Jan Vermeer was born in in Delft. In the same year, he also married Catharina Bolnes. His mother in-law, Maria Thins, possessed a moderate collection of paintings by the Utrecht Caravaggisti , painters that were profoundly influenced by the art of Caravaggio. In the latter part of the s, Vermeer gradually switched to genre painting, that depicted intimate scenes of domestic life. His most famous paintings were interior scenes of young women engaged in reading and writing, playing musical instruments and doing domestic work.
In Young Woman with a Water Pitcher ca. In the quiet scene, Vermeer expressed the beauty and harmony found in everyday objects and activities. During his career, the artist showed interest in camera obscura, an optical tool that could project imagery on a flat surface. Some have argued that this interest extended into his method of painting, and that he used the device to plan the arrangements of his compositions.
He died in in Delft, leaving his wife and children with enormous debt. Because he only garnered moderate success and encountered unfortunate circumstances at the end of his life, Vermeer was largely forgotten by history. He was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime but evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. He was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists , and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries.
Since that time, Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Relatively little was known about Vermeer's life until recently. He seems to have been devoted exclusively to his art, living out his life in the city of Delft. Johannes Vermeer was baptized in the Reformed Church on 31 October His father Reijnier Janszoon was a middle-class worker of silk or caffa a mixture of silk and cotton or wool.
As an apprentice in Amsterdam, Reijnier lived on fashionable Sint Antoniesbreestraat, a street with many resident painters at the time. In , he married Digna Baltus. The couple moved to Delft and had a daughter named Geertruy who was baptized in In a visiting Frenchman, the Baron de Monconys , visited a well-to-do baker, Hendrich van Buyten , who had a painting of a single figure by Vermeer.
Given this date, it is possible that the painting could have been Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter or the Woman with a Water Pitcher , both relatively small, similarly-sized works, painted at about the same time — It could also have been the large Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window , executed relatively early in Vermeer's career. Indeed, it is not out of the question that it could have been the Girl with a Pearl Earring , for the price which the baker claimed to have paid for it—six hundred gilders—could have been justified by the beauty of this work.
Neither of these two works was mentioned in seventeenth-century documents. It is entirely possible this group is not among the missing Vermeer's and that all passed forward to the present day intact; but their vague descriptions stymie accurate attribution. Altogether, there seem to be at least six Vermeer paintings that still remain hidden or are forever lost. Additionally, two more works were described so vaguely that no one today can pinpoint their attribution with certainty.
Ten of Vermeer's surviving paintings have not been accounted for using contemporary seventeenth- early eighteenth-century documentation. Nonetheless, scholars believe they have garnered sufficient evidence to support credible attributions for them. In , there was another Amsterdam auction for the estate of Pieter van der Lip, with a painting in it described as "A woman reading in a room, by vander Meer of Delft. But the listing would account for one of them.
Finally, in , at the estate of the Amersfoot paper merchant, Paulus Gijsbertsz, another painting was listed, "A piece by Van der Meer, being a lady in her room. This is not a candidate for the missing in Vermeer's inventory. The last three items of the Dissius inventory — number 38 , "a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful;" number 39 , "Another by ditto;" and number 40 , "A pendant by same"—shed helpful but ultimately too dim light for an assured identification of these works.
A Dutch "tronie" was not necessarily a portrait of a particular individual but rather a character study depicting a head and shoulders dressed in colorful, often highly textured clothing, especially fancy hats and collars. Such clothing was often distinctive, even theatrical, out of fashion and exotic costumes for this purpose were frequently termed "antique.
Though portrait painting in Vermeer's day was not considered the highest form of art, it was in relatively high demand and it did help pay the bills. A tronie , therefore, was often an artist's business card, a very commonplace form of advertising. Vermeer seems to have painted four such tronien that have survived if one accepts that he at least began Young Girl with a Flute , though did not finish it himself.
By modern eyes, his Girl with the Pearl Earring fits the description in Dissius number 38 perfectly. It is uncommonly artful with an exotic antique" turban. The Dissius accountant who listed this painting may have been so taken with its beauty that he used the rare accolade "artful" in his description of a tronie.
The painting's obvious pendant is the Portrait of a Young Woman in New York, for it is the same size and depicts the same general demeanor and torsion as the Girl with the Pearl Earring. But note that Dissius number 39 describes only "another" tronie by Vermeer, not a pendant. Dissius number 40 does specify a pendant tronie , however, ostensibly referring back to item number Victor de Stuers, an important art historian, recognized the exceptional quality of the painting and urged his friend Arnold des Tombe to buy it.
In order to not arouse suspicion, De Steurs and De Tombe agreed not to bid against each other. Des Tombe acquired the painting for a mere two guilders, plus the buyer's premium of thirty cents. Girl with a Pearl Earring c. A bitter end Vermeer's fortunes abandoned him in the final years of his life. 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.
The world in a Dutch room Despite the air of absolute privacy that epitomizes Vermeer's interior scenes, they reveal the artist's links with the world outside and the birth of globalization. He depicted costly carpets imported from Turkey, high-quality earthenware from Germany, and precious porcelain from Italy and China. The stringed instruments represented in four pictures were fabricated in Antwerp. The stiff felt hats worn by some of his male sitters were made from high-quality beaver pelts, thanks to North American trappers.
A barely visible pouch of tobacco in one picture brings to mind the same continent again. The forgotten painter In an age when there were no photographs, glossy art magazines, or chic art galleries, a painter's fame in Vermeer's time depended on producing a large number of artworks and selling them to influential art collectors based in cultured metropolises.
Vermeer had no followers or apprentices to spread his style, and worse, he painted slowly and sold many works to a single collector in the small-town of Delft. So soon after he died, his name was forgotten by all but a few Dutch art experts. Later, some of his finest works were signed with the names of other Dutch painters in order to increase their monetary value.
Today, all but two paintings by Vermeer have found their way into the world's most prestigious public art collections. Woman Reading a Letter c. Mistress and Maid ca. The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content. Online Exhibit The Milkmaid Rijksmuseum.
Online Exhibit View of Delft Mauritshuis.
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