Interestingly Vermeer died penniless and nobody liked his paintings until they were rediscovered in the 19th century. A common theme in the Netherlands. I always joke that it's better to be an artist in Iran. Culture is a waste of time and artists are just lazy bastards who need to get a real job. A merchant Republic like Venice but it never lost its focus on money for fashion.
“Originally, Vermeer's works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris“
His financial problems also were at least in part because he was unlucky. As an art dealer, he sat on paintings he couldn’t sell because of the Franco-Dutch War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Dutch_War). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer#Wars_and_deat...:
“In a petition to her creditors, his wife later described his death as follows:
...during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.”
(That wife gave him 15 children, 11 of which lived long enough to be baptized, so yes, that might have been an expensive family to run)