Johannes Vermeer

The painter of small domestic interiors lit by a north-facing window from the left — a body of work so consistent in its quality and mood that it constitutes, in the words of the art historian Lawrence Gowing, 'the most perfect small oeuvre in the history of painting.' Vermeer was born in Delft, apparently trained there, and spent his entire working life in the city. He was also an art dealer, inheriting the trade from his father, and apparently supported a household of eleven children partly through dealing rather than painting. Only about thirty-five paintings are securely attributed to him, which, given that he worked for some thirty years, implies either great deliberateness or great losses. The paintings are studies in the relationship between light, surface and psychological interiority. The same model — almost certainly his wife Catharina — appears in many of them, caught in some ordinary act: reading a letter, weighing pearls, pouring milk. The light in each case is exact, specific, the product of minute observation (and, it is now generally accepted, of the optical aid of a camera obscura). The surfaces — tablecloth, earthenware, blue and white Delftware — are differentiated with a sensory precision that amounts to a kind of phenomenology of domestic attention. Vermeer died in 1675 at forty-three, leaving debts. He was almost completely forgotten for two centuries, until the French critic Théophile Thoré identified his work and championed his name in a series of articles in the 1860s. The 20th century placed him among the half-dozen greatest painters who ever lived. The Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), now in The Hague's Mauritshuis, has become as iconic as the Mona Lisa.