Johannes Vermeer
He was born in 1632 and died in December 1675. He was a Dutch painter who specialized in middle-class portrait, often depicting domestic life at the time. He was a moderately well-known painter of this genre and had a select number of patrons, but was relatively poor at the time of his death, and left his wife and children in dept. After being relatively well known at the height of his career he was not renowned as one of the great artists in till the late 1800.
Relatively little is known about the artist, apart from some documentation and notes from other artists at the time, but what people have been able to gather over the years is this, his father was a silk and taffeta seller, and was apprenticed in Amsterdam for a time. He married in 1615 to Catharina Bolenes, which was a good match as she was wealthy than him, but came from a catholic family, so could be the reason why he became catholic, in order to marry her and moved to Delft with her, and had many children with her. In 1631 he leased an inn called the “flying fox” and later a larger inn but this put financial problems upon the family, then his father died and he took over his father’s business. He moved into his mother in law 15 years before his death. He was known to be part of the artist guild of the city, and some other artist of that period has recognised him in documents.
His work
He did relatively few pieces during his life time, compared to other Dutch masters at the time, as he worked slowly and with great detail, in the light and the perspective of the people and the furniture within the images. Within his work he used lots of bright colours, especially with blue and yellow, he used expensive pigments in order to do this like using lapis lazuli and Indian yellow, which were foreign and imported in to the city of Delft.
A lot of the paintings he did during his life time were set within his home, as when you look at the backgrounds, it looks like that It is set in two rooms, with similar furniture, moved around for the specific portrait he was painting. This was similar for the people who were portrayed within these paintings; they were mostly women, often the same people. A lot of his work