Many of Vermeer's paintings show people indoors, where light from a window, furniture, and fabrics establish space and atmosphere, giving everyday actions a finely observed presence.
Only a limited number of his paintings survive. Girl with a Pearl Earring is closer to a tronie, or character study, than a formal portrait of an identified sitter.
Style
Vermeer may have first executed his paintings tonally like most painters of his time, using either monochrome shades of grey ("grisaille") or a limited palette of browns and greys ("dead coloring"), over which he would apply more saturated colors (reds, yellows, and blues) in the form of transparent glazes. No drawings have been positively attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods.
There is no other 17th-century artist who employed the exorbitantly expensive pigment ultramarine (derived from natural lapis lazuli) either so lavishly or so early in his career. Vermeer used this pigment in not just elements that are naturally of this colour; he also used it early in a work, beneath subsequent earth colours such as umber and ochre, to subtly tint their shade. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer's understanding of Leonardo's observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object.
An example of Vermeer using ultramarine as an underpaint is in The Girl with the Wine Glass. The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and, owing to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance.
Even after Vermeer's evident financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in Lady Seated at a Virginal. This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector and would coincide with John Michael Montias' theory that Pieter van Ruijven was Vermeer's patron.
Vermeer's works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Besides these subjects, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can also be found in his work.
Painting materials
One aspect of his meticulous painting technique was Vermeer's choice of pigments. He is best known for his frequent use of the very expensive ultramarine (The Milkmaid) and also lead-tin-yellow (A Lady Writing a Letter), madder lake (Christ in the House of Martha and Mary), and vermilion. He also painted with ochres, bone black and azurite. The claim that he used Indian yellow in Woman Holding a Balance has been disproven by pigment analysis.
In Vermeer's oeuvre, only about 20 pigments have been detected. Of these, seven principal pigments that Vermeer commonly employed are lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, madder lake, green earth, raw umber, and ivory or bone black.
Works
It is believed Vermeer produced a total of fewer than 50 paintings, of which 34 have survived. Only three Vermeer paintings were dated by the artist: The Procuress (1656; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden); The Astronomer (1668; Musée du Louvre, Paris); and The Geographer (1669; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt).
Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil on canvas The Procuress (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows, and grays. Vermeer painted multiple artworks portraying a pure profile like the painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace, which was uncommon in Dutch art at the time. Practically all of his surviving works belong to this period, usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by a pearly light.