As the known pictures of Vermeer are very few--fewer than forty, I believe--some great discoveries may be in store for the diligent, or, more probably, the lucky.
I have read somewhere--but cannot find the reference again--of a ship that left Holland for Russia in the seventeenth century, carrying a number of paintings by the best artists of that day--particularly, if I remember, Gerard Dou.

The vessel foundered and all were lost.

It is possible that Vermeer may have been largely represented.
Only comparatively lately has fame come to him, his first prophet being the French critic Thore (who wrote as "W.

Burger"), and his second Mr.Henri Havard, the author of very pleasant books on Holland from which I shall occasionally quote.

Both these enthusiasts wrote before the picture opposite page 2 was exhibited, or their ecstasies might have been even more intense.
In the Senate House at Delft in 1641 John Evelyn the diarist saw "a mighty vessel of wood, not unlike a butter-churn, which the adventurous woman that hath two husbands at one time is to wear on her shoulders, her head peeping out at the top only, and so led about the town, as a penance".