50 Fun Facts About Vermeer

Which actress played the maid Griet in the 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Scarlett Johansson played Griet opposite Colin Firth's Vermeer; Kate Hudson had been cast first but left the project before filming began.

Which Hague museum holds Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Mauritshuis: a 2018 study there with microscopes and X-ray scans found that Vermeer had given the girl fine eyelashes.

Roughly how many surviving paintings do scholars firmly attribute to Vermeer?

About 35: scholars accept 34 without dispute and argue over a few more. One local patron is thought to have bought so much of his work that his fame barely spread beyond his home town.

What kind of light source lights most of Vermeer's interior scenes?

A window on the left lights nearly all of them; in The Guitar Player he broke the habit and let the light enter from the right.

What object did Vermeer paint out of The Milkmaid, later revealed by X-ray?

A fire basket, a wicker frame set over hot coals for drying clothes, stood where the foot warmer is now; he also painted out a rack of jugs on the wall.

How fast did Vermeer's final collapse kill him?

Under two days: 'in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead', his widow declared, blaming the strain of his failing business.

Which expensive blue pigment did Vermeer use unusually lavishly?

Natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli: where most painters used the costly blue sparingly, he mixed it even into his greys and shadows.

Which novelist wrote the 1999 novel Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Tracy Chevalier got the idea lying in bed one morning, looking at a poster of the painting that had hung in her bedroom since she was 19.

Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but which Dutch type of character study?

Tronie: Rembrandt often used his own face for such character heads, and Vermeer's girl, if anyone sat for her at all, was never named.

Which Vermeer was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990?

The Concert vanished when two men in police uniforms talked their way in, handcuffed the guards and left with 13 works 81 minutes later.

In Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the girl's turban is blue and which other colour?

Yellow: she has wound the turban from two pieces of cloth, one blue and one yellow, and the exotic headdress marks the picture as a costume study, not a likeness.

Which city holds more Vermeer paintings than any other?

New York: the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection together hold more Vermeers than any Dutch city, while Delft, where he painted them, has none.

Which Vienna institution displays The Art of Painting?

Kunsthistorisches Museum: Vermeer kept the picture all his life, and his widow signed it over to her mother to keep it from his creditors.

Which religion is Vermeer thought to have adopted before his 1653 marriage?

Catholicism: his bride's mother is thought to have insisted on it, and the couple later named a son Ignatius, probably after the saint who founded the Jesuits.

What was the name of Vermeer's wife?

Catharina Bolnes was left with eleven children to raise when he died, and petitioned the court for relief from his debts.

In which Belgian city was Vermeer's The Love Letter stolen in 1971?

Brussels: the thief hid in an electrical closet until closing time, cut the canvas from its frame and demanded a ransom for refugees in East Pakistan; he was caught within two weeks.

Which 2013 documentary follows an inventor recreating The Music Lesson with mirrors?

Tim's Vermeer follows Texas inventor Tim Jenison as he rebuilds the painted room and copies it by matching colours in a small mirror; the magician Teller directed.

Which British artist argued in 2001 that Vermeer used optics to compose his pictures?

David Hockney set out the case in his book Secret Knowledge, worked up with physicist Charles Falco: sudden leaps in realism, he argued, came from mirrors and lenses.

Which forger sold fake Vermeers, one of them to Hermann Göring?

Han van Meegeren confessed to forgery to escape a charge of aiding the enemy, then painted a fresh 'Vermeer' in front of witnesses to prove he could.

The Astronomer and The Geographer are both thought to portray which man?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Delft's microscope pioneer, was baptized within days of Vermeer and later handled his estate, though some see little likeness.

Which Paris museum owns The Astronomer?

Louvre: the Nazis seized the painting from the Rothschild family in Paris in 1940; it went back to them after the war and passed to the French state in 1983.

Which French critic's 1866 study revived interest in Vermeer?

Théophile Thoré-Bürger presented Vermeer as an unknown, misjudged genius, though he also credited him with dozens of pictures that scholars have since rejected.

Which painters' guild did Vermeer join in 1653 and later lead?

Guild of Saint Luke: he could not pay the full entrance fee when he joined, yet his fellow painters later elected him headman four times.

What disaster struck Vermeer's home town of Delft in 1654?

A gunpowder explosion: the 'Delft Thunderclap' wrecked a large part of the city and killed Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt's gifted pupil.

Which 1672 crisis ended Vermeer's sales and wrecked his art business?

The Rampjaar, or 'disaster year': France invaded from the south, Münster and Cologne from the east, and with courts, theatres and shops shut, the art market collapsed.

Which nickname did a French critic give Vermeer because so little was known of his life?

The Sphinx of Delft: only a few registers and official documents recorded his life, and nobody even knows who trained him as a painter.

Which museum staged the largest Vermeer exhibition ever held, in 2023?

Rijksmuseum: his few surviving paintings are the prized treasures of their museums and rarely lent, which is why no show had gathered so many before.

Which Vermeer painting did Salvador Dalí copy and pit against a rhinoceros?

The Lacemaker: Dalí saw the curve of a rhinoceros horn in it, painted his own version in 1955 and spent years on a film about the pair that he never finished.

Which country's royal collection has owned Vermeer's The Music Lesson since 1762?

Britain: George III bought it in 1762 with a consul's collection in Venice, and a misread signature kept it under another painter's name until 1866.

What trade did Hendrick van Buyten, who held Vermeer paintings as collateral, follow?

Baker: Hendrick van Buyten later accepted two Vermeers from the widow as security for her unpaid bread bill, promising them back if she paid.

Which optical device do some scholars believe Vermeer used as a painting aid?

Camera obscura: its lens softens sharp lines much as his pictures do, yet no record shows he owned one, and scholars dispute the idea.

In which church was Vermeer buried?

Oude Kerk: the Old Church's foundations gave way as its brick tower rose, which is why it leans about two metres; naval heroes Piet Hein and Maarten Tromp lie there too.

Near which city was Girl with a Pearl Earring hidden in caves during World War II?

Maastricht: the vault in the St Pietersberg tunnels also sheltered Rembrandt's Night Watch, taken off its frame and rolled up on a cylinder.

What colour was the background of Girl with a Pearl Earring originally?

Deep green: Vermeer laid a translucent glaze of indigo and weld over black, and those two plant dyes faded, leaving the dark void we see now.

For roughly how much was Girl with a Pearl Earring bought at auction in 1881?

2 guilders, plus a 30-cent premium: the grimy canvas went unrecognised at a sale in The Hague, and its buyer later left it to the nation in his will.

In Banksy's 2014 Bristol parody of Girl with a Pearl Earring, what stands in for the pearl?

An alarm box: Banksy stencilled the girl around a security alarm already fixed to the wall and called the mural Girl with a Pierced Eardrum.

Which church's sunlit spire did Vermeer shift toward the centre of View of Delft?

Nieuwe Kerk: it holds the tomb of William of Orange, leader of the Dutch revolt, so the spotlit tower is read as a salute to the House of Orange.

A 2021 restoration of Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window uncovered a hidden picture of whom?

Cupid: the god of love had hung on the back wall all along, and restorers removed the overpaint once tests showed another hand had added it after Vermeer.

Which French novelist had a character die in front of View of Delft?

Marcel Proust has his novelist Bergotte fall ill and die in front of the painting, fixated on a 'little patch of yellow wall' he wishes he had written like.

Which wealthy Delft collector is thought to have bought much of Vermeer's output?

Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt backed Vermeer for years; her 1665 will left the painter 500 guilders, the only bequest outside the family.

A Vermeer was stolen twice, in 1974 and 1986, from a country house in which nation?

Ireland: Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid was taken from Russborough House by an IRA gang, then by Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill, and recovered both times.

A 2015 study put Vermeer's aunt in the right-hand house of The Little Street, selling what?

Tripe: the study found the aunt kept herself and her children by selling it, and the alley beside the house was long known as the Penspoort, or Tripe Gate.

The model in Vermeer's The Art of Painting, with laurel crown and trumpet, is usually read as which muse?

Clio, the muse of history: her laurel, trumpet and book match the figure in Cesare Ripa's handbook of emblems, which Dutch painters consulted in translation.

Which painter's forged signature once appeared on The Art of Painting?

Pieter de Hooch's signature was added while Vermeer was little known, so the picture changed hands in 1813 as a de Hooch and kept that label for decades.

Who bought Vermeer's The Art of Painting from an Austrian count in 1940?

Adolf Hitler wanted it for the giant museum he planned in Linz; recovered from a salt mine in 1945, it was never handed back to the Czernin family.

What did close study show about the scales in Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance?

They are empty: she is steadying the scales, not weighing anything, although the picture was long known as Woman Weighing Gold.

Which US museum owns Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance?

National Gallery of Art: Philadelphia tycoon Peter Widener bought the picture in 1911, and it came to the museum with his family's collection in 1942.

Which Dirck van Baburen painting hangs in the background of two Vermeers?

The Procuress, or a copy of it, belonged to Maria Thins, his wife's mother, which is how the brothel scene came to hang behind the figures in two of his pictures.

Which forged 'Vermeer' ended up in Hermann Göring's collection?

Christ with the Adulteress was traced after the war from Göring's hoard back through a dealer to the man who had painted it, who was arrested as a collaborator.

Which Amsterdam family's famous art collection included The Milkmaid until 1908?

Six: the picture entered the family when the collector Lucretia van Winter married into it in 1822, and her descendants sold it in 1908.