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The Astronomer is an oil painting on canvas by the Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in 1668. The work depicts an astronomer studying a celestial globe beside a copy of Adriaan Metius's Institutiones Astronomicae Geographicae. Closely related to Vermeer's The Geographer, it is thought to portray the same sitter, possibly Antonie van Leeuwenhoek; a 2017 study showed that both paintings were made from canvas cut from the same bolt. The painting was seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family during the Second World War, returned to them when the war concluded, and acquired by the French state in 1983. It is now in the collection of the Louvre in Paris.Painting credit: Johannes Vermeer