The Prettier Mona Lisa
Tokyo has a great many museums and I admit that I am not making as much use of them as I should but I could not miss a substantial part of the Mauritshuis collection being on display in Tokyo including its most famed and priced picture: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.
I was wondering why the Mauritshuis allowed the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to show parts of its collection but the clarification came right at the entrance to the venue where a panel said that the Mauritshuis closed to the public in April this year for 2 years (wow) to undergo restoration and reconstruction. So, the Mauritshuis sent its collection on tour and to celebrate its own reopening, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum won the deal it seems.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s o-bon holidays season in Japan and many companies (as well as the one I work for) had closed the entire or parts of last week. I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum on Tuesday the 14th and Ueno Park, which brims with museums and also the Ueno Zoo, was incredibly crowded despite juicy mid August temperatures of 33 Celsius or so (in the shade of course).
Entering the park there was a giant queue to one of the museums and I thought, hell, if that is the Metropolitan Art Museum I’ll go home again immediately, but luckily the queue was for the Ueno Royal Museum and their Tut Ank Amun exhibition.
Arrived at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum next to Ueno Zoo, I found a sign which happily announced that the waiting time to get into the Mauritshuis exhibition was only 10 minutes. That sounded much more promising indeed, after all the exhibition had already started on the 30th of June.
In contrast to the Tut Ank Amun exhibition, the queue was also inside the acclimatized building and the short wait was easy to handle.
The exhibition spread over three floors starting in the basement and working its way up. Even though the waiting time had been only ten minutes, the crowd was huge and even bigger in front of every picture.
In the basement the exhibition started with the history of the Mauritshuis, then landscapes and seascapes and history paintings. The first floor was devoted to Portraits and Tronies the second floor to Still Lives and Genre Paintings.
The crowd moved agonizingly slowly from picture to picture and was transported from floor to floor via a escalators. The famous Girl with a Pearl Earring had her own room and inside it the crowd split into a queue and a gathering. The queue was for people who wanted to see the Girl from “relatively” close up without further heads in the way but while walking and not stopping in front of the picture. The gathering was behind that first row of passers by and people were allowed to stand there and stare at the Girl as long as they wanted, but always with someone passing between them and the picture.
Even the first row passers by didn’t get closer than a meter. The picture hung behind a balustrade and a sheet of bullet-proof glass which was cleverly integrated into the wall, meaning the picture hung behind it in a flat alcove. The lightning was perfect and the bullet proof glass did not glean and felt as if hardly there. The procession until one got to the picture took about 15 to 20 minutes. After the procession, I sneaked into the gathering in front of it and was as so often happy for my height and did manage quite a good look at the picture.
It is beautifully done, yes. The light composition is perfect and she is very pretty and one does indeed wonder if she was a real model and person or not.
Three other paintings left a deep impression with me too, all of them Rembrandts. Two of them were Rembrandt’s self portraits as a young and old man. I don’t quite understand why the people from the exhibition did not put them directly next to each other but had one painting by Rembrandt “the Laughing Man” in between. It would have been, at least in my opinion, much better to have those two self-portraits right next to each other. The eyes stayed the same, but otherwise quite shocking to see this young, optimistic and cocky face next to the old, tired and puffy one.
The third picture that impressed me much was Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise which is a masterpiece of lighting again.
Despite the throng of people this was an exhibition well worth seeing and it compensates for my disappointment last year, when I was in Amsterdam seeing the VanGogh Museum and the National Museum where there was a postcard of the Girl with a Pearl Earring in the museum’s shop saying “I’m in the Mauritshuis in The Hague”, and I had no time to go there, well, now I didn’t need to 
