The painting The Geographer by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer is an image that is frequently selected as a cover for geography books. Drawn in the second half of the 17th century, the picture must not only be considered as a portrait of how to think and do geography at that time; it can also be seen as a piece of art with a heavy symbolic load to stimulate a methodological debate on geographic readings of images. The present text aims to reflect about the languages of this painting, considering its sociocultural, economic and political contexts and its relation to the different processes of constructing geographic knowledge.
Vermeer; The Geographer; image reading; 17th-century Holland; visual methodologies
