Let it go with Vermeer, as a blockbuster draws to a close

To become one of the last lucky visitors to the “Vermeer” exhibition, Kristian Markus from Hamburg, Germany, drove for five hours on Saturday to reach the Rijksmuseum before midnight.

Markus, who works in marketing, first stopped in Münster to pick up his mother – the tickets were her Mother’s Day gift – and then drove on for another two hours to Amsterdam.

“I knew it would be a special mood,” he said. “Vermeer’s interiors are a closed world; they’re all private interiors, private stories, and you need a little bit of an intimate feel to get close to it.”

The ‘Vermeer’ exhibition, featuring 27 of the approximately 35 known works of art by the Dutch Golden Age master, is the Rijksmuseum’s most successful exhibition ever in terms of ticket sales.

According to the museum’s press service, the Rijksmuseum sold more than 650,000 tickets to visitors from 113 countries for an exhibition that lasted 16 weeks, starting February 10 and closing on Sundays.

“I dare say we could have sold more than a million tickets,” said Taco Dibbits, the museum’s director. “Everyone was talking about it and there was a huge buzz.”

The show was billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the largest collection of Vermeer’s works in one place, including ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ from the Mauritshuis in The Hague; “Young Woman with a Lute,” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and three paintings from the Frick Collection in New York.

“I seriously think it will never happen again,” Dibbits said Monday. “Vermeers are few and because of their popularity, most museums will have a hard time getting them to travel.”

However, the Rijksmuseum opposed the sale of as many tickets as possible. Dibbits said his intention was to bring visitors “closer to Vermeer” and to allow them to view his works – mostly tranquil domestic scenes – in as intimate a setting as possible. (And as a Rijksmuseum, the Rijksmuseum does not have to earn its income from ticket sales.)

It initially made available 450,000 tickets for the show, which sold out in three days. Museum officials expected a lot of interest, but were surprised by the large number of applications.

Nevertheless, the limited tickets left many Vermeer aficionados disappointed. Some people planned trips to Amsterdam just to see the show before realizing they couldn’t get in.

In response to the demand, the museum quickly tried to find ways to admit more visitors, extending opening hours to 11 p.m. from its normal closing time of 5 p.m. Staff shortages made that difficult. “In the Netherlands, as it is currently in many countries in Europe, it is very difficult to find personnel,” says Dibbits. “We hadn’t filled all the security and front office positions yet.”

In March, the museum was finally able to release another tranche of tickets to meet demand. When that batch of about 200,000 tickets became available online, Dibbits said, the Rijksmuseum’s website crashed.

For the final weekend, museum officials wanted to offer two special evenings to Vermeer aficionados, keeping the doors open until 2 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. “At first we were afraid that people would say that we don’t want to work until 2 am,” says Dibbits. “But people loved the idea.”

The Rijksmuseum offered another 2,300 tickets over the weekend, which were made available via lottery on the museum’s website and advertised on social media.

This is how Marcus Stehlik, a lawyer from Vienna, finally got his tickets. He said he had been trying since January but it was always sold out. “We read about it on Twitter and lucked out,” he said, adding that he and his wife flew in for the weekend, but after spending the day visiting other museums, they nearly slept through their 12:30 a.m. time slot early Sunday morning .

“Honestly, we almost missed it,” he said. “But we’re so glad we didn’t.”

Indeed, at 1 a.m., the museum galleries were much less crowded than during daytime opening hours, when visitors had to climb over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of “The Milkmaid” and “The Geographer.”

Julia Kowalska, a Polish mathematician studying for a PhD in the Netherlands, said it was her ninth visit to the show, and the most relaxed. Kowalska purchased a Friends Pass for the museum, which allowed her to invite a different friend to join her on each visit.

“Now each painting is associated with a different person,” she said. “Now it feels like the end of a chapter of my life. My private life became completely intertwined with Vermeer.”

At 1:37 a.m. on Sunday, security personnel began chasing visitors out of the galleries. The halls began to empty, and stragglers got a moment or two alone with their favorite work.

Later on Sunday, Dibbits said goodbye to the last visitors, an American couple from North Carolina, as the doors closed at 6 p.m.

“I’m still a little bit mourning the departure of the paintings,” he said Monday. “It was an emotional goodbye.”