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Johannes Vermeer
The Geographer Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99Diana and Her Companions Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99Woman Holding a Balance Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99The Woman With a Water Jug Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99The Milkmaid Johannes Vermeer
$39.95 – $44.95The Art of Painting Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99The Alley Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99Le Verre de Vin The Glass of Wine Johannes Vermeer
$49.95 – $54.99Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer
$39.95 – $44.95
Johannes Vermeer
Today, the name Vermeer instantly conjures an image of his Girl with the Pearl Earring painting, known as the "Mona Lisa of the North." The 17th century Dutch Master's rendition of an ordinary girl, sublimely glancing at the viewer from a mysterious black background with a shining pearl upon her lobe, has become a universal icon in the canon of Dutch Golden Age artwork. Vermeer's career was devoted to exploring tender moments of everyday life, documenting the private interior spaces of both mind and environment that epitomized the age of Baroque genre works. Yet his mastery of pigment and light elevated the artist beyond the realm of his contemporaries, providing an inimitable glimpse into the lifestyle of his thriving historical era.
Vermeer specialized in scenes of domestic life; a genre he helped catapult within the Baroque lexicon. Many of his paintings contain the same furnishings or motifs that inhabited his own private studio, and his models were often women that he knew or relatives of patrons.
Vermeer was posthumously titled the "Master of Light" due to the delicate attention he paid to express the way light played upon skin, fabrics, and precious stones in his work. His expertise stemmed from using Renaissance techniques such as chiaroscuro, mixed with his own signature utilization of light, shadow, and paint to evoke texture, depth, and emotion.
Colors and pigments were of extreme interest to Vermeer and he was known for his exquisite mixing of ethereal hues. It is said that his long-term patron Pieter van Ruijven bought and provided the artist with expensive ingredients such as lapis lazuli and carmine for these efforts. It is perhaps unsurprising that it was around this time that the painter began his own downward slide into debt, as obsessive as he was about his prized materials.
Vermeer was a modestly successful painter in his lifetime, yet only 34 paintings are attributed to him today (a few more are under question), signifying the artist's semi-lackadaisical handling of his career, which would eventually leave him and his family in debt and despair.
Because financial insecurity, madness, and depression peppered the artist's life, it has been surmised that the calm idyll Vermeer was known to capture in paint reflected a world that he, himself, perhaps wished to inhabit.