How Vermeer learnt to embrace the everyday – and transfigured it

Has any artist ever painted fewer pictures than Johannes Vermeer? At the last authenticated count there were 37 still in existence, and five more are known from references in early sources. With allowance for wastage and disappearance historians estimate that he produced no more than 50, a rate of two a year over a career spanning two decades. So when 28 are assembled in one exhibition, as currently at the Rijksmuseum, it counts as a blockbuster.

Astonishingly, this is the museum’s first Vermeer exhibition. Holland’s national gallery has not always valued its most popular master: when it opened in 1885, the only Vermeer on show, ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’ (c.1663-64), was a loan. A celebrity artist in his lifetime, after his early death the painter from Delft was forgotten by all but a few connoisseurs; the occasional painting that trickled on to the market tended to be attributed to better known artists. It was the French 18th-century painter and collector Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun who first spotted that ‘this vander Meer about whom historians haven’t spoken at all, deserves special attention’ and the British art dealer John Smith who put the puzzle of his genius in a nutshell when he observed in an 1833 catalogue: ‘This painter is so little known, by reason of the scarcity of his works, that it is quite inexplicable how he attained the excellence many of them exhibit.’

Who are these girls, all of a type like the props in his paintings?

How indeed? The curators of this exhibition, the biggest ever collection of Vermeer’s works in one place – including the artist’s studio – are still unable to offer an explanation. Where did he train before registering as a master in Delft in 1653? Did he make a study trip to Italy? Did he work alone or with assistants? No one knows.