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Vermeer worked slowly and left very little behind. Only about 34 paintings are firmly given to him today, most of them quiet interiors of Delft, the Dutch town where he spent his whole life, women reading letters or pouring milk in a shaft of window light. He painted them over roughly 20 years while also running a business dealing other artists' pictures to make ends meet.

Then the market vanished under him. In 1672, remembered in the Netherlands as the Rampjaar, the disaster year, French armies under Louis the Fourteenth invaded the Dutch Republic and the economy collapsed, and with it the trade in paintings that Vermeer lived on. He died three years later in 1675, suddenly, leaving his wife Catharina and 11 surviving children buried in debt. She tried to hand two of his canvases to the local baker to settle a bread bill.

For almost 200 years he was nearly forgotten outside Delft. In the 1860s a French critic, Théophile Thoré, hunted down his scattered pictures and wrote the articles that made his name, calling him the Sphinx of Delft because so little about the man was known. That is still roughly true. We have his paintings and a handful of documents, and almost no words from Vermeer himself.