Early Vermeer Painings

Early Vermeer Paintings


Three historical paintings by a very young painter with his career barely off the ground would attract little attention in ordinary circumstances.

These aren’t ordinary circumstances. The artist is Johannes Vermeer, and the works are showing together for the first time in the Netherlands, just kilometers from Delft, where the early Baroque artist lived and died an unknown, leaving only 34 known works behind. So line-ups can be expected outside of narrow cellar-level entrance to the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.

Barely a 10-minute walk away from The Hague’s depressing inner-city strip mall, the Mauritshuis could easily be called Vermeer World Headquarters, mostly due to the fact that it’s home to the artist’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is closing rapidly in on the Mona Lisa as the most iconic painted face on the planet this side of Lady Ga Ga.




Girl with Pearl Earring

Stretched Canvas Print

Vermeer, Jan


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The three earlier paintings constituting “The Young Vermeer” help create a context for the artist’s slowly arriving fame – a 19th century invention, initially – which has accelerated on so many contemporary fronts that he’s become the poster boy for Dutch Golden Age art, the pearl-wearer the poster girl for all Dutch art.

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