Where do you go if you want to see the original The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Johannes Vermeer? Caltech professor Williams’s website has gathered a wealth of information about him.

You’ve read the book and seen the movie, but where do you go if you want to see the original The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Johannes Vermeer painting that inspired both? Art enthusiasts can go to www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/vermeer where Caltech professor Roy Williams has gathered a wealth of information…

The history of faking is nearly as old as the history of art. Dutchman Van Meegeren (1889-1947) produced a stream of “Vermeers” and was sentenced to a year in prison for fraud.

The history of faking is nearly as old as the history of art, and for as long as there have been documents, there have been forgeries. “This is not a lie, it is indeed the truth,” runs an inscription of the earliest forgery we know, a Babylonian cuneiform inscription from…

A new painting by Vermeer is discovered in Paris and exhibited in Rotterdam.

We arrived late at Rotterdam, where was their annual marte or faire, so furnished with pictures (especially landskips and drolleries as they call those donnish representations) that I was amaz’d. . . .

When John Evelyn in 1641 thus recorded the flourishing artistic life of Holland, Jan Vermeer of Delft…