9 Facts About Vermeer

Jan Vermeer van Delft only left a handful of paintings to history, and even these tell us little about the man. The scant facts of his existence prompted the 19th-century French critic Theophile Thore to dub him the 'Sphinx of Delft'.

Almost every single one of Vermeer's interior scenes appears to have been made in the same room, with a tiled floor and a window high to the left of the scene. Many of his subjects are clearly modelled by the same person…

One popular, but unproven, theory says that he was using a camera obscura. A darkened room with a pinhole opening, that would project the scene from the brightly lit room - the same principle as in a modern mechanical camera.

The principle of the camera obscura was known at the time, and the Dutch Republic was a centre of research into optics and of lens making, however not all historians are convinced.

On the 12 of October, 1654, disaster struck Delft. A gunpowder store was accidentally ignited, and the resulting explosion devastated the city. Vermeer survived, but the artist Carel Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt, was killed. Egbert van der Poel painted the destruction.

One of the few street scenes by Vermeer depicts the so-called Little Street. For centuries, historians had debated whether this was a real or imagined address. In 2015, researchers checked the detailed tax maps of the city and narrowed down 40-42 Vlamingstraat.

Disaster struck again in 1672. French armies invaded the Dutch Republic, and war broke out with England. The Republic was surrounded, and the economy collapsed. Vermeer's art market crashed, and he died after a short illness. His large family had to sell everything to survive.

Now discover all 36 of Vermeer's paintings exhibited together in Augmented Reality with our Pocket Gallery, Meet Vermeer.