In the paintings by seventeenth-century Dutch artist Vermeer, we find several recurrent items: a satin jacket, a certain Turkish carpet, and wooden chairs with lion' s head finials  These reappearing objects might seem to evince a dearth of props  Yet we know that many of the props Vermeer used were expensive
Thus, while we might speculate about exactly why Vermeer worked with a small number of familiar objects, it was clearly not for lack of props that the recurrent items were used
If a dearth of props accounted for the recurrent objects in Vermeer's paintings, we would not see expensive props in any of them.