Maps and Globes
Detailed wall maps and a pair of globes turn up across Vermeer's interiors, rendered with enough accuracy to identify the real printed sources he worked from. They open his enclosed rooms onto the geography, trade, and learning of the Dutch Golden Age — most explicitly in the paired Geographer and Astronomer.
The world on the wall
A printed wall map was a familiar piece of décor in a prosperous Dutch home, a sign of learning, trade, and reach, and Vermeer painted maps with enough accuracy that scholars can identify the published sheets he worked from. The large map of Holland and West Friesland behind Officer and Laughing Girl reappears behind the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and a different map hangs over the player in Woman with a Lute.
The scholar’s pair
The motif is most explicit in two companion pictures of men of science, almost certainly the same model, painted at the end of the 1660s. The Geographer bends over his charts with dividers in hand and a terrestrial globe on the cupboard above him; The Astronomer reaches toward a celestial globe, the heavens to the geographer’s earth.
Together the maps and globes open Vermeer’s enclosed, north-lit rooms onto the geography, commerce, and learning of the Dutch Golden Age, letting a whole wider world press in at the edge of a quiet interior.
