Johannes Vermeer is famous for the quiet rooms he painted in Delft, each lit by a single window, and above all for Girl with a Pearl Earring. Only around three dozen of his paintings survive.
He died in Delft in 1675 and his name faded almost at once. The fame came afterward, in a long climb that began with one French critic and one filthy canvas.
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The Girl is the face that made Vermeer famous. In 1881 she was sold at auction in The Hague for two guilders, plus a thirty-cent commission. The Mauritshuis says the canvas was so dirty and in such poor condition that it was hard to see what it actually was.
The buyer was a collector named Arnoldus des Tombe. His friend and neighbor Victor de Stuers recognized a Vermeer under the grime and agreed not to bid against him. The Mauritshuis puts the price at about thirty euros in today's money.
A picture that cheap belonged to a painter nobody was fighting over. For nearly two centuries after his death, Vermeer had been little more than a name in Delft. So I think the question is less what he painted than who made the world care, and when.
Who pulled Vermeer out of the dust?
A French critic did. Théophile Thoré, who wrote under the name W. Bürger, published his study of Vermeer in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866 and claimed to have rescued the painter from oblivion.
Thoré attributed seventy-four paintings to Vermeer, more than twice the number accepted today. Most of those attributions fell away, but the argument stood: this forgotten painter from Delft belonged beside the greatest names of Dutch painting.
I think that mattered more than any single attribution. Thoré was building a famous painter. Within half a century, museums and collectors were paying for that story.
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