MILAN – Jan Vermeer , a seventeenth-century Dutch artist, was a skilled master in calibrating light and shadow. His painting seems to be the clear mirror of a peaceful and silent life. But it is only an apparent stillness, because his absorbed figures communicate a sense of mystery and expectation. The beginnings
The news on the life of Jan Vermeer is very scarce: the only sources are some registers, a few official documents and comments from other artists. The date of his birth is not known precisely, it is only known that he was baptized on October 31, 1632, in the Protestant church of Delft. His father is a silk weaver and art dealer, a situation that certainly influences the young Jan. Nothing is known about Vermeer as a child and adolescent. His artistic background is also uncertain. It is not known whether he ever left Delft to study painting elsewhere. In 1653 he marries a Catholic girl with whom he will have eleven children and that same year he becomes a master in the Delft painters’ guild.
( SEE THE GALLERY OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PAINTINGS BY JAN VERMEER ) The technique
Jan Vermeer, coming from the field of materials and fabrics, makes the use and treatment of light his own with the use of dotted color which allows him transparent colors thus giving relief to objects. The almost touchable drapery, the use of blue and yellow are elements found in “The milkmaid”, “The girl with a pearl earring” and “The lacemaker”. The early years
It appears Jan Vermeer painted very little and sold only a portion of his output, as most of his paintings were still in the hands of his family when he died. However, his other activities as an art dealer and innkeeper allowed him to support his large family very well. Vermeer’s early works have warm colors inspired by paintings from the Rembrandt school, while the composition and subjects suggest the influence of the Caravaggists. Pictorial evolution
After the first paintings, Vermeer’s pictorial evolution took a quick and decisive turn. He suited his expressive needs to scenes from everyday life that painters such as Terborch, Nicolas Maese Pieter de Hooch had already successfully developed. His approach to these issues was different. In his contemporaries the anecdote is a fundamental component of the painting. The sense of the universal emerges in Vermeer. In 1662 Vermeer was elected head of the Guild and also confirmed in the following years, a sign that he was considered a respectable citizen. However, in 1672 a severe financial crisis, provoked by the French invasion of the Dutch Republic, caused a collapse in the demands of luxury goods such as paintings and, consequently, Vermeer’s business as an artist and merchant suffered, forcing him to ask for money. loans.READ ALSO: The 15 biographical films dedicated to the greatest painters in the world Death
Overwhelmed by debts, the artist died while still young in December 1675 and, the following year, his wife, forced to declare bankruptcy, declared: “because of the great expenses due to his children and for which he no longer had personal means, he was so afflicted and weakened that he lost his health and died within a day and a half ”. Style
Jan Vermeer is an artist of great originality, who has been neglected for two centuries and only rediscovered since the end of the nineteenth century. About forty works attributed to him have survived, of which only sixteen are autographed. One of the reasons for this limited production is to be attributed to the meticulousness he put into the execution of his paintings, which therefore required a long time to be finished. The painter’s skill derives from the severe application of the canons of Flemish and Dutch painting of the time to which Vermeer adds an exceptional naturalistic perfection. The choice of colors or the combination of tones are carefully measured by the artist in relation to the psychological impact on the observer; the outlines are often blurred by a stroke of color intermediate with respect to the background.
