Why It Took Vermeer 191 Years To Get Famous
When I teach my Art History survey, my students are often shocked to hear that an artist like Johannes Vermeer wasn’t especially famous during his lifetime. Even if they don’t know his name, most of them have seen Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring before. It’s been called the Dutch Mona Lisa, it’s the basis for the famous Tracy Chevalier novel (and subsequent movie adaptation starring Scarlet Johansson and Colin Firth), and it has prompted endless riffs and memes.
And yet the painter, Johannes Vermeer, was not particularly famous during his day. Although he was documented in a few travel journals and he was nominated to be the head of the guild of St. Luke in Delft twice, he did not achieve the same kind of fame as his contemporaries like Rembrandt. Certainly after his death, he fell into virtual obscurity until his rediscovery first by Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Brun in 1792 and then by Théophile Thoré-Bürger in 1866.
How could it be that an artist as famous as Vermeer is today could have been relatively obscure?
How to Get Famous as an Early Modern Artist
A lot of this comes down to how the art market functioned in the workshop and guild system. In the…
