Every single available ticket to see the Rijksmuseum’s Johannes Vermeer retrospective is already gone, the Amsterdam institution said over the weekend, dashing the hopes of many far and wide who had hoped to see the unprecedented show.
“At the moment there are no more tickets available for Vermeer,” the Rijksmuseum said on Sunday, just two days after the show opened to the public. “To ensure that the public can have a pleasant visit to the exhibition, the number of available tickets is limited.”
But the museum hinted that it would find ways of opening the show to more visitors, writing that it was “working hard to ensure more people have the opportunity to see the exhibition.”
Related Articles
The Vermeer show has been hotly anticipated since it was first announced in 2021, when the Rijksmuseum declared the show the “first and last” retrospective for the artist. There’s good reason for such hyperbolic language, as there has never before been a more comprehensive Vermeer show mounted.
Experts have also closely watched the show for the new research about Vermeer that has emerged as a result. Alongside that scholarship, there have been efforts to review old information about Vermeer, with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC even stripping the Vermeer attribution from one painting in its collection. That work is still presented within the Rijksmuseum show as an authentic Vermeer, however.
The Rijksmuseum’s show has garnered rave reviews. The New York Times’s Jason Farago wrote, “Really, the show is just about perfect: perfectly argued, perfectly paced, as clear and uncontaminated as the light streaming through those Delft windows.” The Guardian critic Adrian Searle awarded the show five stars, writing, “The last big Vermeer show, in The Hague, was a febrile, crowded experience. Here, the art has room to breathe.”