Johannes Vermeer

Vermeer spent almost his whole life in Delft, where he also dealt in art and ran an inn. He worked slowly, and only about thirty-five paintings survive, most showing women absorbed in quiet tasks in sunlit interiors.

He died deep in debt, and his name was all but forgotten for two centuries until the French critic Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him in the nineteenth century, calling him “the Sphinx of Delft”.