Vermeer’s room and furniture

These drawings show plans, side views and bird’s-eye views (axonometrics) of the spaces shown in eleven of Vermeer’s paintings of interiors. Ten of these seem to depict the very same room - although the tile patterns vary. (For the eleventh picture, ‘The Love Letter’, it is impossible to say whether it might be the same room, because there are no architectural features or pieces of furniture shared with other pictures. What is more, the fireplace and doorway are unique to this painting.) Each picture’s viewpoint is labelled V. Only those parts of the tiled floors that are visible in the paintings are shown in the plans. In some instances the positions of objects or parts of objects which are not wholly visible but can be located with confidence, as for example the legs of chairs or the feet of tables, are shown in dotted lines.

The scale of the reconstructions can be gauged by the floor tiles: the small tiles in 'The Glass of Wine' and 'The Girl with the Wineglass' are 14.6cm square. The larger tiles in all the other paintings are 29.3cm square.

Click on an image below to view the reconstructions, or the chair to see the furniture scale drawings: