With thanks again to Tiffany and Greg for hosting us in Amsterdam, their massive and special gift as Friends of the Rijksmuseum was to be able to take us both, one at a time, to see perhaps the best art exhibition I for one have ever experienced.

I may not know much about art etc etc etc, but Vermeer (1632-1675) created paintings that stun and inspire with their artistic detail and technical brilliance, using pixels of painted light to build quite extraordinary depth and authenticity.

The show was sold out, definitively, as the Rijksmuseum website puts it, within two days of going on sale, so having given up on the idea, and finding that even tickets to the rest of the museum weren’t available until well into May, it was indeed rather special to be able to swan in with Tiffany.

With tandem Daisy2 parked safely in the back yard, this is therefore a belated individual Vermeer post to share some of what I was able to capture, and give a sense of how powerful the exhibition is for friends unable to see it themselves.

The bread is almost three-dimensional in its plasticity, and the movement of the milk out of Vermeer’s jug, seen up close, stuns. And just strokes of paint and light.

I’ll add a gallery here with captions, as if I write any more actual text I will be in serious danger of revealing just how little I know about art… (Separate blog post coming shortly about Daisy’s travails along the Rhine,)