JAN VERMEER
Dutch Baroque Era Painter (1632-1675)

This Dutch masterpainter created some of the most exquisite paintings in Western art. His works are admired for their poetic quality and for the sensitivity with which he rendered effects of light and color.
Jan or Johannes Vermeer was born in 1631 in the town of Delft in Netherlands. His father Reynier Vermeer, a lower-middle class silk weaver and art-dealer married his mother, Digna from Antwerp, Belgium in 1619. It was likely his father who introduced the young Vermeer to the art of painting. After his father¡¦s death in 1652, Jan Vermeer inherited the ¡§Mechelen¡¨ (a large inn which the family purchased in 1641) together with his father¡¦s art-dealing business.
Little is known about Vermeer¡¦s life and his apprenticeship as an artist. Some say his teachers may have been Leonaert Bramer, a Delft artist who was a witness to Vermeer¡¦s marriage to Catherina Bolnes in 1653 or the painter Carel Fabritius of Delft.
Vermeer¡¦s art subjects were mostly domestic interior scenes that include large genre pieces and portraits. In his early paintings such as The Milkmaid (1658), he produced a gentle balance between the compositional and figural elements. Vermeer was also able to achieve a highly sensuous surface effect in this oil in canvas painting by applying paint thickly and remodeling it using firm strokes. But he used thinner combinations of glazes to obtain a subtler and more transparent surface display as can be seen in Jan Vermeer¡¦s Woman with a Water Jug (1660-62).
His intense sensitivity to the effects of light and color and his interest in defining accurate spatial relationships probably encouraged Vermeer to experiment with the camera obscura, an optical device that could project the image of sunlit objects placed before it with extraordinary realism. But Vermeer¡¦s dependence on the use of camera obscura is still in dispute amongst historians. More so, a chronology of Jan Vermeer¡¦s art works are complicated by the fact that only three of his paintings are dated, namely The Procuress (1656), The Astronomer (1668) and The Geographer (1669).
After his death in December 1675, he was overlooked for more than 200 years. Some of Jan Vermeer¡¦s paintings were attributed to other artists. It was only after French critic W. Thore-Burger ¡§rediscovered¡¨ Vermeer in 1866 that he became widely known and his art works heralded as genuine Vermeers. Thore-Burger attributed 66 pictures to him but today only 35 paintings are accredited to him. Among these paintings are:
• Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657) - Oil on canvas, 83 x 64.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
• A Girl Asleep (1657) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• The Milkmaid (1658) - Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
• View of Delft (1659-1660) - Oil on canvas, 98.5 x 117.5 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague
• Woman with a Water Jug (1660-1662) - Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 40.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• A Woman Holding a Balance (1662-1663) - Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 38 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington
• Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) - Oil on canvas, 46.5 x 40 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague
• Mistress and Maid (1667/68) - Frick Collection, New York
• The Lacemaker (1669/70) - Louvre, Paris
• Lady writing a Letter with her Maid (1670) - Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 58.4 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
• The Guitar Player (1672) - Iveagh Bequest Kenwood House, London
• Lady Standing at the Virginals (1673/75) - National Gallery, London
• Lady Seated at the Virginals (1673/75) - National Gallery, London

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