Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch painter who worked in Delft in the seventeenth century, left only 34 to 37 paintings. The usual explanation is that he painted slowly, perhaps two or three pictures a year across two decades.
The records add a second explanation. Painting was only part of his working life, since he also dealt in other artists' pictures and had a large family to feed.
No document from his lifetime says why the count stayed so small. Every answer has to be rebuilt from scraps of paper: a widow's petition, a French traveler's journal, a bread debt.
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The journal is the oldest of those scraps. In August 1663 a Frenchman named Balthasar de Monconys, who kept a written record of his travels, came to Delft and called on Vermeer. The painter had not a single picture to show him.
Instead Monconys was taken to a baker's shop. There he saw one Vermeer, a picture with a single figure in it, for which six hundred livres had been paid. The livre was the French money he reckoned in, and he thought the price too high for one figure.
A painter with nothing on hand and a baker holding his work hardly fit the image of a slow perfectionist laboring alone over every canvas.
The count nobody can settle
Even the total is uncertain. Counts of Vermeer's paintings today run from 34 to 37, depending on which doubtful pictures are kept, and one small panel of a girl in a wide hat sits right on that line…
What You'll Discover
How fast he really painted.
What else filled his days.
Who bought half of his paintings.
Why a baker held two of them.