Vermeer
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50 free Vermeer trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Johannes Vermeer painted fewer than 50 pictures, sold most of them to one Delft family, and died in debt at 43 during the Dutch Republic's disaster year. Then he vanished from the history books for two centuries until a French critic rebuilt his catalogue and Proust fainted in front of View of Delft. These 50 questions cover the life and the paintings: the inn his father ran on the market square, the Catholic conversion his mother-in-law demanded, the Guild of Saint Luke, the gunpowder explosion that flattened Delft, and the lavish ultramarine he kept buying even when broke. There are questions on Girl with a Pearl Earring (its green background, its two-guilder sale, Banksy's alarm box), on the Concert still missing from the Gardner Museum, on The Art of Painting's wartime journey into Hitler's collection, on Han van Meegeren's fake that fooled Göring, and on the camera obscura theory tested in Tim's Vermeer. Easy questions cover museums and famous titles; the hard tier asks about tripe sellers, forged signatures and where Vermeer hid his initials. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which actress played the maid Griet in the 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson played Griet opposite Colin Firth's Vermeer; Kate Hudson had been cast first but left the project before filming began.
Q 02Which Hague museum holds Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Mauritshuis
Mauritshuis: a 2018 study there with microscopes and X-ray scans found that Vermeer had given the girl fine eyelashes.
Q 03Roughly how many surviving paintings do scholars firmly attribute to Vermeer?
About 35
About 35: scholars accept 34 without dispute and argue over a few more. One local patron is thought to have bought so much of his work that his fame barely spread beyond his home town.
Q 04What kind of light source lights most of Vermeer's interior scenes?
A window on the left
A window on the left lights nearly all of them; in The Guitar Player he broke the habit and let the light enter from the right.
Q 05What object did Vermeer paint out of The Milkmaid, later revealed by X-ray?
A fire basket
A fire basket, a wicker frame set over hot coals for drying clothes, stood where the foot warmer is now; he also painted out a rack of jugs on the wall.
Q 06How fast did Vermeer's final collapse kill him?
Under two days
Under two days: 'in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead', his widow declared, blaming the strain of his failing business.
Q 07Which expensive blue pigment did Vermeer use unusually lavishly?
Natural ultramarine
Natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli: where most painters used the costly blue sparingly, he mixed it even into his greys and shadows.
Q 08Which novelist wrote the 1999 novel Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier got the idea lying in bed one morning, looking at a poster of the painting that had hung in her bedroom since she was 19.
Q 09Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but which Dutch type of character study?
Tronie
Tronie: Rembrandt often used his own face for such character heads, and Vermeer's girl, if anyone sat for her at all, was never named.
Q 10Which Vermeer was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990?
The Concert
The Concert vanished when two men in police uniforms talked their way in, handcuffed the guards and left with 13 works 81 minutes later.
Q 11In Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, the girl's turban is blue and which other colour?
Yellow
Yellow: she has wound the turban from two pieces of cloth, one blue and one yellow, and the exotic headdress marks the picture as a costume study, not a likeness.
Q 12Which city holds more Vermeer paintings than any other?
New York
New York: the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection together hold more Vermeers than any Dutch city, while Delft, where he painted them, has none.
Q 13Which Vienna institution displays The Art of Painting?
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Kunsthistorisches Museum: Vermeer kept the picture all his life, and his widow signed it over to her mother to keep it from his creditors.
Q 21Which Paris museum owns The Astronomer?
Louvre
Louvre: the Nazis seized the painting from the Rothschild family in Paris in 1940; it went back to them after the war and passed to the French state in 1983.
Q 22Which French critic's 1866 study revived interest in Vermeer?
Théophile Thoré-Bürger
Théophile Thoré-Bürger presented Vermeer as an unknown, misjudged genius, though he also credited him with dozens of pictures that scholars have since rejected.
Q 23Which painters' guild did Vermeer join in 1653 and later lead?
Guild of Saint Luke
Guild of Saint Luke: he could not pay the full entrance fee when he joined, yet his fellow painters later elected him headman four times.
Q 14Which religion is Vermeer thought to have adopted before his 1653 marriage?
Catholicism
Catholicism: his bride's mother is thought to have insisted on it, and the couple later named a son Ignatius, probably after the saint who founded the Jesuits.
Q 15What was the name of Vermeer's wife?
Catharina Bolnes
Catharina Bolnes was left with eleven children to raise when he died, and petitioned the court for relief from his debts.
Q 16In which Belgian city was Vermeer's The Love Letter stolen in 1971?
Brussels
Brussels: the thief hid in an electrical closet until closing time, cut the canvas from its frame and demanded a ransom for refugees in East Pakistan; he was caught within two weeks.
Q 17Which 2013 documentary follows an inventor recreating The Music Lesson with mirrors?
Tim's Vermeer
Tim's Vermeer follows Texas inventor Tim Jenison as he rebuilds the painted room and copies it by matching colours in a small mirror; the magician Teller directed.
Q 18Which British artist argued in 2001 that Vermeer used optics to compose his pictures?
David Hockney
David Hockney set out the case in his book Secret Knowledge, worked up with physicist Charles Falco: sudden leaps in realism, he argued, came from mirrors and lenses.
Q 19Which forger sold fake Vermeers, one of them to Hermann Göring?
Han van Meegeren
Han van Meegeren confessed to forgery to escape a charge of aiding the enemy, then painted a fresh 'Vermeer' in front of witnesses to prove he could.
Q 20The Astronomer and The Geographer are both thought to portray which man?
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Delft's microscope pioneer, was baptized within days of Vermeer and later handled his estate, though some see little likeness.
Q 24What disaster struck Vermeer's home town of Delft in 1654?
A gunpowder explosion
A gunpowder explosion: the 'Delft Thunderclap' wrecked a large part of the city and killed Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt's gifted pupil.
Q 25Which 1672 crisis ended Vermeer's sales and wrecked his art business?
The Rampjaar
The Rampjaar, or 'disaster year': France invaded from the south, Münster and Cologne from the east, and with courts, theatres and shops shut, the art market collapsed.
Q 26Which nickname did a French critic give Vermeer because so little was known of his life?
The Sphinx of Delft
The Sphinx of Delft: only a few registers and official documents recorded his life, and nobody even knows who trained him as a painter.
Q 27Which museum staged the largest Vermeer exhibition ever held, in 2023?
Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum: his few surviving paintings are the prized treasures of their museums and rarely lent, which is why no show had gathered so many before.
Q 28Which Vermeer painting did Salvador Dalí copy and pit against a rhinoceros?
The Lacemaker
The Lacemaker: Dalí saw the curve of a rhinoceros horn in it, painted his own version in 1955 and spent years on a film about the pair that he never finished.
Q 29Which country's royal collection has owned Vermeer's The Music Lesson since 1762?
Britain
Britain: George III bought it in 1762 with a consul's collection in Venice, and a misread signature kept it under another painter's name until 1866.
Q 30What trade did Hendrick van Buyten, who held Vermeer paintings as collateral, follow?
Baker
Baker: Hendrick van Buyten later accepted two Vermeers from the widow as security for her unpaid bread bill, promising them back if she paid.