Works by Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer worked slowly, probably about three paintings a year, and they are usually rooms in a house with one or two figures, most often women, lit from a window on the left.

Nothing moves in The Milkmaid, from about 1660, except the thin white stream running from her jug into the bowl. Window light breaks into bright dots of paint on the bread crusts and the basket. Vermeer used ultramarine in this picture, a costly blue made from lapis lazuli; no other painter of his century spent it so freely or so early in a career, and he even laid it beneath umber and ochre to shift their tone.

The same things come back from picture to picture. Carved lion heads on a chair stand behind A Lady Writing and beside the arm of the Girl with the Red Hat, and both women wear big pearl drops at their ears. Tiny flecks of white sit on the girl's pearls, lips and nose; some have argued that highlights like these come from the lens of a camera obscura, but the inventory taken after his death lists no lens of any kind. In Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window her face shows faintly in the panes of the open casement, and a large painting of Cupid hangs on the wall behind her.

Only two townscapes by him are known. In View of Delft, of about 1660–61, clouds take up more than half the canvas, the walls and gates across the water lie in shadow, and the sun falls on the roofs and a church tower beyond them.

Sources: Wikipedia, Mauritshuis, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.