Every Painting by Johannes Vermeer, Ranked

Girl with a Flute (ca. 1664–67)

Is this painting truly a Vermeer? Over the past year, experts have grown increasingly split on the matter, with the Rijksmuseum coming down in favor of the long-standing attribution. Its owner, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has said that the artist didn’t paint it, however, and that the work “falls short of Vermeer’s standards.” (It is included in the Rijksmuseum’s show regardless.) Whatever the case, the painting pales in comparison with other late-career works by Vermeer that also depict female sitters in domestic settings.

The subject here is posed frontally—a little too frontally, making her seem rather wooden. Compare that with Girl with the Red Hat, which art historians believe features the same sitter, and there’s a world of difference. In that painting, the woman’s face has much more emotion in it, and the tapestry hanging behind her can be made out clearly. The background of Girl with a Flute is much fuzzier, causing the painting to be a lot less striking on the whole.

Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (ca. 1670–72)

There are no bad Vermeer paintings, but there are some that are significantly less impactful than others, and Young Girl Seated at the Virginals, in the Leiden Collection in New York, is certainly among his weaker efforts. While it may bear a resemblance to a similar Vermeer work owned by London’s National Gallery depicting the same subject matter, this is a much starker effort, with few elements beyond a woman, her chair, and her instrument (a keyboard related to the harpsichord). Typically, Vermeer’s paintings with musical instruments hint at a romantic context, but it’s hard to derive much subtext from a work that has so few details, especially for an artist who was so detail-oriented.

And here lies the elephant in the room: The painting’s attribution has been contested across the years, though compelling elements have turned up in recent decades to support the idea that it is indeed a Vermeer. Much of the evidence for both sides of the debate has rested on traces of pigment and pentimenti, or corrections made to the painting, perhaps by someone after Vermeer died. At the Vermeer retrospective in Amsterdam, the painting is labeled a true work by the artist.

Saint Praxedis (1655)

One of only a few Vermeer works with explicitly religious content, Saint Praxedis depicts a Roman Catholic figure known for washing the bodies of martyrs after they were killed by their persecutors. In this depiction a slain man is lying behind her, his head detached from his bleeding body. She wrings a sponge into a vessel while behind her, in the distance, her sister Pudentiana walks by. Vermeer converted to Catholicism just two years before this was painted, and many art historians have seen Saint Praxedis as an expression of the artist’s devotion to his new faith.

But not all agree that the work is by Vermeer, and few even knew about the piece until it was exhibited publicly for the first time, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1969. (It wasn’t until 1986 that the painting was even labeled a Vermeer.) If indeed it is a Vermeer—it is being exhibited at the Rijksmuseum as one—it’s a lesser effort by a great artist.

Girl with a Red Hat (ca. 1664–67)

This work has long confounded scholars for a multitude of reasons, one of which is the fact that it is painted on panel, making it the only known Vermeer painting not on canvas. The image he chose, too, is a bizarre one: a young woman who sits in a chair, not resting against its back, as one might expect, but with her arm crooked over its top and her body turned toward the viewer. This unusual compositional choice has sent art historians down the rabbit hole, particularly because the finials on the chair are facing in the wrong direction, suggesting that the chair is positioned in an impossible way.

The use of panel may have had its benefits: It allowed Vermeer to obtain a glossy, out-of-focus look that can be seen in this woman’s rich blue clothing. The aesthetic here is a little too raw, a little too fuzzy to totally work, but Vermeer would go on to refine it with much better paintings like The Lacemaker, which likewise has a blurry look in portions.

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (ca. 1654–55)

When you imagine a painting by Vermeer, you probably don’t conjure a work like this one—and for good reason, since it lacks the rich detail of later works by him. The narrative scene depicted here, featuring the sisters Mary and Martha hosting a seated Jesus in their home, is borrowed from the Bible. Possibly with the hope of gaining a foothold as an artist, a young Vermeer painted this image in the style of artists who were already successful. Some scholars also posit that he created this painting for Delft’s religious community. He had married Catherina Bolnes a couple of years prior to making this composition and had converted to Catholicism not long before that.

Despite its low ranking here, don’t completely write off Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. The painting displays glimmers of Vermeer’s knack for sharp compositions—note how Jesus’s pointing finger leads the eye toward Mary, away from Martha, who seems too distracted with preparing his food to notice his halo. It also marks an early example of how Vermeer sought to capture women in domestic spaces, albeit largely without much of the visual flair that would later characterize his work. According to its owner, the National Galleries of Scotland, the painting is also largest one Vermeer ever produced, at 62.4 inches wide and 55.7 inches deep.

Diana and Her Nymphs (ca. 1655–56)

This early work may appear jarring for Vermeer fans because it’s so different from the domestic scenes that followed. Made just after the aspiring artist finished his stint at the painters’ guild in Delft, it depicts the ancient Greek goddess Diana surrounded by her nymphs, one of whom washes her feet. The mythological subject matter wasn’t unusual at the time—other artists, including Peter Paul Rubens, depicted the same narrative in more exuberant ways.

It’s not necessarily a count against Vermeer’s Diana and Her Companions that the mood here is much more sedate than in Rubens’s Diana and Her Nymphs on the Hunt, in which a dog stares up adoringly at Diana and a centaur attempts to kiss a nymph without her consent. Yet Vermeer’s painting contains its own pleasant weirdness, thanks to one subtle flourish: the subjects’ garb, which belongs not to ancient Greece but roughly to Vermeer’s own time.

The painting’s unusual lighting—the illumination comes from some unknown source outside the canvas—also injects some strangeness to the scene. For a while, however, the painting looked a lot more conventional. About 20 years ago the Mauritshuis, in The Hague, which holds the work, found that a blue sky that long appeared in the upper right-hand corner was painted onto the canvas after Vermeer’s death. Now restored, his true vision for the painting is once again viewable.

The Guitar Player (ca. 1670–72)

The unusual composition of The Guitar Player distinguishes this painting, both within Vermeer’s output and among other works like it. The woman portrayed here is shown strumming her instrument, smiling as she looks at something outside the canvas. Who, or what, is she gazing at, and why? Although scenes with musical performances were often coded as seduction scenes, there are too few bread crumbs here to assert any solid interpretation.

The Guitar Player ranks below most of Vermeer’s other musically themed works, but it does get points for an odd art-historical footnote that involves the painting. For many years, a nearly identical painting, now owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was thought to be the real thing. Only much later, in 1928, did scholars judge that the Philadelphia work was a copy. The giveaway was the woman’s hairdo, which did not have her dangling curls—but those curls did not go out of style until around a decade after the original Guitar Player was painted, and by then Vermeer was dead. During the run of the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective, the debate about the Philadelphia painting was opened anew.

Girl with a Wine Glass (ca. 1659–61)

This painting, like some of Vermeer’s others, is a seduction scene—an image that was already something like a subgenre in Dutch painting before he took it up. In it, two men are seen in the company of a woman whose smile would seem to indicate some level of inebriation. She holds up her wineglass while one of the men places his hand beneath hers. He may be the one doing the seducing here, but she doesn’t seem entirely invested in his advances: Her gaze meets our own, not his. A second man sits at the rear, looking away from the others.

Could the painting contain a moralizing message? Some scholars have suggested as much, given that the stained-glass window seen near the seated man depicts an allegorized version of Temperance. But Vermeer appears more interested in triangulating the funky power dynamic at play than he does in moving the viewer toward an optimal way of being. Although it contains plenty of intrigue (and some bold uses of madder lake and vermilion), The Girl with a Wine Glasses offers less food for thought than many of his other efforts.

The Procuress (1656)

This crowded composition, with its characters cramped together in a darkened space, has often been treated as unusual for Vermeer, who’s known primarily for focusing on lone female figures in largely vacant homes. Its lascivious setting, a brothel, likewise stands out within the artist’s oeuvre.

Drawing heavily on a painting by Dirck van Baburen that was owned by Vermeer’s mother-in-law, The Procuress belongs to a genre known as “merry company” paintings, in which several people in various degrees of inebriation are shown partying. True to its genre, Vermeer’s revelers appear to be happy and engaged in their own worlds—save for one, who gazes out toward the viewer with a smile. In meeting his eyes, viewers are reminded of their voyeurism, a theme which would only become more prevalent in later works by Vermeer. Yet for all the drinking and erotic potential, there’s little that makes this painting as electric as it ought to be.

Study of a Young Woman (ca. 1664–67)

Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, this painting is what was known as a tronie, a portrait of a stock character. Works like it, common during the 17th century, were meant less as portraits of individuals and more as examples of an artist’s excellence. Accordingly, its look is similar to that of Girl with a Pearl Earring, even if the execution is very different. (Some have suggested that the two works were once paired, given that they have so many similarities.)

The girl is shown in a dark, vacant space, and light seems to unnaturally illuminate her face. While the whites of her eyes sparkle, as they do in Girl with a Pearl Earring, the lighting is more muted and less pronounced. Adding to this softness is her pale blue drape, which covers an arm that is bent toward the viewer. Not quite as striking as Girl with a Pearl Earring yet not easy to dismiss entirely, Study of a Young Woman is minor-key Vermeer.

The Little Street (ca. 1658–59)

The influence of Pieter de Hooch hangs heavily over The Little Street, which has become one of its era’s most celebrated images of Delft. While de Hooch is most famous for his interior scenes in which women are carefully arranged in domestic settings, he did sometimes paint exteriors like this one, where open doors and alleyways reveal people going about their daily activities.

The format wasn’t the only thing Vermeer borrowed from de Hooch. Both artists created deceptively naturalistic images that elided true details that would have been seen on real Delft streets, combining buildings as they saw fit to create better pictures. (In 2015 Rijksmuseum scholars tracked down the real address in Delft that Vermeer had painted; it no longer looks anything like what is shown here.) Scholars have frequently praised the picture for its exacting attention to detail. Indeed, Vermeer calls attention to areas where paint has worn off these buildings and where individual bricks are lopsided or eroded. The people themselves are far vaguer by intention, with one woman’s face even left a blur. Viewers can fill in the facial details—or perhaps even imagine themselves standing there instead.

Girl Interrupted at Her Music (ca. 1659–61)

An underlying tension haunts Girl Interrupted at Her Music, whose female sitter wears a somewhat surprised look. Because Vermeer often relied on popular genres as intertexts for his work, contemporary audiences would have known this was a seduction scene, given the emphasis on music and the Cupid painting hanging on the wall. Further underscoring all this is her dress, which is of the kind worn by maids in private; the man knows her well enough to be visiting when she’s not at work.

This is more than a simple scene of a woman reading a musical score with a companion—it’s an erotic thriller. The woman looks outward toward the viewer, while the man seems unaware that he is being observed. Has she been caught in the act? And are we seeing something we shouldn’t? Vermeer lets those questions hang in the air, never definitively answering them.

The Wine Glass (ca. 1659–61)

It’s useful to compare this painting to The Girl with a Wine Glass, a work with a very similar subject and setting that may have been produced in the same year as this one. In both, a man approaches a young woman. Alcohol is being consumed, possibly in excess. In the case of The Wine Glass, the female sitter has just finished whatever was poured. A stained-glass window depicting an allegorized Temperance appears in the two paintings, suggesting that these works may be imploring their viewers to behave unlike the people shown here and to exercise some modesty.

The similarities between the two works end when it comes to their sensibility. The Girl with a Wine Glass feels slimy, like something we shouldn’t be seeing—the seduction is happening before our eyes, and the young woman smiles out at the viewer as if flaunting her sexual appeal. The Wine Glass is far less racy. One male has been removed, and the musical instrument balanced against a chair, a common symbol of romantic intrigue, leaves the seduction mainly to the viewer’s imagination.

The Wine Glass may be much less provocative work, but it is the clear winner of the two, if only because it offers a master class in coloration. Few could beat the way that Vermeer has rendered the blue curtain here, allowing its translucent fabric to cast its hues across the corner in which it hangs, where aquamarine meets shadowy blackness.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (ca. 1657–58)

For multiple centuries, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window appeared to simply display a young woman before a blank wall. Then, in 2019, everything changed. Its owner, the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, Germany, revealed X-ray analysis to the public that confirmed she was situated before a painting of Cupid, underlining the fact that this letter is almost certainly from her lover. This put the composition more in line with Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

But whereas that painting tends toward sedateness, this one exhibits Vermeer’s talent for exploring the ways light changes color. Note how sunlight hits the window’s blue frame, transforming a portion of it so that one corner is lighter than the rest, and observe how the illumination spills across the rich red carpet on the table. Later works by Vermeer would repeat similar subject matter, minus some of the rich coloration.

Then there’s the curtain that hangs to the right—a meta-element that seems to exist less within this woman’s room than it does within our own space; it has been drawn back for us so we can see what’s behind it. Drapes like this one functioned similarly in other images depicting interiors by Delft artists at the time. But in translating this element for a more intimate space, Vermeer has heightened the voyeuristic quality.

Young Woman with a Pitcher (ca. 1662–64)

Vermeer’s handling of the soft light pouring in through the window in this painting owned by the Met caused many to wrongfully attribute it to Gabriel Metsu until the 19th century. Now scholars consider it a fine Vermeer—among the finest by him held in the United States, in fact—and one that crystallizes a number of styles and themes he would use repeatedly. For one, there’s the focus on a female subject who stands alone, seemingly divorced from anyone else around her. She’s afforded her own psychology, with a gaze that connotes a quiet moment of contemplation. What she’s thinking about remains unclear.

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher isn’t quite as tantalizing as other Vermeers, but it does offer a pleasant example of how he imbued quotidian objects with symbolic potential. The pitcher his subject holds as she opens the window is a marker of her wealth, given that it is made of silver.

Young Woman with a Lute (ca. 1662–64)

The art historian Lawrence Gowing had a special term to describe paintings like Young Woman with a Lute; he called them “pearl pictures.” He was referring to the way that Vermeer utilized lighting effects to showcase his sitters’ jewels, which he often further underlined with tiny dabs of whitish paint. Such is the case here, where one’s eye immediately gravitates toward this young woman’s earring, a tiny object that ends up commanding the room.

Like other Vermeer paintings, this one is a musical scene that some have considered to contain an erotic undercurrent, even though no liaison is explicitly represented. (By way of evidence, scholars have pointed to the lute on the floor, suggesting that an encounter is about to take place or has already occurred.) There’s also the map on the wall, an image implying a world that extends beyond this canvas. Relative to other Vermeer pictures, Young Woman with a Lute isn’t quite as exciting, but the operative word, of course, is relative: A lesser Vermeer painting is still a great one.

A Lady Writing (ca. 1664–67)

The model for A Lady Writing may have been a woman Vermeer knew well: his wife Catherina Bolnes. Scholars have been unable to say this definitively, but one thing is certain: This woman is shown in a non-idealized state that makes her seem very real and very present. Rather than being too absorbed in the act of writing to notice us looking at her, she stares back at the viewer, confronting us.

We don’t get to see what it is that she’s penning—this is another mysterious scene from an artist who specialized in them. The woman’s mouth is bent slightly into a knowing smile, perhaps hinting that this letter isn’t a sad one. Historians have scoured the painting behind her for clues, noting the appearance of a bass viol in it. Seen in this light, her missive could be a love letter.

A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (ca. 1662–64)

Rather than presenting this scene straight on, Vermeer has offered a more oblique perspective on this depiction of a woman at a virginal and a gentleman looking at her while she plays. A windowed wall takes over around a quarter of the image, and a draped table obstructs a clean view of the man. Meanwhile, a mirror hanging above the virginal reflects back her face—and an easel.

In constructing the painting in this way, Vermeer reminds viewers of his artistry, adding a self-referential layer to a tableau that could be treated as a scene of aesthetic seduction. Further underlining all this is the canvas within a canvas on the right-hand side, which scholars have identified as an allegorical scene of Roman Charity, intended to extol the value of providing for others.

Mistress and Maid (ca. 1664–67)

A quick glance at Mistress and Maid may remind viewers of the many images of women writing and reading letters that occur throughout Vermeer’s oeuvre, yet this painting suggests something far more dramatic than what appears in any of those scenes. Here, a maid appears to have interrupted a woman mid-letter, bringing her a missive that appears to contain some urgency. We know this from the woman’s concerned expression, even if we can’t see the text itself.

The lighting, too, is amplified, with the background rendered as a black void from which these two figures emerge. This is quite unlike so many other Vermeer paintings in which neatly furnished domestic interiors are portrayed in rich detail. It is almost as though the figures have been excised from one of those spaces and transported here, lending the painting a mystique that can’t be pierced.

Forced to look for clues only in the few elements that appear on the table here, one’s eye falls on a box that, as National Gallery of Art curator Marjorie E. Wieseman notes in the Rijksmuseum show’s catalog, is not a jewelry casket but a container used to hold letters. Wieseman reports that its design indicates that it is of Indo-Pacific origin, pointing to places that contemporary viewers would have recognized as being many thousands of miles from home. That Vermeer was able to conjure such a full, vast world using just a handful of objects is a testament to his mastery.

The Concert (ca. 1662–64)

Paintings like The Concert pose problems for Vermeer scholars: If they do represent moments of seduction, is Vermeer casting judgment, or is he simply depicting a scene? Note the sharp differences between this painting and the picture to the right within it, Dirck van Baburen’s Procuress, a work once owned by Vermeer’s family. Van Baburen’s scene is a naughty image of a woman working out the business of a potential sex act; its figures are tightly clustered to create drama. Vermeer’s painting, with its somber tones and its figures spaced out across this setting, is significantly more low-key.

Injecting further mystery is the fact that Vermeer has positioned his male figure facing the piano, away from the viewer, so that we cannot see his face. He is clearly not the one playing it—the woman to his left is—but he appears to be admiring the painting beneath its lid, a majestic image of the countryside. Given that painting on the piano and the landscape on the wall, there’s an emphasis on exteriors here—which is made all the more interesting by the work’s setting, a cloistered interior whose window exists somewhere outside the frame.

A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (ca. 1670–72)

Frequently viewed by scholars as a work initially paired with A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, which is also held by the National Gallery in London, this painting shows a woman caught in the middle of playing music on a harpsichord-like instrument. That subject matter commonly keys viewers into an erotic subtext, and indeed, behind this woman is Dirck van Baburen’s painting of a procuress. (That same painting also figures in Vermeer’s The Concert.) This Vermeer work is notably sultrier than A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, which is much lighter and a lot less crowded.

Still, it can be hard to know what, exactly, Vermeer wants us to think about this woman. The magic of a painting like this one is that he has deliberately cropped out a lot of elements that would help us understand it (even the bass viol next to her is severed before its bottom), leaving parts of this room to the imagination. Although that may seem hardly innovative by today’s standards, it was unusual for the time.

Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid (ca. 1670–72)

Perhaps best known for having been stolen by IRA members in 1974, Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid is not exactly clear about what’s happening. As in The Love Letter, a maid accompanies a wealthy woman who, in this case, is a writer, not a reader. We don’t know what she’s writing, however, only that whatever it is has clearly gone through multiple drafts—some tossed-away papers and a seal lie on the marble floor. Meanwhile, the maid looks out a window as sunlight streams in.

As in The Love Letter, the painting within this painting may offer a clue as to what’s being written. It portrays the episode from Exodus when Pharaoh’s daughter finds the baby Moses in the reeds. In Vermeer’s day, that was seen as a statement about how God can bring together people whose views may be opposed. Perhaps this letter writer is making amends with its recipient. At the very least, she seems engrossed in the task at hand.

Officer with a Laughing Girl (ca. 1657–58)

Art historians cannot make up their minds about the woman in this painting. In one reading, she’s a sex worker in a brothel chatting up a customer. In another, she’s a maid who has been interrupted by a flirtatious man. Adding further intrigue is the fact that Vermeer may have based her on his wife, Catherina Bowles. Because there is so little information about where this scene is set, it’s hard to come up with a definitive interpretation of what’s taking place.

That Vermeer chose such a stylized composition only further heightens the strangeness of it all. He notably casts the man in shadow, portraying him from behind so that he looms large in the left half of the painting. We can’t see his face. Instead, the illumination directs the eye to the giggling woman, who does seem genuinely happy to see him. The difference in scale between the two has been counted as possible evidence supporting the theory that Vermeer relied on early photographic techniques when determining how his paintings would look.

Woman with a Pearl Necklace (ca. 1662–64)

Scholars are split on whether this work contains a coded message to its viewers. Some have noted the pearls of the necklace and the mirror to which the subject has directed her attention, and said that it is a picture about what it means to be pure. Others have stated that it is something more modest: simply a highly stylized genre scene. “One of the most remarkable aspects of Vermeer’s genius,” curator Arthur Wheelock once wrote, “is the elusiveness of his meaning, especially in the genre paintings, which are so carefully conceived.” In that way, Woman with a Pearl Necklace must count among Vermeer’s most ambiguous efforts.

The painting may be a little too slippery. It’s more difficult to ascertain its sitter’s psychology than it is in other, related works, like Woman Holding a Balance or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Still, it is hard to deny the visual pleasure offered by its theatrical lighting and its subject’s stylish garments.

The Astronomer (1668)

This painting, which may have once been paired with The Geographer, seems to portray little more than an astronomer at work. But as usual for Vermeer, a painter who often laced quotidian scenes with deep meaning, the image contains greater resonance than at first meets the eye. The astronomer wears a kimono-like robe that suggests worldliness and access to foreign countries, while his cluttered desk and shrunken room imply a cloistered existence. It is this contrast between inside and outside that enables The Astronomer to offer the low-key jolt that it does.

While the astronomer’s profession would seem to point at a secular way of thinking, Vermeer also imbues this scene with a religious undercurrent through the painting hung on this man’s wall: an image of the baby Moses that Vermeer scholar Albert Blankert has identified as a work by Peter Lely. In aligning the astronomer with a biblical figure who freed his people, Vermeer offers an image of spiritual liberation without much in the way of obvious Christian iconography. The astronomer’s newly expanded mind can be seen in his hand gesture, with his fingers splaying outward as he comes to realize something game-changing about his work.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1664–67)

This portrait is arguably Vermeer’s most widely seen work—and one of the most famous paintings ever created. It’s been the subject of a novel, a film adaptation of that book, and numerous homages by contemporary artists, including Yasumasa Morimura and Awol Erizku. But is the painting quite as good as its reputation suggests?

On a technical level, almost certainly yes; on a thematic one, perhaps not quite so much. The painting is undeniably a formal marvel because, as usual, Vermeer has so finely wrought the dramatic lighting effects on display. The young girl seen here appears to emerge from total darkness, yet her lips, her eyes, and her earring (which is in fact not a pearl, according to recent research) catch light that streams in from an unseen source. Vermeer wasn’t the first to try his hand at this format—his colleague Michael Sweerts also painted in this way—but he perfected it with Girl with a Pearl Earring.

A Maid Asleep (ca. 1656–57)

The muted scene in A Maid Asleep once contained more risqué elements. Alongside this maid who’s nodded off, Vermeer had initially painted a man and a dog. What was the man doing with this maid, whose table has on it a bowl of juicy-looking apples? We’ll never know, considering that somewhere along the way, Vermeer chose to remove him.

What we’re left with is the first of many tableaux by Vermeer in which a woman is pictured accompanied only by her thoughts. As an initial foray into the genre that would make him famous, A Maid Asleep is a masterly one. It provides just enough details to make us wonder more, then stops short of providing easy answers. The maid’s lips, upturned ever so slightly, provide only a vague clue as to what she’s dreaming about, and yet we have all we need to begin guessing at her emotional state. Then there’s the door behind her, which is left ajar, the key still in its lock. She is derelict in her duties—perhaps because, as one Amsterdam auction house speculated back in 1696, she is drunk.

The painting’s composition also hints at where Vermeer’s later efforts would take him. He makes use of deep space in A Maid Asleep, allowing viewers to peer all the way back into an adjacent room, and he places a chair up close to the viewer, tilting it so that it slices off a portion of the scene. Compositions like this one are oblique and cause Vermeer’s paintings to seem almost cinematic at times.

The Lacemaker (ca. 1666–68)

At just nine inches tall, this diminutive painting is the smallest known work by Vermeer. Even still, it offers a surprising wealth of detail in that tiny amount of space. You can almost count the number of threads that spill from the cushion by her side, even if other areas of the painting seem slightly blurrier. This is hardly a mistake, however. Scholars are now nearly certain that Vermeer enlisted a camera obscura, an early photographic tool, to paint The Lacemaker, which may account for why parts of it look out of focus. This aesthetic may have been produced by a photographic device, but it’s also one you could produce with your eye. After all, when you stare at something for a long time, you only notice certain things to the exclusion of others.

Images of lacemakers were not unusual during Vermeer’s time, especially since learning the craft was considered an important component of girls’ education in his day. When painters represented these young women at work, they did so at a remove, placing them among matronly figures in a domestic setting. Not so with Vermeer, whose point of view is unusually close to his lacemaker, affording us a front-row seat to her psychological state.

However finely wrought her emotions may be, it’s hard to know what she’s thinking about. Scholars have pored over the tome on the adjacent table for details, pointing out that it could be a prayer book or a manual on patterning, but they have yet to ascertain what’s in its pages. Therein lies this painting’s magic.

A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (ca. 1670–72)

Commonly thought to be a pendant to A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, which is also owned by London’s National Gallery, this painting shows a woman playing a harpsichord-like instrument, which connotes romance. This is underscored by the painting of Cupid behind her, an image taken from a book by Otto van Veen, who commonly portrayed the god as holding up mottos such as “A lover ought to love only one.”

There are no lovers explicitly portrayed in this painting, but perhaps Vermeer is imploring us to consider whether this woman has been loyal to whomever she calls her paramour. It would seem that Vermeer admires this young, well-to-do woman, whose virtue he portrays by way of her stately pose and her carefully composed interior. But can looks be deceiving? Vermeer lets that question linger.

View of Delft (ca. 1660–61)

View of Delft is so plainspoken that it may, at first glance, read as little more than a landscape of the city that Vermeer called home. Yet close observation reveals just how stylized this painting is. Deftly wielding his brush to create a wide range of effects, Vermeer left his paint unevenly textured, so that elements like bricks appear rough—a flourish that only enhances the naturalism of the scene. Meanwhile, water appears to denature into a range of cool blue strokes, creating the illusion of placid wavelets.

So vivid is the detail, in fact, that some have speculated about just how, exactly, Vermeer was able to achieve it. One widely circulated claim involves a camera obscura; the theory’s proponents claim that’s why there are little white flecks known as “discs of confusion” throughout. But while Vermeer may have relied on a camera obscura at some point, it remains uncertain to what to degree it influenced his paintings. Whatever the case may be, View of Delft is a prime example of how Vermeer’s knack for finely wrought detail allowed him to draw viewers into his immersive world.

The Milkmaid (ca. 1658–59)

With its soft lighting and seemingly simple imagery, The Milkmaid is one of the most famous Vermeers—a fact that conceals how unusual it is within the context of Dutch painting during the era. Vermeer was an expert at synthesizing preexisting conventions and formulas, then making them his own, and The Milkmaid is an example of that practice. It’s no wonder that critic Peter Schjeldahl once remarked that the painting “exercises more dazzling virtuosity than I quite know what to do with.”

As art historians Ben Broos and Arthur Wheelock Jr. pointed out in the catalog for the 1996 Vermeer retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., milkmaids were common subjects for painters working in the Netherlands at the time, and Vermeer certainly knew this. But when these milkmaids were represented by his compatriots, they were always seen in the context of others around them, and never alone.

Vermeer isolates his maid, showing in her a moment of solitary contemplation as she pours milk from a jug into a basin. Most images of milkmaids had an erotic undercurrent; Vermeer’s was no different in that regard. Yet, according to art historian Walter Liedtke, Vermeer sought to distance viewers and make them aware of their status as voyeurs, suggesting that Vermeer was “sympathetic to female feelings as well,” as Liedtke once wrote. One way Vermeer accomplished this was through subtle formal innovations. For instance, via the slanted windowpanes he directs the eye toward the maid’s arm, foregrounding the labor involved in her métier. It’s a flattering image of a job commonly considered lowly.

Woman Holding a Balance (ca. 1662–64)

The moralizing religious themes of some of Vermeer’s paintings are made relatively explicit in Woman Holding a Balance, a seemingly banal scene in which a lone female subject gets ready to weigh the jewels before her. (Many have incorrectly suggested that she’s balancing gold, but in fact there is none on her scales.) As is the case with the women in similar Vermeer pictures, this woman is seen in a serene moment of inward thinking, bathed in dramatic light and left on her own, free of distraction.

Even though her task may appear plain, Vermeer has imbued it with spiritual significance by placing behind her a painting of the Last Judgment, when one’s soul is weighed by God. You could amass all the worldly treasures you could ever want—the pearls before this woman, for example—and still be damned to Hell if you are an impure person, this work suggests. Vermeer may have granted this realization to his subject, whose gaze led curator Walter Liedtke to pronounce this work “one of Vermeer’s most sophisticated paintings.”

The Geographer (1669)

Long thought to be one half of a pair with The Astronomer, The Geographer is a painting about the intersecting quests for scientific knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. The work, which draws on images of scientists that were common at the time, may have been produced on commission, but scholars don’t know the precise identity of this geographer, if he really did exist. After all, there could have been many figures like him, considering that by the time Vermeer painted this work, the Netherlands had become well known in Europe for its mapmakers.

Vermeer represents the profession as more than just an attempt to make sense of the world, however. The geographer shown here seems to already know what exists far beyond his home—he wears a kimono-like robe that signifies him as “a man of the world in a positively ideal sense,” as Städel Museum curator Friederike Schütt writes in the Rijksmuseum catalog. A globe behind him hints at the faraway place from which that garment may have come.

The painting is a striking meditation on how our inner state is informed by the world all around us. As the geographer looks outside, he is met with a wall of sunlight that streams indoors, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior, on both a physical level and a psychological one.

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (ca. 1662–64)

Perhaps more so than any other painting Vermeer made, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is suffused with mystery. Who has written this epistle, and why? What does it say, and how is the reader reacting to it? There are no easy answers, but Vermeer has scattered some clues throughout.

For one, there’s the map on her wall, which suggests a place far away, perhaps the one where the letter was written. Then there’s the objects around her, including the pearls left on the table, suggesting that she has dropped everything to read this piece of mail. And then there are her clothes, which balloon outward, possibly suggesting that she is pregnant. Piece all this together, and you may come up with a narrative about a woman whose partner is abroad and has written her with urgent news.

Whatever the case may be, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter is a treasure. It encapsulates Vermeer’s sense for stillness, quietude, reflection, and interiority. To that end, he has arranged this woman’s chairs, table, and walls so that they appear to box her in, keeping her constantly both inside her apartment and her own head.

Allegory of the Catholic Faith (ca. 1670–74)

This painting stands apart from almost every other work in Vermeer’s oeuvre because it so directly functions as an allegory—and for that reason, it has proved divisive. In 1996 the art historian Arthur Wheelock wrote that the “painting proves a difficult one for twentieth-century viewers to accept with the same enthusiasm engendered by Vermeer’s other works.” He was referring to the canvas’s multitude of symbols, which would have been easily decipherable to Vermeer’s contemporaries. And if you can read it using their logic, Allegory of the Catholic Faith reveals itself as one of Vermeer’s finest, strangest brews.

It’s not known who commissioned this work—one theory holds that Vermeer had been working for the Jesuit Order in Delft, another that it was painted for a wealthy Catholic patron. It is known, however, that Vermeer was basing the work on iconographies outlined by Italian iconographer Cesare Ripa, who had died about half a century earlier. For example, the central female figure, meant to represent Faith herself, overlays several different iconographies Ripa wrote about. Vermeer put his own spin all of them, placing a globe at her feet to show that the world is effectively in her control. Other symbols abound: a bitten apple that looks back to the Garden of Eden, a crushed serpent furthering that narrative, a Eucharist-like arrangement on the table beside her.

While all of this should make the painting come off as staid, Vermeer is in total control here, adding elements that Ripa never mentioned, including a hanging glass orb that reflects the room around her. An array of visual rhymes unfold. The woman clasps her hand to her breast, tilting her body in an echo of the curtain and the figures in the crucifixion scene behind her, and the orb recalls the globe at her feet. In aligning all these objects, Vermeer creates striking comparisons between exterior spaces and interior psychological states. What goes on inside us, he suggests, manifests outside, too.

The Love Letter (ca. 1669–70)

A curtain is pulled back to reveal a scene fraught with tension in The Love Letter, in which a maid arrives bearing an epistle for a rich woman who is presumably her employer. The viewer is at a distance from this scene, similar to how an audience views actors on a stage, lending the painting a theatrical quality.

It is hard not to be lured into this tableau by its rich ambiguity, as Vermeer provides his two female figures with gazes that are hard to entirely describe. The maid appears to smile slightly as she cocks one elbow and regards the other woman, to whom she’s just handed the letter. The recipient, holding a lute, looks upward with an expression that seems to evince a combination of anxiety and sadness. What is she so afraid of? The painting behind her, depicting a ship sailing through disturbed waters, could communicate where her lover is writing from, or it could more simply portray this woman’s state of mind upon reading her paramour’s words.

It is to Vermeer’s credit that The Love Letter can elicit many different readings, a fact due in no small part to the density of symbols and objects he builds up across the canvas. While the painting places viewers at a remove, it’s hard not to want to peel away its layers and get closer to the work’s emotional core.

The Art of Painting (ca. 1666–68)

Today, The Art of Painting is regarded as an all-time great, and justly so: This picture is Vermeer firing on all cylinders, embedding a domestic scene with a dense array of symbols. It wasn’t always viewed that way, however; it was relatively obscure for a couple of centuries after its making until it was reclaimed by art historians during the 1860s.

This painting is one of the rare allegories that Vermeer produced, with the focus this time on the nature of art-making itself. Many wrongfully assumed that the painter portrayed is Vermeer himself. But there is farther-reaching meaning here; this is a figure meant to stand in for all the painters across history who have touched a brush to a surface of their choosing. The profession, in Vermeer’s view, is clearly a noble one, with the blue wreath being painted crowning the painter’s hand like a tiara placed on the head of royalty.

The woman he is painting is Clio, the Greek muse of history, whose guise Vermeer borrowed from a book by Cesare Ripa. While Vermeer’s Clio may be an allegorical figure, he didn’t anonymize her in quite the same way as he did his painter—she is the real thing, a unidealized person who could have walked in from the street. Hammering home the sense that this painting takes place in our world is the map on the wall, which portrays the 17 provinces of the Netherlands at the time. It reminds viewers that art and life are rarely ever separable, and its layers of self-reference even come to engulf the viewer, who is sutured into the scene by way of the curtain lifted to reveal this painter in action.