CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/15/2023

A new take on Baroque blockbuster, Johannes Vermeer

Painted ca. 1662, Woman with a Water Pitcher is reproduced from Vermeer’s Maps, the Frick Collection’s fascinating new exploration of map renderings in the paintings of the quintessential seventeenth-century Dutch master whose work is currently on view at the Rijksmuseum. Behind the figure in the painting is a print of the Map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands by cartographer and engraver Jodocus Hondius I. This map "was never meant to represent the most detailed or up-to-date topography of the area,” art historian Rozemarijn Landsman writes. "Instead, it is about the idea, the history, or the possibility of a country. Its content, features, and purpose were determined by the context of an ongoing war, immigration, and the formation of the Dutch Republic. Its function is perhaps best understood as symbolic or propagandist rather than practical.”