Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer was born in October 1632 and spent his life in Delft, a moderately successful genre painter who made his real living as an art dealer. He worked with painstaking care and expensive pigments, painting domestic scenes of middle-class life - almost all set in two small rooms of his own house, the same furniture and people, mostly women, arranged and rearranged under his particular mastery of light. He produced relatively few paintings and died in December 1675, not wealthy, leaving his wife in debt. After his death he sank into obscurity, barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's 1718 survey of Dutch painters and omitted from histories for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him, Thoré-Bürger attributing 66 works in an essay, though only 34 are universally accepted today. Since then his reputation has grown enormously.