Who is the painter vermeer

Importantly, there is little trace of Fabritius' style in Vermeer paintings until a few years after Fabritius had died in the infamous Gunpowder explosion of Delft while he was painting a portrait. Leonaert Bramer , the most esteemed painter of Delft, had been traditionally considered Vermeer's teacher, comforted by the fact that he was a friend of the Vermeer family and had even testified in favor of the young painter on the occasion of his marriage to the Catholic Catharina Bolnes.

While one of Vermeer's earliest known works, Diana and her Companions , can securely be related to two works of the same theme by the accomplished Van Loo, there is no evidence that Vermeer had been in those years in Amsterdam, where Van Loo lived. In any case, it should be remembered that not all painters in those times showed the influence of their masters.

As Walter Liedtke pointed out, the discovery of Vermeer's master would probably not be very helpful in clarifying the artist's development—his talents may have simply been nurtured "by beginning not as a painter's apprentice but as an art dealer's son. It seems safe to say that whoever instructed Vermeer had far less impact on the artist's professional course than his upward marriage to a young girl fig.

Painters bought their raw materials from myriad sources, including quacks, traveling sailors and apothecaries. Painters traditionally ground their own paint and stretched their own canvases. However, in Vermeer's time, ready-made pigments and primed canvases in stock dimensions could already be purchased at specialized art dealers. One such dealer in Delft was Leendert Volmarijn.

It is not known where or from whom Vermeer acquired his materials. A bill dated indicates that the artist owed 6 guilders 13 stuivers for medicine to the apothecary Dirck de Cocq. De Cocq is known to have sold lead-tin yellow , the pigment Vermeer used to depict the characteristic yellow garments worn by the female protagonists of his interior scenes. However, the exacting nature of his paintings technique is confirms he used only the highest high grades of natural ultramarine pigment , the most costly pigment available to painters, imported from Afghanistan, via Venice.

Vermeer married Catharina Bolnes, who one and a half years older than he, on April Shortly after, both of their signatures appear on a document together. A cursory examination of the couple's calligraphy fig.

While Vermeer's signature is relatively undemonstrative and controlled, the sensual swirls of the "B" in "Bolnes" and plunging loop of the "h" in "Catharina" denote an uninhibited hand which belongs, perhaps, to a young girl unafraid to show her emotions. It is by and large assumed that their marriage, blessed with eleven children, was a happy one, at least until the financial collapse of the Vermeer family in the final years of the artist's life.

Catharina came from a well-to-do family in Gouda fig. Her mother, Maria Thins c. Catharina's father was Reynier Bolnes — , a prosperous brickmaker from Gouda as well. Three of their children survived infancy, a boy, Willem and two girls, Maria and Cornelia. Catharina was born in when her mother was Catharina was raised Catholic.

Vermeer instead, had been raised as a Protestant. Today a number of scholars maintain that upon marriage Vermeer converted to Catholicism or, at least, he took an active part in bringing up his children in his wife's religion. Three other children were buried in , , One other child born in died in or after The child born in s died in At the artist's death, eleven children were recorded as being alive. Maria must have closely considered her daughter's marriage with Vermeer, since her own marriage had been miserable.

Her father, after 13 years of marriage, had become an ogre. Maria's relatives and neighbors were to testify that they saw him insulting his wife, kicking her, pulling her naked from her bed by her hair when she was sick, attacking her with a stick when she was pregnant, and chasing her out of the house. She was forced to eat her meals by herself. On one occasion, Catharina, aged nine, ran to her neighbors in fright, yelling that her father was about to kill her sister Cornelia.

Maria received the support of her sister and brother, who was himself stabbed in a fight with one of Reynier's brothers while Reynier was bolstered by his son Willem. Years later after the unhappy couple had been legally separated, Catharina and her mother moved into the quiet Catholic enclave, called the papenhoek , "Papists Corner," in Delft, perhaps, seeking solace from their traumatic life in Gouda.

Willem, Catharina's brother, who had sided with his father, later moved in with them when Vermeer was living—and probably painting—there as well. It entailed a move from the lower, artisan class of his Reformed parents to the higher social stratum of the Catholic in-laws, and from Delft's Market Square to its " Papists' Corner ," the Catholic quarter of the city.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Johannes Vermeer , has argued that Vermeer's artistic development had been deeply influenced by his conversion citing as proof three religious pictures painted by Vermeer, Saint Praxedis Wheelock is virtually alone in supporting its authenticity , Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and the late Allegory of Faith.

Following his marriage, Vermeer seemed to have distanced himself from his own family, a fact which can be seen in his apparent failure to name any of his children after his mother or father, a common practice at the time both in Protestant and Catholic families.

The couple named their first daughter Maria, in honor of Maria Thins, and their first son Ignatius, after the patron saint of the Jesuit Order. For more information on Vermeer's Catholic marriage and the implications it had on Vermeer's life and work, click here. Except for his ties with the painters of Delft's guild, evidence suggests that Vermeer's social relationships did not extend far from the Papist's Corner, an inevitable consequence of a Catholic marriage and probable conversion to Catholicism.

At the outset of his career, Vermeer surveyed the styles of various seventeenth-century artists. The first two surviving works reveal the ambitious young painter at grips with the problems of what art theorists considered the noblest form of painting: istoria , or history painting. History painting was intended to offer uplifting or cautionary narratives to encourage contemplation of the meaning of life. The most suitable scenes to be represented were drawn from classical literature, ancient mythology and the Bible.

Although Vermeer's two surviving history paintings are quite large and broadly painted, they betray serious problems in composition, perspective, anatomy and handling of light.

Some Vermeer scholars believe that the first of the two works, Diana and her Companions fig. If that was the case, it is not too difficult to understand why the artist's appeal was left unanswered. Although extraordinarily interesting from an art-historical point of view, the juvenile work was, at least by contemporary standards, hardly a masterpiece.

The heads of the foreground figures are positioned in such a way that their faces are cast in a deep shadow making it impossible to divine their emotions or characters.

The poses—four out five of the figures bend their heads downwards in a frieze-like procession—reiterate the melancholy mood of this picture for which the artist provides no psychological escape except for an unfriendly dark sky.

The disorderly distribution of lights and darks runs counter to the period recommendation to group lights and darks together in order to avoid producing a "checkerboard" effect. The brass basin seems to slip off the bottom of the painting and the large rock in the foreground, in one art historian's opinion, looks like "a sack of potatoes.

However, the young painter made rapid progress. The second history painting, the Christ in the House of Martha and Mary , is artfully composed and fluently painted. The foreshortening of the seated figure's head and clutched hand demonstrate a technical confidence unseen in the earlier Diana and rivals in its exceptional economy of tone, the works by the Utrecht painter Hendrick ter Brugghen, whose religious pictures may have inspired this work by Vermeer.

The colors are lush, the atmosphere resonates with light and shadow and brushwork is reassured, although somewhat complacent in the definition of Christ's robe. However, the artist owed as much to window shopping as to his own compositional prowess. The figure of the Christ and the kneeling Mary can be traced to a painting of the same subject by Erasmus Quellinus II while the poses and positions of all three figures share much in common with an engraving by Georg van de Velde after Otto van Veen.

Borrowing of this sort—termed aemulatio —was not looked down upon per se but, on the contrary, considered a fundamental part of the learning process. What was important was to make the borrowing one's own. Other than the Diana and her Companions and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary period source inform that Vermeer painted at least two more history paintings: "En graft besoeck - ende van der Meer guilden," a Visitors to a Tomb , probably a representation of the Three Marys at the Sepulcher, a story from the New Testament, and a mythological J upiter Venus and Mercury , perhaps a misunderstanding of Jupiter, Mercury and Psyche or Virtue , the more common motif of the two.

On June 27, , the former work was in the collection of Johannes Renialme, a young "gentleman dealer" who came from a distinguished family with members in Antwerp and Venice.

Although the young painter must have been justifiably pleased to have his work in a solid art collection, it was valued at 20 guilders while a "perspectieff," a painting whose most salient feature is its perspective, by the modest Hendrick van Vliet was valued at guilders. Although Vermeer would soon veer to an entirely new genre for which he is known, the late Allegory of Faith shows that he had not completely abandoned religious subject matter. The young artist's next step was another large-scale work, The Procuress fig.

The new position established him as a well-respected painter in his own right, although the few paintings that exist have led many scholars to calculate that the artist only produced three or so paintings per year. One day in , while Vermeer was away from the house, his wife's absent and aggressive brother Willem returned and physically attacked the heavily pregnant Catherina, threatening to stab her with a pointed metal stick.

The mother and unborn child were saved from the attack when the Vermeers' maidservant put herself between the siblings. According to court records, Willem was heard to shout "she-devil" and "old popish swine" at Catherina and her mother Maria, before being taken away and incarcerated until the end of his life.

Interestingly, the traumatic, violent episode didn't make its way into Vermeer's art. On the contrary, the calm idyll that Vermeer was known to capture in paint reflects a world that he, himself, perhaps wished to inhabit. The wealth of his wife's family allowed Vermeer to paint for his own pleasure, rather than to support his family as was the case for most other painters, and he never took on pupils or apprentices. The painter was also known to have used expensive pigments like lapis lazuli for the skirt of The Milkmaid and deep carmine for the dress of The Girl with a Wineglass.

While some have suggested that Vermeer's long-term patron Pieter van Ruijven would have bought and supplied the artist with these exclusive ingredients, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was around this time that the painter began his own downward slide into debt. This led to a dramatic economic crash for the once prosperous, middle-class country. The art market plummeted, and Vermeer could barely afford to keep himself, his wife, her mother, and his eleven children.

He took on increasing amounts of debt, borrowing thousands of guilders, and was even caught pocketing his mother-in-law's money. Vermeer died on December 16, , having fallen into a fit of madness and depression. In the court records, his wife stated that, " As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.

Since Vermeer had been so adept at capturing moments of ordinary beauty, he became a major influence on these artists, who revived an awareness of the master's work.

Despite the fact that only 34 3 more are disputed Vermeers of his pieces have survived, Vermeer is considered today to be one of the greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age. In the twentieth-century, the Surrealist Salvador Dali became entranced by Vermeer's work and produced his own variations including The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft which can be used as a Table in , as well as The Lacemaker After Vermeer in Most recently, the anonymous British graffiti artist Banksy reinterpreted and reproduced the painting on a building in Bristol, UK, using a burglar alarm in place of the iconic pearl earring.

Content compiled and written by Ellie Birch. For example, in Christ in the House of Martha and Mary ca. As the painter worked on a picture, the world of art was constantly tested against direct observation. Vermeer was intensely preoccupied with the behavior of light and other optical effects such as sudden recessions and changes of focus. His compositions are mostly invented and exhibit the most discriminating formal relationships, including those of color. In his best works, these qualities suit the subject matter exceedingly well.

Vermeer idealized a domestic world occupied if not animated mostly by women, whose postures, behavior, and in some cases expressions suggest close study and sympathy in this the artist resembles Gerard ter Borch, the Younger, whose work he knew.

He often suggests some connection between a figure and the viewer, subtly casting the latter in the role of a spellbound voyeur. A Maid Asleep A few bust-length studies of figures, like the celebrated Girl with a Pearl Earring Mauritshuis , must be based on live models but were not intended as portraits. Liedtke, Walter. Duparc, Frederik J. Wheelock, Jr. Johannes Vermeer.