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Jan or Johannes Vermeer van Delft
(Oct. 31, 1632 Delft - Dec.16, 1675 Delft) Dutch Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Johannes Jan Vermeer enjoyed only slight recognition during his short life and his work was forgotten or confused with that of others during the following century. Today he is ranked among the greatest Dutch masters and considered one of the foremost of all colorists. Although his oil paintings are modest in theme, they exhibit a profound serenity and a splendor of execution that are unsurpassed. No painter has depicted more exquisitely luminous blues and yellows, pearly highlights and the subtle gradations of reflected light, all perfectly integrated within a strictly ordered composition. Vermeer apparently produced only one or two oil paintings a year during his period of greatest activity but created some of the most exquisite paintings in Western art.
His works are rare. Barely 35 works are known to have been painted by Vermeer. In his later works, he produced meticulously constructed interiors with just one or two figures, usually women. These are intimate genre oil paintings in which the principal figure is invariably engaged in some everyday activity, one is reading a letter, another is fastening a collar around her neck, yet another is pouring out milk. Often the light enters Vermeer's oil paintings from a window. He was a master at depicting the way light illuminates objects and in the rendering of materials.
By 1641 his father was sufficiently prosperous to purchase a large house which contained an inn on the market square in Delft where he probably also sold paintings. When he died in 1652 Johannes inherited his father's business. His oil painting output was too small to have been the sole support of his family of 11 children. Only about 35 paintings can be attributed to him with any certainty. Forgeries of Vermeer's work have been frequent, Hans van Meegeren's being the most successful. (Van Meegeren was arrested and charged with collaboration for having sold a "Vermeer" to Herman Goering. After two weeks of imprisonment Van Meegeren revealed that he could not be accused as a collaborator since he had himself painted the painting in question. After being detained in prison for six week, he was placed in a house rented by the Dutch government and there he began to paint, for the benefit of the court authorities, his last "Vermeer" copy, Jesus amongst the Doctors. His charges were changed from collaboration to counterfeiting and sent to prison for 1 year.)
Little is known for certain about Vermeer's life and career. He was the son of a silk worker with a taste for buying and selling art. Vermeer himself was also active in the art trade. He lived and worked in Delft all his life. Not much is known about Vermeer's apprenticeship as an artist either. His teacher may have been Leonaert Bramer, a Delft artist who was a witness at Vermeer's marriage in 1653. In 1653 he enrolled at the local artists guild. His earliest signed and dated oil painting, The Procuress (1656, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), is thematically related to a oil painting that Vermeer owned and that appears in the background of two of his own paintings. Another possible influence was that of Hendrick Terbrugghen, whose style anticipated the light color tonalities of Vermeer's later works.
During the late 1650s, Johannes Vermeer, along with his colleague Pieter de Hooch, began to place a emphasis on depicting figures within carefully composed interior spaces. In early paintings such as The Milkmaid (1658, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) Vermeer struck a delicate balance between the composition and figure elements and he achieved highly sensuous surface effects by applying paint thickly and modeling his forms with firm strokes. Later he turned to thinner combinations of paint to obtain the subtler and more transparent surfaces, such as Woman with a Water Jug (1664, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
After his death at the age of only 42, Vermeer was overlooked by all but the most discriminating art collectors and art historians for more than 200 years. His few oil paintings were attributed to other artists. In 1842, an art historian and critic, Joseph Thore, aka William Burger, discovered the landscape View of Delft. He was in ecstasy and devoted twenty years of his life to researching the artist's true identity. In 1866, W. Burger published the first papers on Vermeer, which lists 42 works. Thanks to him, Vermeer is one of the most famous world artists today.
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The Milkmaid
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View of Delft
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Woman with a Water Jug
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