Johannes Vermeer (October 1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period[3] painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life.

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.

[10] 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.

[11] 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 as a part of the Rembrandt and his Age exhibition.

[12] In Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, the connoisseur Charles Swann is depicted as playing a leading role in rediscovering Vermeer.

Brian Howell's novel The Dance of Geometry (2004) narrates four interlinking episodes that centre around the creation of Vermeer's The Music Lesson, dealing with his childhood and courtship of his wife-to-be, a visit by a French traveller who becomes involved in the final stages of the work and its tragic end, a modern copyist's deliberations on the importance of the work in his life, and the final stages of Vermeer's life.

The title essay is a meditation on the relationship between Vermeer's paintings in the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the events being recounted in the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in the same city.

[14] The 2019 film The Last Vermeer, based on the 2008 book The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez, tells the story of Han van Meegeren (played by Guy Pearce), an art maker who swindles millions of dollars from the Nazis, alongside Dutch Resistance fighter Joseph Piller (Claes Bang).

It was directed by Dan Friedkin from a screenplay by John Orloff (under the pen name James McGee), Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby.