courtesy of Erik Tiemens]