Vermeer, Johannes

Jan or Johannes Vermeer, also known as Vermeer of Delft (Delft, 1632 - 1675), was a Dutch painter. Although few details of his life are known and fewer than forty secure paintings survive, he is now considered one of the great masters of seventeenth-century painting. His mature art focused on intimate interior scenes and everyday life, rendered with exceptional sensitivity to light, space, atmosphere, and surface. His works combine realism with symbolic depth, and his fame was fully restored from the second half of the nineteenth century onward.