Lady Standing at a Virginal

Around thirty-four paintings by Vermeer are known. That is the entire surviving output of a working life, and it tells you most of what you need to know about how he painted.He spent his whole career in Delft, ran an art dealing business inherited from his father, headed the painters’ guild twice, and had eleven surviving children. The pictures were made slowly in a room he used repeatedly, with the same window, the same chairs, the same map on the wall.What he did with light in that room has never really been explained. There is a long argument about whether he used a camera obscura, and it remains an argument.The French invasion of 1672 destroyed the Dutch art market and he died three years later leaving his widow in serious debt. He was then more or less forgotten for two centuries, until a French critic began reattributing his work in the 1860s.