Johannes Vermeer

Who is Johannes Vermeer?

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch Golden Age painter who lived and worked his entire life in Delft. He specialised in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life, painted with extraordinary attention to light, colour and quiet composition. Working slowly and producing a relatively small body of work, only around thirty-five paintings are firmly attributed to him today. His masterpieces include Girl with a Pearl Earring (circa 1665), The Milkmaid (circa 1658), and View of Delft, one of the finest cityscapes of the era. Vermeer was respected locally, served as head of the Delft painters' guild, and dealt in art, but he was not widely famous outside his city during his lifetime and died in debt, leaving a large family. His reputation was revived in the 19th century, and he is now considered one of the greatest painters in Western history, admired especially for his luminous rendering of natural light.

Sources: Mauritshuis, The Hague — Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam — The Milkmaid (c. 1658) · Walter Liedtke, Vermeer: The Complete Paintings (2008)