Johannes Vermeer - Works

Works

See also: List of paintings by Johannes Vermeer and Category:Johannes Vermeer

Only three paintings are dated: The Procuress (1656; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), The Astronomer (1668; Musée du Louvre, Paris), and The Geographer (1669; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt).

Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil-on-canvas Procuress (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. After creating his own The Procuress, almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows and grays. Practically all of his surviving works belong to this period; usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a serene sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by a pearly light. Mundane domestic or recreational activities become thereby imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). Vermeer's two townscapes, View of Delft (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and A street in Delft (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), have also been attributed to this period.

A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come The Allegory of Faith (c 1670; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The Love Letter (c 1670; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

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