Maria de Knuijt

[6] The van Ruijven family, who lived off the Oude Canal in Delft, were members of the Arminian party in the Dutch Reformed Church.

[9] Besides the paintings, Magdalena's estate included her legacy of a house in Voorstraet, the domain of Spalant, and interest-bearing obligations.

[5] According to curators of a retrospective (10 February 2023 – 4 June 2023) of Vermeer's work at the national museum, Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, de Knuijt was his main patron.

[8][12] De Knuijt began collecting his works around the time that Vermeer started painting portraits of young women.

Vermeer changed his focus to domestic scenes of wealthy women's lives, within de Knuijt's purview.

[4] Vermeer's early predilection for the female figure; the growing market for pleasing images of youthful femininity; the identification of high-class burgher households with women in Dutch paintings of domestic life, and the aesthetic appeal to Vermeer of ordered, sunlit spaces associated with such households; the likely attraction of those subjects to women such as Maria de Knuijt, whose husband set out to build a choice collection of modern subjects painted by living masters associated with Delft: this combination of factors makes Vermeer's attention to women in his art easier to understand.De Knuijt communicated her care and consideration for Vermeer when she bequeathed 500 guilders, then equal to about an annual salary for a craftsman, to him in a testament of 1665.

[15] The series of twenty-one paintings owned by de Knuijt,[b] many now-famous, included Girl with a Pearl Earring.

[i] Determining the provenance of paintings owned by Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, Maria de Knuijt, their daughter Magdalena, and her husband Jacob begins with the list of Vermeer's paintings sold at an auction in 1696, one year after the death of Jacob Dissius and two years after his father's death.

[51] Montias concluded that the majority of the 21 Vermeer paintings in the 1696 auction following Jacob Dissius's death had initially been purchased by Pieter Claesz van Ruijven.

[9] However Broos & Wheelock note that there is no documentary evidence that Pieter van Ruijven bought or owned works by Vermeer and argue that some of the paintings could have been acquired by Dissius, his wife Magdalena, or his father Abraham.

When some of Vermeer's works resurfaced, they were incorrectly attributed to other Dutch artists, such as Pieter de Hooch and Rembrandt.