[4] "Almost all his paintings", Hans Koningsberger wrote, "are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women.

Until the 19th century, the only sources of information were a few registers, official documents, and comments by other artists; for this reason, Thoré-Bürger named him "The Sphinx of Delft".

[19] Digna's father, Balthasar Geerts, or Gerrits (born in Antwerp in or around 1573), led an enterprising life in metalworking, and was arrested for counterfeiting.

[27] His painting The Allegory of Faith,[29] made between 1670 and 1672, placed less emphasis on the artists' usual naturalistic concerns and more on symbolic religious applications, including the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Walter Liedtke, in Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests that it was made for a learned and devout Catholic patron, perhaps for his schuilkerk, or "hidden church".

[30] At some point, the couple moved in with Catharina's mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church.

[31] The names of 10 of Vermeer's children are known from wills written by relatives: Maertge, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, and Ignatius.

[36] Pieter van Ruijven and his wife, Maria de Knuijt, were Vermeer's patrons for the better part of the artist's career.

In 2023, Maria de Knuijt was identified by the curators of the 2023 exhibition of Vermeer's works at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as the main patron because of her long-standing and supportive relationship with the artist.

The diplomat and the two French clergymen who accompanied him were sent to Hendrick van Buyten, a baker who had a couple of Vermeer's paintings as collateral.

In 1672, a severe economic downturn known as the Rampjaar struck the Dutch Republic, after French troops led by Louis XIV invaded the country from the south during the Franco-Dutch War.

As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.

[49] In his studio, there were two chairs, two painter's easels, three palettes, 10 canvases, a desk, an oak pull table, a small wooden cupboard with drawers, and "rummage not worthy being itemized".

A local patron named Pieter van Ruijven had purchased much of his output, which kept Vermeer afloat financially but reduced the possibility of his fame spreading.

There is no other 17th-century artist who employed the exorbitantly expensive pigment ultramarine (derived from natural lapis lazuli) either so lavishly or so early in his career.

Even after Vermeer's evident financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in Lady Seated at a Virginal.

His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses.

[56] He is best known for his frequent use of the very expensive ultramarine (The Milkmaid) and also lead-tin-yellow (A Lady Writing a Letter), madder lake (Christ in the House of Martha and Mary), and vermilion.

Of these, seven principal pigments that Vermeer commonly employed are lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, madder lake, green earth, raw umber, and ivory or bone black.

[61] In 2001, British artist David Hockney published the book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which he argued that Vermeer (among other Renaissance and Baroque artists including Hans Holbein and Diego Velázquez) used optics to achieve precise positioning in their compositions, and specifically some combination of curved mirrors, camera obscura, and camera lucida.

He spent the next five years testing his theory by re-creating The Music Lesson himself using these tools, a process captured in the 2013 documentary film Tim's Vermeer.

Neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, in an interview with Jenison, notes that human vision cannot process information about the absolute brightness of a scene.

[65] Another was the addition of several highlights and outlines consistent with matching the effects of chromatic aberration, particularly noticeable in primitive optics.

There is no historical evidence regarding Vermeer's interest in optics, and the detailed inventory of the artist's belongings drawn up after his death includes no camera obscura or any similar device.

[69] Only three Vermeer paintings were dated by the artist: The Procuress (1656; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden); The Astronomer (1668; Musée du Louvre, Paris); and The Geographer (1669; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt).

Mundane domestic or recreational activities are imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g., Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie).

The Delft master's modern rediscovery began about 1860, when German museum director Gustav Waagen saw The Art of Painting in the Czernin gallery in Vienna and recognized the work as a Vermeer, though it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch at that time.

[72] Research by Théophile Thoré-Bürger culminated in the publication of his catalogue raisonné of Vermeer's works in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866.

[76] In the 20th century, Vermeer's admirers included Salvador Dalí, who painted his own version of The Lacemaker (on commission from collector Robert Lehman) and pitted large copies of the original against a rhinoceros in some surrealist experiments.

[77] On the evening of 23 September 1971, a 21-year-old hotel waiter, Mario Pierre Roymans, stole Vermeer's Love Letter from the Fine Arts Palace in Brussels, where it was on loan from the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition Rembrandt and his Age.