In the 17th century the Dutch city of Delft was an art center, though not a big one. Its population at mid-century was only about 25,000. Because art follows patronage, artists who worked in Delft tended to pass through and move on. Towns in Holland were a lot closer together and rather more connected than in Italy or France. Little enough is known about Vermeer, but presumably he wasn't some sort of lonely angelic visitation, popping up from nowhere.
Every artist has aesthetic parents, brothers and sometimes offspring.
But genius tends to be unpredictable, and a puzzling thing about Vermeer is that artistically he had no real progeny and no certain parentage. Nobody knows who taught him to paint, and his influence on younger Delft artists is too slight to bother with. He did no teaching, and no one imitated him. Moreover, most of the other Delft painters in his time pale by comparison with him. There were a few fine flower painters, like Balthasar van der Ast, whose elaborate portrait of variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life.