Biography:
Vermeer was apprenticed as a painter, but it is not certain where he studied, nor with whom. It is generally believed that he studied in Delft and that his teacher was either Carel Fabritius (1622 - 1654) or Leonaert Bramer (1596 - 1674). On the 29th of December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, which was a trade association for painters. His financial difficulties are revealed by the guild's records, which indicate that he could not initially pay the admission fee. However, in later years he evidently was well established: One of the town's richest citizens, Pieter van Ruijven, became his patron and bought many of his paintings. If he indeed completed only a small number of paintings, his income probably relied largely on his business as an art dealer. In 1662 he was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he was considered an established craftsman among his peers, and a respectable middle-class citizen.

However, a severe economic downturn struck the Netherlands after 1672, when the French invaded the country. This led to a collapse in demand for luxury items such as paintings, and consequently damaged Vermeer's business both as a painter and an art dealer. With a large family to support, Vermeer was forced to borrow money. When Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, he left Catherina and their children with very little money and several debts. In a written document his wife attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. Catherina asked the city council to take over the estate, including paintings, in order to pay off the debts. The famous Dutch microscopist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who also lived in Delft and worked for the city council, was appointed trustee for the estate in 1676. Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catherina and Maria; Catherina sold some of these paintings to pay creditors.

In Delft, Vermeer had been a respected artist, but he was almost unknown outside his home town, and the fact that a local patron, van Ruijven, purchased much of his output reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Vermeer's relatively short life, the demands of separate careers, and his extraordinary precision as a painter all help to explain his limited output. It is assumed that some of his paintings were lost after his death. Nonetheless, Vermeer is now considered one of the great masters of the seventeenth century.

painting gallery
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his work:
Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely 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 which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.

There is no other seventeenth century artist who from very early on in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine. Not only do we see it used in elements that are intended to be shown as blue, like a woman’s skirt, a sky, the headband on the Girl with a Pearl Earring (The Hague), and in the satin dress of his late A Lady Seated at a Virginal (London); Vermeer also used the lapis lazuli widely as underpaint in, for example, the deep yet murky shadow area below the windows in The Music Lesson (London), and The Glass of Wine (Berlin). For the wall beneath the windows - areas in these paintings of intense shadow - Vermeer composed by first applying a dark natural ultramarine, thus indicating an area void of light. Over this first layer he then scumbled varied layers of earth colours in order to give the wall a certain appearance: the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light from the strongly lit interior, reflecting its multiple colours back onto the wall. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object. (see Wadum-95 in References) This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour. A comparable but even more remarkable yet effectual use of natural ultramarine is in The Girl with a Wineglass (Braunsweig). The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and due 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 most generously, such as in the above-mentioned 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 Claesz. van Ruijven being Vermeer’s patron.