Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. A moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime, he produced relatively few paintings and was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.

Vermeer worked slowly and carefully, often with expensive pigments. He is renowned for his masterly use of light, evident in canvases such as "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Milkmaid".