Johannes Vermeer
The poet of quiet everyday life.
Vermeer painted only about 35 known pictures, almost all of them quiet interiors in Delft with light from a window on the left.
Johannes Vermeer was baptised in Delft on 31 October 1632. His father was a weaver, art dealer and innkeeper. Where Johannes learned to paint is not known. In 1653 he married Catharina Bolnes, who was a Catholic, and he is believed to have converted. The same year he became a member of the painters' guild in Delft, on whose board he later served several times. The family lived with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and the couple had fifteen children, eleven of whom survived.
His first known works are large history paintings with biblical and mythological subjects. In the late 1650s he found his field: quiet interiors with one or two people in a room. The Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum pours milk from a jug in a bright kitchen. View of Delft and Girl with a Pearl Earring are in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but a so-called tronie, a study of a face in fanciful dress. He also painted The Art of Painting, an allegory in Vienna.
Vermeer painted slowly, perhaps two or three pictures a year. The light usually falls through a window on the left and spreads softly through the room. He used ultramarine, a very expensive blue pigment made from lapis lazuli, and he added small points of light that make surfaces sparkle. Whether he used a camera obscura, a kind of early camera, as an aid is debated.
His art was sold to a small circle of collectors in Delft. When the Netherlands was invaded in 1672 the art market collapsed, and the family ran up large debts. Vermeer died in December 1675, only 43 years old. Only about 35 paintings are attributed to him today. One of them, The Concert, was stolen from a museum in Boston in 1990 and has never been recovered.
After his death Vermeer was forgotten. A French critic rediscovered him in the 1860s, and he then became one of the best-loved painters in the history of art. In the 1930s and 1940s the forger Han van Meegeren sold fake Vermeer paintings for large sums.