Johannes Vermeer

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A girl turning out of the dark in exotic dress and a turban, an outsized pearl at her ear: not a portrait but a tronie, a study of a head, in The Hague since 1902.

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His home town across the harbour water: gates and bridge, the Nieuwe Kerk spire catching the sun, boats at the quay. It is the only cityscape he left, and one of the pictures he is most known by.

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A kitchen maid pours milk, lost in the work; everything else in the room holds still, and light plays over the surfaces in hundreds of tiny coloured points.

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A painter in elegant costume before a crowned model, the map of the Netherlands on the wall behind them: long read as an allegory of the art itself, and his most intricately constructed picture.

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A woman wrapped in blue, given over to a letter in light from a window we never see; the first Vermeer the Rijksmuseum ever held.

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A scholar in his robe reaches for the celestial globe; science sits for its portrait in a Dutch study, the sitter probably the same man as in the later Geographer, perhaps Antonie van Leeuwenhoek himself.

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Brick, whitewash and cracks made almost touchable, two houses in his home town with women at the doorway and a child on the step.

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A girl given over to her letter in window light; a Cupid hidden for centuries under overpaint came back in the restoration finished in 2021, returning the picture Vermeer meant us to see.

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Before a Last Judgment on the wall, a woman holds a tiny balance perfectly still; the pans are empty, and whether she stands for holiness or for the world has never been settled.

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A pupil at the virginal, her teacher at her shoulder, in a tiled room receding far back; one of the few pictures that stayed in his house until the debts forced its sale, and in the British Royal Collection since 1762.

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Christ at table while Martha serves and Mary sits listening at his feet: his largest canvas and almost the only one on an open religious subject.

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Mercenary love, perhaps in a brothel, painted in 1656 when he was twenty-four: his first genre picture, one of the very few he signed and dated, with a man in a black beret at the right often identified as the painter himself.

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A woman at the keyboard looks straight out at us, an empty chair beside her and a Cupid on the wall behind, as if she waits for a lover.

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Its companion in London and its opposite in mood: a tapestry drawn aside, the window dark, the light falling from in front of the picture onto a woman at the keys, a scene of a procuress and her client on the wall behind her.

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A lady bends over her writing while the maid waits at the window, perhaps to carry the letter to someone unseen; taken from Russborough House twice, and twice got back.

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A soldier in a red hat and a girl laughing across the table, the great map of Holland glowing between them; the perspective may owe something to the camera obscura.

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One hand at the window latch, the other steadying the jug on its platter, a red rug of Asian weave behind her: a whole domestic ritual held in silver and blue.

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A woman raises her glass to us between two men at a sunlit table, the costly ultramarine of the cloth doing quiet work under the merriment.

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Two women and a man making music in a panelled room; carried out of the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and never seen since, likely the most valuable lost painting in the world.