Born: October 30, 1632
Delft, Netherlands
Died: December 15, 1675
Delft, Netherlands

Jan Vermeer, the greatest of all Dutch genre painters, lived and worked in his native town of Delft. The most likely candidate to have been his master is the history painter Leonaert Bramer, who testified to Vermeer’s character at the time of his betrothal, but the artist’s early work shows no trace of Bramer’s influence. Vermeer’s earliest dated painting, The Procuress of 1656 (now in Dresden), shows that he was familiar with the work of Utrecht followers of Caravaggio. This painting, also in Dresden, was painted shortly after The Procuress and its style is closely related to it, with its broad handling of paint, deep shadows and rich, saturated colors. The subject – a glimpse into the corner of a room where a young woman is totally absorbed in reading a letter – is quite unlike those painted by the Caravaggisti. Vermeer emphasizes the sense of our entering a private world by placing an illusionistic curtain on a rail in front of the scene. It was quite usual in Holland in the seventeenth century to protect paintings from sunlight and dust with such curtains. X-rays have revealed that the curtain was not part of Vermeer’s original design. They also reveal that Vermeer made a number of other changes. He originally included a large painting of a standing Cupid hanging on the back wall, which would have suggested that it is a love letter that the girl reads. In the event he suppressed that element as well as making changes to the area of the figure’s sleeve and hands.
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Vermeer was born in 1632 in Delft which was then an active and prosperous Dutch town. The artist seemed to have left his native city only rarely. Its wealth was based on its thriving Delftware factories, tapestry weaving ateliers, and breweries. It was also a venerable city with a long and distinguished past. Its strong fortifications, city walls and medieval gates that had protected the city for more than three centuries, had provided refuge for William the Silent, Prince of Orange, from 1572 until 1584 during the Dutch revolt against Spanish Habsburg control. Although the court and seat of government moved to The Hague at the end of the sixteenth century, Delft continued to enjoy special status within the province of Holland. This detail of Dirck Van Bleyswyck's Kaart Figuratief shows the area around the Groote Markt (Market Place).
Johannes Vermeer was the second child and only son of Reynier and his wife Digna Baltens. His sister, Gertruy, was born in March of 1620, 12 years earlier than Vermeer. Vermeer's family background would be described today as lower middle-class. His grandparents were illiterate and so was his mother. Vermeer was baptized on 31 October, 1632 in the Reformed Church (in the Nieuwe Kerk) and was raised a Protestant. His father, Reynier Janz.—in the later part of his life his surname was changed to Vos and then Vermeer although we do not know why— was an innkeeper and member of the Saint Luke’s Guild. Guild membership allowed Reynier to sell paintings as well. Even so, neither of these trades were Reynier’s real profession. Sometime after his wedding, he described himself as a "caffawercker" (silkworker). Caffa was a kind fine satin widely used for clothes, curtains and furniture-covering. Some scholars have speculated that Vermeer's predilections for this material, often depicted in his paintings, was a kind of childhood remembrance. The paintings in which his father dealt may have sparked in young Vermeer his interest in painting.
Vermeer spent his childhood in a house, located on the Markt in the center of the town, which his father bought after having improved his economic situation. Reynier was evidently a hardworking man who lived and invested conservatively. The ground floor of the house was the inn, called Mechelen. Judging from contemporary etchings it must have been quite large, large enough to also accommodate an ample space for Reynier's caffa production and living quarters for the family.

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
In April 1653 Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic girl, Catharina Bolenes (Bolnes). The blessing took place in a nearby and quiet village Schipluiden. For the groom it was a good match. His mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on 5 April. Some scholars doubt that Vermeer became Catholic, but one of his paintings, Allegory of Catholic Faith, made between 1670 and 1672, placed less emphasis on the artists’ usual naturalistic concerns, and more on religious symbolic applications, including the sacrament of the Eucharist, which was scorned by the Protestant order at the time. Walter Liedtke in Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests it was made for a learned and devout Catholic patron, perhaps for his schuilkerk, or "hidden church." So, whether it represents Vermeer’s own beliefs or only those of his patron is left to speculation. At some point the couple moved in with Catharina's mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church. Here Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, producing paintings in the front room on the second floor. His wife gave birth to 14 children, four of whom were buried before being baptized, but were registered as "child of Johan Vermeer". From wills written by relatives, the names of ten of Vermeer's children are known: Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, and Ignatius.Several of these names carry a religious connotation, and it is likely that the youngest, Ignatius, was named after the founder of the Jesuit order.

VERMEER'S CHILDREN
The Vermeers had at least 11 children during their 22 years of marriage: Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, Ignatius, one other, and possibly more who died in infancy. From what we know of their later lives, none of them seem to have inherited Vermeer's artistic skills or pursued distinguished careers. Vermeer's wife, Catharina, who must have been pregnant far much of the time, also had the burden of looking after her mother. Although Maria (Catharina Bolnes' mother) lived to be 87, surviving Vermeer, she was already nearly 70 when the family moved in and was presumably getting frail. Caring for 11 children, an aging mother, and an artist must have taken most of Catharina's time, even with the help of a maid. After Vermeer's death, she claimed to have known little about his business affairs since she had never concerned herself further or otherwise than with her housekeeping and her children'.
"The Vermeers' sixth surviving child and first son, also called Johannes, he was having his education paid for out of income from farmland in Schoonhoven that had been Willem Bolnes's. The boy may have been sent to a Catholic college in Mechelen in the southern Netherlands; in which case, it may have been Johannes who was the child of Vermeer's who in 1678 was mentioned as being 'piteously wounded' in an explosion on a vessel carrying gunpowder from Mechelen. But young Johannes, if he was the wounded person, survived that minor ontploffing. He seems to have become a lawyer in Bruges, preserving his links with the Catholic south, and had a son, another Johannes, who preserved the artist's name but was brought up in Delft by his aunt Maria and her husband Johannes Cramer - despite which the boy doesn't appear to have learned to write (he put a cross rather than a signature on a power of attorney in 1713). He married a Delft girl but moved to Leiden where their five children - Vermeer's great-grandchildren - were baptized as Catholics. Another son of Vermeer, Franciscus, became a master surgeon in Charlois, a village near Rotterdam, and later moved to The Hague. Apart from Maria, Beatrix was the only one of Vermeer's daughters to marry. Aleydis, the fourth girl, lived until 1749, when she died in The Hague. Continuing remittances from their grandmother Thins's estates and from the Gouda Orphan Chamber apparently helped the unmarried daughters (including Aleydis, Gertruyd, and Catharina, named after her mother) to subsist. One of the girls, Maria seems to have been the most fortunate through her marriage to Cramer; the couple had a number of children who were well provided for, and one of whom became a Catholic priest."
In June 1674, one year before her father's death, Maria, about 20 years old, married the son of a prosperous Delft silk merchant named Gilliszoon Cramer. The wedding ceremony has held in Schipluy, where Maria's parents had been married, most likely with Catholic sacraments.
Vermeer's family was unusually large. "In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth-century, the family was the keystone of society and had many unique and advanced characteristics. The family unit was small and insular in orientation: the average of three or four children, and close relatives, such as grandparents, rarely shared the home. Children were treated by their parents with a respect and understanding unusual for the times, and received their moral instruction in the home, where they generally lived until their mid to late twenties." John Montias, who has written the most exhaustive study of Vermeer's family, has noted the "chance factors affecting child-bearing activities, or the lack of it, of different members of the family played a major role in determining...." the same family's fortunes. The fact that Reynier Jansz. Vos alias Vermeer (Vermeer's father) had only two children helped the family's ascent, just as the numerous progeny of the artist contributed to the family's downfall. The financial collapse would have been even more precipitous were it not for the penchant of Maria Thin's (Vermeer's mother-in-law) family for celibacy: her aunt Diewertje died a spinster, not one of Maria's four brothers and sisters ever married; her son Willem was briefly betrothed but remained a bachelor. On Vermeer's side, even his sister Gertruy had only one child, who apparently died in infancy. Johannes and Catharina and their numerous children profited from the failure of all these related to leave viable heirs. Unfortunately, these multiple windfalls could only palliate the disastrous effect of Catharina's unbridled fertility. "

Where were Vermeer's Children?
It is difficult to imagine that the father of 11 children was not in some way or another influenced by their presence. Many critics have noticed the apparent discrepancy between Vermeer's perfectly-ordered interiors and what may have been the artist's daily life with a brood of children. Where are the cradles, beds and chairs, according to the inventory of movable goods taken after his death, strewn out over the house?
Contrary to many Dutch genre painters such as Jan Steen, Nicolaes Maes and Gabriel Metsu whose pictures literally overflow with children, Vermeer gave them only two small, but poetic parts to play.
The problem is not as difficult as it may seem. Simply put, Vermeer's paintings were not intended biographical statements. Even though they do represent contemporary settings and modes, they were not meant to reflect the conditions of his personal life. Vermeer worked within established and well defined genre categories and some critics believe the artist wished to express the lofty values associated with traditional history painting.
Vermeer's principle biographer John Michael Montias, maintains that even though the lack of turmoil represented by such a large family may seem conspicuous, the artist's "subjects and the way he handled them are rooted in much earlier experience and were invariant to the things that happened to him in his adult years."
Curiously enough, Vermeer directly portrayed children only two times in 35 paintings, once in The Little Street and a second time in The View of Delft where a young girl can be seen with an infant in her arms to the extreme left of the foreground. There are however, more than a few indirect representations of children in other paintings. A painting-within-a-painting of Cupid appears either partially or entirely in three other works and at close inspection we can see that children are represented on the tile baseboards in The Milkmaid , A Woman Standing at a Spinet and A Lady Seated at a Spinet.
The Milkmaid (c. 1658)

These decorated baseboards, fabricated in Delft, were commonly found in Dutch houses and were widely exported. They protected the lower part of the white-washed walls from passing mops. However, even if Vermeer's miniscule renditions of the children that populate them do express something of the children's naive simplicity, they were most likely included as a comment on the principle theme of the picture. In the case of the Lady Standing at a Spinet, the little Cupid on the tile directly to the left of the lower portion of the woman's silk gown, subtly reinforces the representation of the large-scale painting of a Cupid which hangs on the back wall in an ebony frame.

CAREER
It is unclear where and with whom Vermeer apprenticed as a painter. Speculation that Carel Fabritius may have been his teacher is based upon a controversial interpretation of a text written in 1668 by the printer Arnold Bon. Art historians have found no hard evidence to support this. The local authority, Leonaert Bramer, acted as a friend but their style of painting is rather different. Liedtke suggests Vermeer taught himself, using information from one of his father's connections. Some scholars think Vermeer was trained under the Catholic painter Abraham Bloemaert. Vermeer's style is similar to that of some of the Utrecht Carravagists, whose works are depicted as paintings-within-paintings in the backgrounds of several of his compositions. In Delft, Vermeer probably competed with Pieter de Hooch and Nicolaes Maes, who produced genre works in a similar style.On 29 December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear that Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war and economic crisis; Vermeer was not alone in experiencing difficult financial circumstances. In 1654 the city suffered the terrible explosion known as the Delft Thunderclap, which destroyed a large section of the city. In 1657 he might have found a patron in the local art collector Pieter van Ruijven, who lent him some money. In 1662 Vermeer was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he (like Bramer) was considered an established craftsman among his peers. Vermeer worked slowly, probably producing three paintings a year, and on order. When Balthasar de Monconys visited him in 1663 to see some of his work, the diplomat and the two French clergymen who accompanied him were sent to Hendrick van Buyten, a baker, who had a couple of his paintings as collateral.
In 1671 Gerrit van Uylenburgh organised the auction of Gerrit Reynst's collection and offered thirteen paintings and some sculptures to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. Frederick accused them of being counterfeits and had sent twelve back on the advice of Hendrick Fromantiou. Van Uylenburg then organized a counter-assessment, asking a total of 35 painters to pronounce on their authenticity, including Jan Lievens, Melchior de Hondecoeter, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and Johannes Vermeer.In 1672 a severe economic downturn (the "Year of Disaster") struck the Netherlands, after Louis XIV and a French army invaded the Dutch Republic from the south (known as the Franco-Dutch War). During the Third Anglo-Dutch War an English fleet and two allied German bishops attacked the country from the east causing more destruction. Many people panicked; courts, theaters, shops and schools were closed. Five years passed before circumstances improved. In the summer of 1675 Vermeer borrowed money in Amsterdam, using his mother-in-law as a surety.In December 1675 Vermeer fell into a frenzy and, within a day and a half, died. He was buried in the Protestant Old Church on 15 December 1675. Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. The collapse of the art market damaged Vermeer's business as both a painter and an art dealer. She, having to raise 11 children, asked the High Court to relieve her of debts owed to Vermeer's creditors. The Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city council as a surveyor, was appointed trustee. The house, with eight rooms on the first floor, was filled with paintings, drawings, clothes, chairs, and beds. In his atelier there were two chairs, two painter's easels, three palettes, ten canvases, a desk, an oak pull table, a small wooden cupboard with drawers and "rummage not worthy being itemized".Nineteen of substantial debt for delivered bread.Vermeer had been a respected artist in Delft, but almost unknown outside his home town. The fact that a local patron, Pieter van Ruijven, purchased much of his output reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Several factors contributed to his limited oeuvre. Vermeer never had any pupils and therefore there was no school of Vermeer. His family obligations Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catharina and her mother. The widow sold two more paintings to Hendrick van Buyten in order to pay off a with so many children may have taken up much of his time as would acting as both an art-dealer and inn-keeper in running the family businesses. His time spent serving as head of the guild and his extraordinary precision as a painter may have also limited his output.
STYLE
Like most painters of his time, Vermeer probably first executed his paintings tonally, using either only shades of gray ("grisaille"), or a limited palette of browns and grays ("dead coloring"), over which more saturated colors (reds, yellows and blues) were applied in the form of glazes. Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint to the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been positively attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians and advocates of the Hockney–Falco thesis, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects. The often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings have been linked to this possible use of a camera obscura, the primitive lens of which would produce halation. Exaggerated perspective can be seen in Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (London, Royal Collection). Vermeer's interest in optics is also attested in this work by the accurately observed mirror reflection above the lady at the virginals.
However, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians. There is no historical evidence. The detailed inventory of the artist's belongings drawn up after his death does not include a camera obscura or any similar device. Scientific evidence is limited to inference. Philip Steadman has found six Vermeer paintings that are precisely the right size if they were inside a camera obscura where the back wall of his studio was where the images were projected.

The Girl with the Wine Glass (c. 1659) Lady seated at a virginal (c. 1673 - 1675)

There is no other seventeenth-century artist who early in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, or natural ultramarine. Vermeer not only used this in elements that are naturally of this color; the earth colors umber and ochre should be understood as warm light within a painting's strongly-lit interior, which reflects its multiple colors onto the wall. In this way, he created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the color of the adjacent object. This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural color .A comparable but even more remarkable, yet effectual; use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with a Wineglass. The shadows of the red satin dress are under painted in natural ultramarine, and, owing to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful. Even after Vermeer’s supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in Lady Seated at a Virginal. This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector, and would coincide with John Michael Montias’ theory of Pieter van Ruijven being Vermeer’s patron. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendor of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Besides these subjects, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can also be found in his work.

Works
Only three paintings are dated: The Procuress (1656, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), The Astronomer (1668, Paris, Louvre), and The Geographer (1669, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut). Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil-on-canvas Procuress (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. After creating his own The Procuress, almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows and grays. Practically all of his surviving works belong to this period; usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a serene sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by a pearly light. Mundane domestic or recreational activities become thereby imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). Vermeer's two townscapes, View of Delft (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and A street in Delft (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), have also been attributed to this period. A street in Delft View of Delft
A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come The Allegory of Faith (c 1670, New York, Metropolitan Museum) and The Love Letter (c 1670, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).
Fame
Other than the thirty-seven (?) surviving paintings, we have very little documentation of Vermeer's art. When French traveler and diarist Balthasar de Monconys visited Vermeer studio, Vermeer was not able, or willing, to show him even a single work. When the Frenchman went to the house of the baker Hendrick van Buyten (a prominent Delft citizen and collector of Vermeer's painting) he saw one "with a single figure" which he esteemed far too costly. If the price (600 guilders) quoted by the baker is to be believed, Vermeer's paintings were, in fact, rather expensive in respects to those of his contemporaries. Even so, Vermeer's fame did not spread far outside Delft. The most probable explanation is that his paintings were in the hands of only a few select collectors. Ironically, the extraordinary patronage of Pieter van Ruijven was a mixed blessing for the artist. His reputation might have spread in wider circles and his name might have been better remembered after his death had there been more collectors eager to trumpet his fame.
Pieter van Beckhout, a wealthy young connoisseur, visited Vermeer two times in 1669 and on the second occasion saw "some examples of his art, the most curious aspect consists in perspective."
Vermeer was elected hoofdman (headman) of the Saint Luke's Guild for the second time in 1671-1672 and in this period he was called to The Hague in order to judge the authenticity of various paintings which had been sold as works of important Italian masters. Vermeer, along with other headsmen, judged them not only fakes but practically worthless. His position as an esteemed artist would fall victim, like other painters in Delft, to the grave economic crisis following the French invasion in 1672.
In any case, Vermeer's fame was consolidated in his home town.

Maturity

The moment in which Vermeer began to paint coincided with the explosion of the Dutch economy after the cessation of hostilities with Spain in 1648. Whether Vermeer's initial impulse to be a history painter was stimulated by his artistic training, his conversion to Catholicism or the hope that he would realize prestigious princely or civic commissions, he abruptly and dramatically changed his subject matter and style of painting a few years after becoming a master in the guild. Although the reason for which he began to focus on scenes such as A Woman Asleep, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, or The Little Street are not known, it may have been that the patronage he expected as a history painter was not forthcoming. Although the path Vermeer took in defining his artistic personality is understood in only the broadest of terms, the types of scenes he represented in the late 1650s indicate that he was aware of his contemporaries work, and was adept at emulating and improving upon their images.
The years of his pictorial maturity correspond to years of relative financial security. His mother-in-law contributed substantially to the economic well-being of her daughter's family and in the meanwhile Vermeer had secured the patronage an important Delft citizen, Pieter van Ruijven, who acquired perhaps half of the artist's entire output. The financial independence Vermeer enjoyed, partial and precarious as it was, gave him a greater opportunity to follow his own artistic inclination than most of his fellow members of the guild, who had to adapt their art to suit market demand. He could paint fewer pictures than he might have had to had he been forced to support his family exclusively from his art.
At one point, Vermeer moved out of Mechelen presumably to reside and work in his mother-in-law's house on Oude Langendijk, a stone's through away on the other side of the Markt. There is little evidence to show that Vermeer entertained close contacts beyond the relatively segregated Papist's Corner, where he lived. There is not document that links Vermeer his patron Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven even though he was close enough to the Van Ruijven family to be given a conditional bequest of five hundred guilders in the will of Maria de Knuijt, Pieter Claesz.'s wife, in 1665.

Vermeer's Signatures
Of the thirty-four generally accepted Vermeer's twenty-one bear legible signatures (the one on Diana and Her Companions has worn away—see below) . Three historical documents conserve the artist's full signature; one is also signed by the artist's wife, Catharina Bolnes
The signatures of Johannes Vermeer and his wife Catharina Bolnes (left) on a deed of 30 November 1655—two years after their marriage—constitute one the few physical, and we might add, touching testimonies of the couple's union which bore Vermeer fifteen children in all. Even if one does not agree that handwriting tells us something of the writer's character, it is difficult not to notice the striking differences between the two scripts. The rather measured uprightness of Vermeer's style contrasts with the sensual freedom of his wife's.

Vermeer’s Death
Shortly after 1672 he borrowed 1000 guilders from his mother-in-law. His income must have dwindled to nothing and he had eleven children to support. At the same time, the French invasion had reached Delft and its citizens were called upon to dig a high earth rampart around their town for defensive purposes.
Vermeer probably painted very little in his last years. His death, three years later, at the age of forty-three, was described by his wife, "as a result and owing to the 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 had gone from being healthy to being dead." The burial registers of the Oude Kerk mention on December 15, 1675 state: "Jan Vermeer, artist of the Oude Langendijk, in the Oude Kerk." Catharina was left with had a small army of children to care for and an enormous debt. Catharina went to great lengths to save her husband's paintings, which creditors had claimed to pay debts accumulated in the final years of the artist's life..
Catharina petitioned for bankruptcy the following year. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the famed Delft microscopist, who was a neighbor and apparently a friend of Vermeer, was named trustee for the estate.
Catharina was able to survive only through the loving help of her mother Maria Thins. A plea to her creditors some time after her husband's premature death strikes a final sad note in Vermeer's brief life: "during the ruinous war he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in."