ON JAN VERMEER (1632-75)

Very little is known about Vermeer's life, and his methods of working. He had no students or apprentices, and he left no records. Vermeer only produced about thirty paintings during his lifetime. Today he is regarded as one of the greatest artists that ever lived.

Vermeer was born in 1632 in the city of Delft in The Netherlands. His father was a silk weaver and an art dealer, and was probably the one who introduced the art of painting to the young Johannes. After his death Jan Vermeer inherited his father's bussiness.

In 1653 Vermeer joined the Guild of Saint Luke as a master painter - an important step in his career as a painter, it meant he had completed his apprenticeship and was ready to work professionally as an artist.In 1662 he was elected head of the Guilde.

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interiors, often of a woman alone - pouring milk, weighing jewels, reading a letter, playing a lute. In most of the paintings the women sit or stand in the same corner, with the light source from the left. It is not known who any of the models were.

He did not make a living from his paintings, however, possibly because he painted so few - just 35 are known to exist, and he produced only two or three a year. He quite likely had a patron, perhaps Pieter van Ruijven, who bequeathed several Vermeers to his daughter. Vermeer was also an art dealer, but his primary source of income was his mother-in-law.

When Vermeer died in 1675, he left his wife Catherina and their eleven children with very little money. Catharina described her husband's sudden decline thus: "As a result and owing to the very great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had 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 or day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead."

The famous Dutch microscopist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who also lived and worked in Delft was appointed trustee for the estate in 1676. It is assumed that many of Vermeer's paintings were lost after his death. Read more here

Scene from the film: Vermeer [Firth]and Griet [Johansson] studying the Camera Obscura

Many people have speculated that Vermeer might have used some sort of optical device - possibly a Camera obscurato - to help him create his paintings. A Camera obscura [literally: darkened room] is a box which, like a modern camera, has a lens at the front, and was sometimes big enough for the observer to be inside it. Recent work by Prof. Philip Steadman [Open University in England] show how Vermeer - maybe with the assistance of the famous Dutch microscopist van Leeuwenhoek? - painted pictures which may be thought of as "photographs" as much as paintings. One of several evidences for Vermeer's supposed use of the Camera obscura is his treatment of highlights on reflective surfaces. Metal and ceramics have small circles of white or yellow pigment. It has been suggested that these are the 'circles of confusion', seen when you view bright highlights through a lens that is either not quite focussed, or is not a very high quality lens. The girl's pearly earring show this distinctive 'soft focus' effect.

From Vermeer: The Complete Works on the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring: In one of Vermeer's most engaging images, a young girl dressed in an exotic turban gazes at the viewer. Her liquid eyes and half-opened mouth impart the immediacy of her presence, yet her purity and her evocative costume giver her a lasting quality, unconstrained by time or place. Despite the feeling of immediacy Vermeer thus creates, the young girl's idealized image conveys a sense of timeless beauty. Vermeer worked as a classicist, purifying his images to express lasting rather than transient qualities of life.