Johannes Vermeer Prints
1632–1675 · Dutch · Dutch Golden Age
The quiet light of the Dutch Golden Age — Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and his luminous interiors. Restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte paper.
35 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer was baptised in Delft in October 1632 and spent his whole life in the town, working in rooms of his mother-in-law's house on the Oude Langendijk. Nothing is documented about his training; he joined the painters' Guild of Saint Luke in December 1653 and was elected its head in 1662 and again in 1670. He painted slowly and for a small circle of local buyers, and only thirty-four surviving paintings are generally accepted as his. Most show one or two figures in a quiet interior lit from a window on the left: The Milkmaid of about 1658, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, The Astronomer. He used costly natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli, freely enough to tint shadows and underlayers, which is why the blues in his pictures have not dulled. Girl with a Pearl Earring, from about 1665, and the View of Delft are the exceptions that face outward. Vermeer died in 1675, in debt, at forty-three, and was little known outside Delft until the critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger catalogued his work in 1866. The stillness and the calm, even light are what people hang him for: a Vermeer settles a room.