12 Things You Didn't Know About Vermeer

Vermeer the globetrotter

Following Vermeer's rediscovery in the 1800s, more than 250 special exhibitions dedicated to his paintings have been staged all over the globe. His pictures have traveled over a million kilometers, A Lady Writing alone has tallied 250,000 kilometers, about five times the circumference of the earth or half the distance to the moon. Vermeer's own life was different. From what we know he remained quietly in Delft and made just a single trip to Amsterdam, about a 109km bus ride today.

The king of colors

Unlike most Dutch painters Vermeer made lavish use of the coloring substance called natural ultramarine, the most brilliant and revered blue available to painters. Ultramarine paint was made by crushing the semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli to a fine powder and mixing it with walnut oil to form a sticky paste. Raw lapis lazuli was mined in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was the most costly coloring substance of all, and more expensive than gold.

A painter of women


It is often said that Vermeer was a painter of women. He painted 42 women compared to 13 men, which was about four times the average proportion of women to men in European painting of the same era. Not a single one of Vermeer's women have names attached to them. He depicted one particularly handsome women four times and critics believe she may have been his wife, Catharina, as she appears to be pregnant in two paintings.

Pieter van Ruijven was a patron

Unlike the overwhelming number of Dutch painters who toiled ceaselessly to make ends meet amidst the competitive art market, Vermeer was an exception. At the beginning of his career he seems to have engaged in a sort of economic alliance with the well-to-do Delft resident, Pieter van Ruijven. Van Ruijven eventually purchased 20 of his finest pictures, a sizable part of the artist's output. This agreement guaranteed Vermeer a certain economic security and the opportunity to paint however he pleased for a number of years.

Girl with a Pearl Earring was sold for barely anything

Vermeer's most iconic painting was purchased in 1881 for next to nothing. In that year it was offered for sale at an auction house in The Hague as a part of the art collection of a certain Mr. Braams. Victor de Stuers, an important art historian, recognized the exceptional quality of the painting and urged his friend Arnold des Tombe to buy it. In order to not arouse suspicion, De Steurs and De Tombe agreed not to bid against each other. Des Tombe acquired the painting for a mere two guilders, plus the buyer's premium of thirty cents.

The world in a Dutch room


Despite the air of absolute privacy that epitomizes Vermeer's interior scenes, they reveal the artist's links with the world outside and the birth of globalization. He depicted costly carpets imported from Turkey, high-quality earthenware from Germany, and precious porcelain from Italy and China. The stringed instruments represented in four pictures were fabricated in Antwerp. The stiff felt hats worn by some of his male sitters were made from high-quality beaver pelts, thanks to North American trappers. A barely visible pouch of tobacco in one picture brings to mind the same continent again.

The forgotten painter

In an age when there were no photographs, glossy art magazines, or chic art galleries, a painter's fame in Vermeer's time depended on producing a large number of artworks and selling them to influential art collectors based in cultured metropolises. Vermeer had no followers or apprentices to spread his style, and worse, he painted slowly and sold many works to a single collector in the small-town of Delft. So soon after he died, his name was forgotten by all but a few Dutch art experts. Later, some of his finest works were signed with the names of other Dutch painters in order to increase their monetary value.

After nearly two centuries of neglect, Vermeer was rediscovered by the adventurous French art critic and left-wing politician Thoré-Bürger. Thoré was so moved by Vermeer's View of Delft that he spent the rest of his life combing through European art collections, art catalogues, and exploring Dutch archives in the hopes of recovering the artist's lost works and setting straight his biography. Today, all but two paintings by Vermeer have found their way into the world's most prestigious public art collections.