![]() ![]() Bailey effectively retells much that is known about many of Vermeer's contemporaries, such as the scientist Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, and speculates on his apparent Catholic faith in the Protestant Netherlands. In this book, Montias traced the artist's life through notary records, discovering that Vermeer's grandfather was a convicted counterfeiter that his grandmother ran illegal lotteries and that the artist himself fathered 13 children and died at the age of 43, completely destitute.Īnother colorful book which fleshes out in a highly readable fashion is Vermeer: A View of Delft by Anthony Bailey. He began a quest to uncover the life of the artist, considered one of the most enigmatic and mysterious. During the course of his research, Montias was surprised to learn that the scholarship on one of his favorite artists, Vermeer, was far from exhausted. Montias' book currently constitutes the basis on which all other research regarding Vermeer's life and immediate social milieu is founded and should be read by anyone interested in Vermeer of the artistic milieu of that period. ![]() John Michael Montias' invaluable Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History was used for the great part of the information contained in this timeline which concerns the artist Vermeer. ![]() However, surviving archival from the following years documents provide an interesting picture and while little can be deduced about the artist's personality, his family background and immediate social milieu is fairly well defined. Only major events of Vermeer's life, baptism, marriage and burial-were recorded in the vellum-bound registers of the Old or the New Church which are preserved now in the Delft archives.Īfter Vermeer's baptism in 1632, little or nothing is known of the artist himself until he marries Catharina Bolnes in 1653. Notorial depositions such as these give us a partial view of individual personalities not only because they emphasize the controversial side of their activities but because they are by and large woefully one-sided and incomplete. The material evidence for seventeenth-century Dutch artists, including Johannes Vermeer, consists chiefly of depositions, business transactional and other documents drawn up by notaries and municipal clerks that force us to consider a person's life from a particular angle closer to his adversarial than to his amicable relations with his fellow men. The Dutch population at large was hardly aware of the "Golden Age of Dutch Painting" in the way we are today and art lovers spoke in different terms about the paintings we so treasure today. Dutch painters wrote next to nothing about themselves or their work since most considered themselves little more than skilled artisans. There existed no private art galleries, no queuing up to major international exhibits, no critical reviews in newspapers and painfully little art writing at all. Modern art enthusiasts should always keep in mind that the twentieth-century art world has little in common with that of Johannes Vermeer. Dutch painters of the 16th & 17th century I - II - III - IV - V - VI.Prominent European painters of Vermeer's era. ![]()
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