Vermeer Paintings: 24 Art Cards (Dover Postcards) Cards – October 27, 2006

I wish they had these for more artists or styles of art even. There are two reasons I don't give it five stars. 1. Because the paintings are framed with a lot of white. It would have been better to enlarge the pictures and reduce the amount of white around them. 2. The other reason is because the cards are perforated for easy tearing. This makes the edges bumpy and rough and hard to use as flash cards. They should just send them as post cards already cut. It would make for a smoother, cleaner looking edge that is easier to handle.

Although Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was among the most gifted of the Dutch Baroque artists, his (relatively small) output has until recently been ignored by most art critics. Vermeer could depict the way light penetrates a window and find the visual equivalent of total silence; a typical Vermeer shows a solitary female figure perusing a letter or concentrating on a quiet task. (GIRL READING A LETTER AT AN OPEN WINDOW and THE MILKMAID are typical Vermeers; both are featured on the book cover and inside the book.) Twenty-four Vermeers are reproduced as detatchable art cards in VERMEER PAINTINGS. The great Dutchman's now-iconic GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is included, as are an atypical, Bible-themed work (CHRIST IN THE HOUSE OF MARTHA AND MARY) and his only paintings of solitary men, THE GEOGRAPHER and THE ASTRONOMER. Another of the best-known Vermeers, VIEW OF DELFT, looks rather murky as reproduced here, but the other cards are fine and capture Vermeer's talent for capturing sunlight on canvas. Other works in VERMEER PAINTINGS include THE LITTLE STREET, WOMAN WITH A PEARL NECKLACE, THE ART OF PAINTING, THE CONCERT, THE MUSIC LESSON, THE LACEMAKER, and the two "virginals" scenes from Vermeer's last years.

Sadly, the actual paintings don't take up the whole card: there is a lot of white space around the images. Also they are printed quite darkly and you can't really see a lot of the painting features. The printing itself isn't very high quality, not terrible, but not high quality.In some (such as Street in Delft), the color is either off or the print comes from before the painting was cleaned: the card portrays the painting a lot more yellow than it actually is. Finally, and this is a bit odd, the cards are not all the same size. Some are 14.2cm by 10cm and some are 13.5cm by 10cm (I should note that the images ON the cards are only 10.1cm by 8cm), so depending on what your plans are for these, they don't match.All and all, I suppose you get what you pay for.

These cards are not full size. The image only measures 3-1/4 x 3-3/4. Much too small.

wonderful reproductions and useful for any correspondence.

Very nice

Dover produces very good quality art PCs at a good price-point.

This is a very nice selection of Vermeer's paintings with a brief but helpful introduction to him as an artist. The quality of the reproductions was not as clear as other art postcards I have seen.

If you have been to Amsterdam and viewed these paintings, this collection of cards is one you will enjoy viewing at home to bring back those wondrous memories of the breathtaking skill of Vermeer.

Vermeer's body of work is very limited. These cards printed on goo, heavy stock include just about all of them.

Paper is kind of cheap.