Vermeer, Jan

(1632-1675, Dutch)

Jan Vermeer oil painting reproductions

Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer (baptized October 31, 1632, died December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life. His entire life was spent in the town of Delft. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime. He seems to have never been particularly wealthy, perhaps due to the fact that he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt at his death. Virtually forgotten for nearly two hundred years, in 1866 the art critic Thoré Burger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 34 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown astronomically, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

Relatively little is known about Vermeer's life. The only sources of information are some registers, a few official documents and comments by other artists. The following biography attempts to give an impression of what we can surmise about the life of this Dutch masterpainter.

Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632, in the city of Delft in The Netherlands. The precise date of his birth is unknown but we do know that he was baptised on October 31, 1632, in the Reformed Church in Delft. His father, Reynier Vermeer, was a lower middle-class silk weaver and an art dealer. He married Johannes' mother, Digna, who was from Antwerp, Belgium, in 1615. Reynier Vermeer's name actually was Reynier Vos (Fox), but he used the name Van der Meer. It was likely he who introduced the young Johannes to the art of painting. The Vermeer family bought a large inn, the "Mechelen", near the market square in Delft in 1641. Reynier Vermeer probably served as inn-keeper while also acting as a merchant of paintings. After Reynier's death in 1652, Johannes Vermeer inherited the Mechelen as well as his father's art-dealing business.

Despite the fact that he came from a Protestant family, he married a Catholic, named Catherina Bolnes, in April 1653. It was an unlikely marriage: in addition to the religious difference, a serious issue at that time (Catholics were an unpopular religious minority in mainly Calvinist Holland), Bolnes' family was significantly wealthier than Vermeer's. Vermeer probably converted to Catholicism shortly before their marriage (certainly, all his children were named after Catholic saints rather than his own mother and father, and one of his paintings, The Allegory of Faith, manifests a Catholic belief in the Eucharist).

Some time after their marriage, the couple left the Mechelen and moved in with Catherina's mother, Maria Thins, a well-off widow, in a house in the "Papist corner" of the town, where the Catholics lived in relative isolation. Vermeer would live in his mother-in-law's house with his wife and children for the rest of his life. Maria apparently played an important role in their life, for they named their first daughter after her, and it is possible that she used her comfortable income to help support the struggling painter and his growing family. Maria Thins was a devotee of the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church, and this, too, seems to have influenced Johannes and Catherina, for they called their first son Ignatius, after the founding saint of the Jesuit Order. Johannes and Catherina had fourteen children in total, three of whom predeceased Vermeer.

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 Saint Luke's Guild, which was a trade association for painters. During the Dutch Golden Age, painting was not considered an art, but a trade, a way to make a living. His financial difficulties are revealed by the guild's records, which establish 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 with 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 Jan 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.

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, 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.

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes.

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 splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Religious and scientific connotations can be found in his works.

His famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.

Ref: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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