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.
Why It Took Vermeer 191 Years To Get Famous
A lot of this comes down to how the art market functioned in the workshop and guild system. In the early modern period (by…