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Girl with Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer
Year: circa 1665
Type; oil on canvas
Dimensions: 17.5 in x 15.4 in
Displayed: Mauritshuis, The Hague

Johannes or Jan Vermeer (baptized in Delft on October 31, 1632, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on December 16, 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death


Despite the fact that he was baptized in a Protestant church, Vermeer married a Catholic girl named Catherina Bolenes in the village Schipluiden. For the groom it was a good match. His mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on April 5, 1653.

His wife gave birth to 14 children, ten of which survived: three sons and seven daughters. The names of ten children are known from wills written by relatives: Maria, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, and Ignatius.

The often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings have been linked to his possible use of a camera obscura, the primitive lens of which would produce halation and, even more noticeably, exaggerated perspective.

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