Vermeer was born in his father's house/store in Delft, a small town in the Netherlands. It is unknown if he traveled, but he was born, married and died there. When his father died he took over the family business and continued to supported himself and his family as a dealer in art. He died young, at 43.

He enrolled in the artists' guild in December of 1653 without sufficient money to cover his dues. In those days artists were considered skilled workmen, like carpenters or plumbers. Skilled workmen were examined and qualified by a "guild" or brotherhood of similar workmen. The St. Luke's Guild was the organization for painters. To enter a guild you had to serve an apprenticeship and be approved of by some number of masters. Vermeer probably did his apprenticeship in Delft and planned to make money by selling portraits and other art for a living.

Before he had finished his artist's apprenticeship, Vermeer was married, on 5 April 1653. His marriage produced a dozen children, of which, only three died early in life.

Four of five early pictures grouped below are listed as "unsigned but not attributable to any other artist" by Encyclopedia Britannica. Never-the-less, E.B. is probably in error on at least two counts: Saint Praxidis is not listed by E.B. at all, although it seem widely accepted as an authentic Vermeer, and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary is signed on the stool. So it seems E.B. is perhaps not the best authority to use for dating the Vermeer paintings. The problem is that every source seems to have it's own dating of Vermeer pictures. So the picture chronology here is somewhat arbitrary, the dates and locations below the pictures are mostly taken from Encyclopedia Britannica article, but should be considered questionable.

Saint Praxidis
1655
oil on canvas; 102×83 cm
Barbara Johnson Collection,
Princeton, New Jersey, US

Christ with
Martha and Mary
about 1654
National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh, Scotland

Napping Woman
about 1656
oil on canvas; 88×77 cm
Metropolitan Museum
New York, NY, US

The Procuress
1656
oil on canvas; 143×130 cm
Gemaldegalerie
Dresden, Germany

If one assumes the dating and selection of Vermmer's pictures is correct, then there is awkwardness in these early paintings that disappers later in Vermeer's career. The sense of photographic exactness which characterizes the later work is not present, although one can begin to sense it in The Procuress. Certainly the first three early pictures do not fit into the general subject matter that Vermeer used in his mature period. It may be that more early paintings exist but have just not been attributed to Vermeer because they don't reflect his mature style. In his later work Vermeer painted mostly Dutch aristocratic and upper-middle class society in acts of daily life. These are called genre paintings (as opposed to religious or mythological paintings like the ones above).

The lack of authenticated early paintings has let to interesting developments in the 20th Century.

All of the generally accepted Vermeer paintings are available either on this page or the next one.

Vermeer had a reasonable reputation as an artist during his own life; he was elected chairman of the artists' guild twice. But as far as any existing records indicate he seems never to have sold one of his creations. The reason for this is unknown.

Girl Drinking Wine
with a Gentleman
about 1658-60
oil on canvas; 78×67 cm
Staatliche Museen
Preussischer Kulturbesitz
Berlin, Germany

Milkmaid
1658-60
oil on canvas; 46×41 cm
Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The principle of the pinhole camera obscura was known by Aristotle, and it had been used to observe eclipses of the sun for more than a millennium. Lenses were a more recent arrival, but they had been known for some time before Vermeer. Some documents put "seeing aids" in Florence in the 1200s. About the same time Roger Bacon, in England, applied mathematical geometric principles to glass and light, and thus started the science of optics. Also there were references to eyeglasses in Germany about 1260. Certainly lenses were in common use by 1600 for a variety of mundane tasks like counting the number of threads per inch in linen cloth and for correcting eyesight. Lenses began to be used scientifically as microscopes by Robert Hook in England, and van Leuwenhoek in Holland in 1650s. Both Hook and Leuwenhoek ground their own lenses.

Van Leuwenhoek, was another merchant living and working close to Vermeer in Delft, when Vermeer died he served as the court appointed executor of Vermeer's will; this appointment could be just formal, but it is more likely a reflection of a well known earlier friendship.

Lenses which projected images on tracing paper and used as a aid for artists had been in use for at least fifty years. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) named this device a camera obscura , which is Latin for "dark room". At this time, it meant a room, tent, or box with a lens. The lens made the image brighter and focused the picture at a certain distance. The first camera obscuri were large. In a book written in 1646, Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) describes one with an outer shell with lenses in each wall, and an inner shell with transparent paper for drawing; apparently the artist entered by a trapdoor. So the use of the lens for assisting an artist was well known by the time of Vermeer.

The evidence for Vermeer's use of a home made camera obscura is all indirect, but still pretty convincing. Many of his pictures are from the same room. This has been demonstrated by recreating the room in miniature and recreating the composition of the pictures by a small camera obscura which projected on the back wall of the room [Steadman]. Vermeer's pictures turn out to be the exact size that would be predicted from such a set up.

Lenses were commercially available as magnifying glasses. These would work well in a camera obscura. Or he could have gotten one or more lenses from van Leuwenhoek. Van Leuwenhoek, was a merchant who sold cloth not far from Vermeer's art store in Delft. They were about the same age, in the same social class, and had related occupations. It is impossible to think they did not know each other and would talk about the new things they were doing. Van Leuwenhoek could not draw, and he hired artists to make drawings of what he discovered under the microscope. It is fun to conjecture that the artist he hired might well have been Vermeer.

One could guess a pattern of artistic development based on Vermeer's use of the lens. This is pure fantasy, but it may not stray far from the truth. Vermeer's use of perspective in his apprenticeship was not great, and this gave him some trouble with his master. In other ways he excelled, especially in his use of color and composition. The master recommended him for the St. Luke's Guild despite his lack of facility with perspective.

Sometime later a magnifying glass came to Vermeer, and in playing with it, he projected an image of the windows on a piece of paper or maybe the wall. Seeing the perspective correctly rendered it occurred to him that if he could use it to trace then his perspective would be perfect. He saw the difference between the artistic perspective of artists and the more perfect perspective of the lens and felt he could reach for a new level of reality in his paintings. He build a camera obscura in a room in his house and began to experiment.

Van Leuwenhoek may even play a part in this, either by insisting on accuracy in the drawing of what Vermeer saw in the microscope, or just from arguing the philosophy of recording nature as seen through a dispassionate machine... the lens. Carried to it's logical conclusion this philosophy implies genre painting, that is representing reality as it is. Not painting the fantasy of biblical or Greek mythologic scenes. One can see Vermeer straining to go beyond genre painting in the two allegory paintings: the Allegory of Painting seems to work well, and the Allegory of Faith, done a decade later seems to over-reach and fall flat. The essential problem of modern photography as art was discoverd by those experiments.

Painting slowly from sketches made from the camera obscura and from long periods of examining every detail of the images projected Vermeer got a much stronger sense of the way light interacts with objects and the environment. What becomes of this is the famous Vermeer 'photographic' style.

The Little Street
1657-58
oil on canvas; 54×44 cm
Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A View of Delft
1660-61
oil on canvas; 99×118 cm
Mauritshuis
The Hague, The Netherlands

A View of Delft is 3.25 feet high by 4.3 feet (98x188 cm) wide, a big picture for Vermeer. Where as The Little Street is only 21 by 17 inches (54x44 cm) less that a quarter the size and fairly normal for most Vermeer pictures.

In the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Vermeer, the author comments:

A close scrutiny of his paintings also brings to mind the idea of an artist confined to the rooms that he is depicting, attentive to all the objects separating him from his main theme but giving no hint whether he considers them obstacles to his progression or supports in a difficult enterprise. It should be added here that the two known landscapes by Vermeer were both painted from a window; it is uncertain whether it was some physical infirmity or merely the wish to paint with all his supplies at hand that rooted Vermeer to the stool on which he portrayed himself, seen from the back, in his “Allegory of Painting.”

If you accept the fact that Vermeer used a camera obscura, it would explain all of mysteries described above. What is interesting in the Allegory of Painting is that there is no visible camera obscura, so maybe if he used one, the model depicted as the artist is a "stand-in" for the figure that most art historians consider Vermeer himself.

In The Music Lesson is the middle picture in the first line below; in it there are two pictures on the wall. The picture on the right has been identified as a picture by Baburen named The Procuress. This picture also occurs in A Lady Seated at a Virginals. This Baburen was owned by the Vermeer's family after he died. He may have borrowed from another family member for this sitting, or perhaps it he even owned it.

The Astronomer
1668
oil on canvas; 50×45 cm
Louvre, Paris, France

The Geographer
1668-69
oil on canvas; 53×47 cm
Steadelsches Kunstinstitut
Frankfurt, Germany

There has been speculation that these portraits are Van Leuwenhoek. If you accept the use of the camera obscura in Vermeer's art and the Van Leuwenhoek friendship, then one or both of the above pictures could be portraits of Van Leuwenhoek. Nothing would be more natural.

The argument against this identification is that since Van Leuwenhoek acted as the executor of Vermeer's will, he could have gotten one or both of the pictures for himself. A year later they were sold at a public auction when Vermeer's wife went bankrupt. Since he didn't end up owning the pictures, presumably he was not the model.

The Lace Maker is a very small picture, 9 1/2 by 8 1/4 inches (24 by 21 cm). It would fit nicely on a 17 inch monitor. So using the enlargement you can see almost every detail of the picture. It has unconventional lighting for a Vermeer, the woman is lit from the right rather than the left. Perhaps, Vermeer was trying out a new portable camera obscura with a smaller lens. The Lady Seated at the Virginal is a more conventional size and it is also lit from the right.

Most of his life Vermeer made money as an art dealer which produced a living wage to support his wife and children. Because of a decline in the art market, primarily caused by political instability and wars in Holland during the early 1670s, he was bankrupt at the time of his death in 1675.

After his death he was quickly forgotten. So he had little effect on art history until he was rediscovered in the middle of the 19th century by Theóphile Thoré, a French art historian (with pseudonym of Ham Bürger), who attributed 76 paintings to him. Scholar's have been examining and evaluating pictures from this group for a century and a half and the number of "authenticated" Vermeer's quickly dropped to around 35. The earlier the painting in Vermeer's life, the more likely the authorship is likely to be disputed. There may be more Vermeer pictures around, to find some authenticated early work might shed real insight into the development of the style used in his later pictures.

Twenty-five years after Vermeer died the practice of artists using optical assistance to get perspective correct seems to be a common occurrence. In 1807 a portable version of the camera obscura using a lens and prism had been invented; this portable device, the camera lucida, could be used in daylight.

David Hockney, a modern artist, has insisted recently that the camera lucida was a common tool used by artists to create proper perspective, and that it was used extensively until the development of photography about a hundred and fifty years ago. After photography artists could use photos in place of a sketch to aid in producing their art. Recently, Hockney has been doing sketches using a camera lucida, bringing the tool out of the closet.

In modern terms using a camera lucida is a bit like scanning a photograph and then "working it over" in a computer using photo editing tool; but using a camera lucida requires a lot more training both methods require a great deal of talent.

The Lace Maker is a very small picture, 9 1/2 by 8 1/4 inches (24 by 21 cm). It would fit nicely on a 17 inch monitor. So using the enlargement you can see almost every detail of the picture. It has unconventional lighting for a Vermeer, the woman is lit from the right rather than the left. Perhaps, Vermeer was trying out a new portable camera obscura with a smaller lens. The Lady Seated at the Virginal is a more conventional size and it is also lit from the right.

Most of his life Vermeer made money as an art dealer which produced a living wage to support his wife and children. Because of a decline in the art market, primarily caused by political instability and wars in Holland during the early 1670s, he was bankrupt at the time of his death in 1675.

After his death he was quickly forgotten. So he had little effect on art history until he was rediscovered in the middle of the 19th century by Theóphile Thoré, a French art historian (with pseudonym of Ham Bürger), who attributed 76 paintings to him. Scholar's have been examining and evaluating pictures from this group for a century and a half and the number of "authenticated" Vermeer's quickly dropped to around 35. The earlier the painting in Vermeer's life, the more likely the authorship is likely to be disputed. There may be more Vermeer pictures around, to find some authenticated early work might shed real insight into the development of the style used in his later pictures.

Twenty-five years after Vermeer died the practice of artists using optical assistance to get perspective correct seems to be a common occurrence. In 1807 a portable version of the camera obscura using a lens and prism had been invented; this portable device, the camera lucida, could be used in daylight.

David Hockney, a modern artist, has insisted recently that the camera lucida was a common tool used by artists to create proper perspective, and that it was used extensively until the development of photography about a hundred and fifty years ago. After photography artists could use photos in place of a sketch to aid in producing their art. Recently, Hockney has been doing sketches using a camera lucida, bringing the tool out of the closet.

In modern terms using a camera lucida is a bit like scanning a photograph and then "working it over" in a computer using photo editing tool; but using a camera lucida requires a lot more training.

Don't think that because an artist uses a tool, that the art is any less creative. Perspective is a method to organize a picture, but it can equally destroy one. To use perspective properly, and get a satisfactory result, may be easier with a tool like the camera lucida or a photograph, but sketching while using these tools still requires both talent and training.

An painter should use whatever tools he can. Painting is not about a method of drawing in some predefined arcane way. It is about the insight and production skills that a painter uses to raise the mundane image to the extraordinary one. Some painters have always tried the latest technology to help them produce the image they want. David Hockney is out spoken that technology and painting have always gone hand in hand. David (and I mean you: David Hockney), when are you going try the latest technology and show us some real computer based art?