Johannes Vermeer died in Delft in December 1675, at 43. His widow said he went from healthy to dead in a day and a half, undone by money worries after a war emptied the Dutch art market.
He was buried in the Old Church on 15 December. He left his wife Catharina and eleven children.
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That day and a half is the only account of his death. No autopsy or diagnosis is recorded, and every later account of his last hours rests on that one sentence. The words come from a petition Catharina filed in 1677, when she needed the court's help with his debts.
I read it as the statement of a witness with a stake, not as a medical record. And one line in it is easy to skip: it names the paintings he could not get rid of, and they were not his own.
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