Thirty-Six Paintings, No Sketches: Why Every Vermeer on a Museum Wall Is Worth the Trip

Johannes Vermeer is still one of the hardest painters in the Western canon to know, because almost nothing about his life made it onto paper. What survives is close to thirty-six canvases, and those paintings are nearly all the evidence there is. No preparatory sketches are known. There is no journal, and only a thin scattering of personal records. For collectors and museumgoers, that scarcity explains the pull. A painter's entire known output could hang in a few galleries, and there will never be a sheet of studies to tell you how any of it was made, so each picture has to answer for itself. Standing in front of one is the closest anyone gets to the man, and that is reason enough to know which museums hold them.

With reporting from The Collector.