Vermeer’s Pigments

Artists didn’t have hundreds of available pigments, as we do today. Paint samples scraped from the edges of Vermeer’s artwork show that he commonly used just seven pigments:

1. white lead, 2. yellow ochre, 3. vermillion, 4. red madder, 5, green earth, 6. raw umber and 7. ivory black.

In total, he may have used as many as seventeen, though many of them were rarely empoyed:
azurite
carmine
charcoal black
green earth
indigo
ivory black
lead white
lead-tin yellow
madder lake
red ocher
smalt
ultramarine
umber
weld
verdigris
vermillion
yellow ocher

The source for this information is an excellent website called Essential Vermeer. Thanks Walt Morton!