Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer painted perhaps forty-five pictures, of which thirty-four survive, and was forgotten for two centuries. Born in Delft in 1632, he was the son of an innkeeper and art dealer who also wove fine silk. He converted to Catholicism to marry Catharina Bolnes in 1653, joined the painters' guild the same year, and had fifteen children, eleven of whom survived him. He worked extremely slowly, produced two or three paintings a year, and sold most of them to a single local patron, Pieter van Ruijven. He also dealt in other artists' work, which is how the family lived. Almost all the mature paintings are small interiors of one or two figures — a woman reading a letter, pouring milk, weighing pearls, playing an instrument — lit from a window on the left. Nothing dramatic happens, and the subject is the light itself: the way it falls on plaster, on a brass jug, on the nap of a carpet. His pigments were expensive, particularly the natural ultramarine ground from lapis lazuli that he used lavishly, including in underpainting where it cannot be seen. The optical accuracy of the highlights — small discs of light on bread, on a rim — has led to a long argument that he used a camera obscura. It is not settled. The French invasion of 1672 destroyed the Dutch art market, and he died in 1675 aged forty-three, his widow describing him as having collapsed under the strain of debt. He was rediscovered in the 1860s by the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger.

• Lived: 1632 CE – 1675 CE
• Nationality: Dutch
• Roles: painter