The Geographer

Vermeer painted this geographer in 1669, in his house on the Oude Langendijk in Delft. It is the companion piece to The Astronomer, painted the same year, and the two paintings may have been commissioned together by the same patron. Both show a male scholar alone in a room, surrounded by the tools of his trade. A man in a blue robe stands at a table, bending over a spread of charts and maps. His right hand holds a pair of compasses, his left hand rests on the table. He has paused in his work and looks up, as if interrupted or struck by a thought. Behind him, a globe sits on a cupboard. Through the window at the left, the same soft light that falls in all of Vermeer's interiors enters the room and illuminates the man's face, his hands, and the papers on the table. The geographer may be Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Delft microscopist who was Vermeer's contemporary. Van Leeuwenhoek was appointed executor of Vermeer's estate in 1675, and he was a surveyor and city official as well as a scientist. The identification is not certain, but the face in this painting resembles the face in The Astronomer, and both paintings show a man of science at work. Vermeer had been painting domestic interiors for about a decade. His paintings of women reading letters, playing instruments, and pouring milk are better known, but his two scholar paintings show a different side of his work. The Geographer is more dynamic than The Astronomer: the figure is caught in motion, his body bent forward, his hand raised with the compasses, his eyes looking up from the page. Oil on canvas, 53 by 46 centimeters, roughly 21 by 18 inches. Vermeer painted with a smooth, controlled surface, building the blue robe in thin layers of natural ultramarine. The charts on the table are real maps, identifiable as the work of the Amsterdam cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu. The globe is also by Blaeu, and the constellations visible on its surface are rendered with careful attention. The nearly square format and scholarly subject make this print work well in a study, office, or library. A dark wood frame matches the painting's tonal range. The 12x16 or 16x20 size gives the charts and the globe enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, where it has been since 1885. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.