Know the Artist_ Johannes Vermeer

He immortalized quiet moments of 17th century life with sublime clarity. How he managed to do so is a secret that Johannes Vermeer took to his grave. His methods are so opaque that he's been nicknamed the Sphinx of Delft, but he's also the celebrated master of light, regarded as one of the most brilliant and compelling painters of the Dutch Golden Age. This is Several Circles. Radiant luminosity, rich colour, and infinitesimal detail. Johannes Vermeer's paintings are so lifelike that they possess an almost photographic quality. Given the painstaking exertion that each artwork must have demanded, paired with his short lifespan, it's no wonder Vermeer is believed to have made less than 50 paintings, around 34 of which have known whereabouts. And yet few artists lay claim to so many monumental masterpieces. They're tranquil pictures of a distant time, but they emanate an enduring life force, humming with the vitality of his anonymous subjects, some of whom meet our gaze with moving sentience. Their privileged windows into the artist's insular world. We're invited to watch a milkmaid carry out her daily tasks, to drop in on a private music lesson, and to meditate on this uncanny view of the artist's native Delft circa 1660. Vermeer was born in 1632 in the Dutch city of Delft, where he lived, worked, and eventually died. It's a provincial narrative, but Delft had its virtues. An old and picturesque city, Delft was a thriving hub for artists. It prospered from multiple industries, most notably the production of hand-painted blue and white ceramics known as Delftware. Textiles were also a thriving trade in Vermeer's day, and his father was a silk weaver, before pivoting to innkeeping and art dealing. While we don't definitively know what prompted Vermeer's decision to become a painter, it's likely that his proximity to the art market had a part to play in his endeavor. And when his father died in 1652, a 20-year-old Vermeer took over the family business, too. In the spring of 1653, Vermeer married a woman by the name of Katharina Bollnaes. That winter, he joined the respected Delft Guild of St. Luke, an alliance of artists and artisans. He was repeatedly elected head of the guild, a testament to his recognition as a superior painter during his lifetime. How he acquired that supreme skill of his, though, is a mystery. In the absence of a formal association with any tutor or studio, Vermeer was possibly self-taught, but there's plenty of speculation about his influences, and several artists whom he may have learned from, or emulated to some extent. Leonhard Brahmer is one, suggested because he knew Vermeer, although his nocturnal scenes are far from Vermeer's chosen aesthetic. Another sensible contender is Karel Fabritius, a former student of Rembrandt's with an outstanding command of light and space. Hints of Rembrandt's drama-drenched portraiture echo in Vermeer's earliest known paintings, like the dreamy, moonlit Diana and Her Nymphs, and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, with that ochre base and the interplay of light and shadow. Vermeer's use of high-contrast luminosity, or chiaroscuro, is also reminiscent of the Italian painter Caravaggio, who inspired a group of followers, or Caravaggisti, in the Dutch city of Utrecht. It stands to reason that Vermeer would have adapted aspects of both Caravaggio and Rembrandt, two giants of the Baroque period, or at the very least, the younger artists who worked in their traditions. Like Dirk van Baburen, whose Caravaggesque painting entitled The Procuress belonged to Vermeer's wealthy mother-in-law. Vermeer's Procuress, painted in 1656, is one of only three paintings known to bear his signature with a date, and it's thought to contain a rare self-portrait. The Procuress possesses some of the natural light quality that Vermeer would eventually master, but it's clunky and lacks the refinement of his mature paintings. It would seem that he found a more suitable alignment with the style of Pieter de Hooch, who worked in Delft during the 1650s. It was Vermeer's marriage that may have had the most significant bearing on his career. His wife hailed from a distinguished family, which elevated Vermeer, a man of far humbler origins, to the upper echelon where the patrons live. He was purportedly known to a few local and regional collectors, but he's believed to have secured the steadiest patron in the Delft-based Pieter van Rauven, who may have purchased as much as half of Vermeer's output by and by. And his paintings fetched high prices when they sold, which, in addition to Vermeer's art-dealing business, afforded some imperative luxuries. He could avoid teaching students. He had access to the most expensive and exotic pigments, like ultramarine, made from precious lapis lazuli, which amplified the resplendence of his paintings. And he was free to paint as slowly as was needed to meticulously render his images down to the finest nano-detail. That, and he had to focus the rest of his time on maintaining his other businesses. He only completed an estimated average of three paintings a year, max. It wasn't until the latter half of the 1650s that Vermeer began to hone in on his mature style of genre paintings, which depict moments in everyday life. A Maid Asleep marks Vermeer's pivot into the domestic sphere. A lone maidservant steals a cheeky snooze, though Vermeer curiously chose to remove a figure who once loomed in the doorway. He flexes his technical muscles by placing his subjects near windows, so as to portray the way the daylight illuminates their faces, spills across uneven walls, and becomes entangled in the fabrics of their clothing and the weaves of draping textiles, perhaps a nod to his late father. The art of painting is one of Vermeer's most exemplary interior scenes. A spiffy artist paints a model, who poses as Cleo, the muse of history. Victory is her crowning glory, and her trumpet signals the watershed moments of history, which she chronicles in her book. This painting teems with details that show off Vermeer's talent, from the folds of the map to the way the light catches the wall's imperfections and reflects off of the chandelier. The patterned drape, one of Vermeer's favorite technical challenges, is parted to the side, lending a real sense of gravitas, what a gift it is to witness this divine process. The art of painting is typically read as an allegory, a proclamation of the artist's essential role not only as a creator, but as a documenter. These intimate pictures of life inside the home dominate Vermeer's oeuvre, with a small number of extraordinary exceptions, like the girl with the pearl earring. With that beguiling stare, the so-called Mona Lisa of the North has spellbound viewers in endless pursuit of who she was. She's a prime example of a tronie, or face in 17th-century Dutch, an ornamental genre of stock portraiture in which the sitter dons a magnificent costume or makes an exaggerated expression as a way for the artist to showcase their talents. The girl with the pearl earring is Vermeer's most iconic painting, but it could be argued that his portraiture doesn't always exemplify the heights of his virtuosity. Though we only know of two, his street scenes are amongst his most mystifying accomplishments. How arresting is the little street, crafted so realistically that it's hard to believe it's only paint on canvas? And the view of Delft, which seems to defy what even the sharpest eye and the most dexterous hand is capable of. So how on earth did he do it? In 1891, an American artist by the name of Joseph Pennell proposed a radical idea. What if Vermeer painted with the assistance of an optical instrument, like a camera obscura, a device that filters an image through a lens and projects it, on a smaller scale, onto the canvas? From there, the artist can choose to trace it or simply use it as a reference. Pennell noted Vermeer's photographic perspective long before the camera's invention, in Officer and Laughing Girl. The perspective between the two figures is so exact that Pennell figured it would have been practically impossible for Vermeer to have accurately achieved it by simply eyeballing his subjects. Scholars have debated this hypothesis throughout the years, but it was the English artist David Hockney who, together with the optical physicist Charles Falco, most famously brought the debate into the public arena in 2001. They argued that painters as far back as Jan van Eyck were secretly employing optical technologies to yield unprecedented precision. In their opinion, the proof was in the pudding—the paintings gave themselves away. Possible lens artifacts abound in Vermeer's paintings—a slight fuzziness to certain lines and details and what almost looks like a depth of field, a photographic phenomenon by which the subject in focus is sharp, while the surrounding imagery is increasingly blurred. In 2013, the Hockney-Falco thesis was controversially, albeit rather convincingly, demonstrated in the documentary Tim's Vermeer. Without any artistic training, the titular Tim uses a mirrored contraption to replicate Vermeer's The Music Lesson over an arduous 130 days. Of course, his copy doesn't have the soul or finesse of the original, but it's a testament to what an amateur can do with a little help. After all, Vermeer lived at the tail end of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of enlightenment, curiosity, and significant research into the capacities of the lens, from the microscope to the telescope. So why wouldn't Vermeer be duly fascinated with a revelatory apparatus that could also perfect his art? The question is, why are we so bothered by the idea that Vermeer wasn't some kind of alchemist? His paintings would be no less beautiful for it, and there's still immense genius in his mastery of color, value, and composition. His apparent devotion to art most importantly kept him painting, at least until he couldn't paint anymore. 1672 was the infamous year of disaster. As England, France, and Germany simultaneously attacked the Netherlands, the Dutch economy crashed, dragging the art market down with it. Vermeer, who relied on selling not only his paintings but other artists as a dealer, became financially desperate and struggled to protect his family, which had expanded to include 11 surviving children and his assets from relentless debt collectors. The pressure weighed too heavily on him, and he died, aged 43, in 1675, within just a day and a half of a shattering psychotic break. We may never have a clear picture of who Vermeer was, what he looked like, how or where he learned to paint, or what his philosophies were pertaining to art and life, but his far-reaching impact is one of the few truths that can be asserted with confidence. He enjoyed moderate success while he lived, and was more or less forgotten with time after his death. His work was even erroneously attributed to his better-known contemporaries. It wasn't until the 19th century that he was duly reconsidered thanks to an art critic who, awed by Vermeer's view of Delft in The Hague, published an essay that resurrected interest in his work. Vermeer posthumously claimed his place in the canon, and his priceless paintings have inspired modern works of art, literature, and film. Most famously, Tracey Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, a novel about the clandestine relationship forged between Vermeer and his housekeeper, which was adapted into a film, and later a play. Vermeer's old master celebrity has had a few drawbacks. His paintings have been forged and stolen on a shocking scale. In 1940, the art of painting was sold under significant duress to Adolf Hitler. In 1971, the love letter was cut from its frame with a potato peeler and buried in a forest before it was returned to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in dire need of restoration. The guitar player was stolen from London's Kenwood House in 1974 and recovered in a nearby cemetery. Woman writing a letter with her maid was stolen from Rusborough House in Ireland in 1974 and again in 1986. It was successfully repurchased by two undercover cops and transferred to the National Gallery of Ireland, where it remains today. And amongst the most infamous art heist casualties is The Concert, one of 13 paintings stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Estimated at upwards of $200 million, The Concert is still at large. Thanks for watching Several Circles. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos about the lives and work of extraordinary artists from across history and the present day. And let us know in the comments if there's an artist you'd like to know more about.