To celebrate his talent, Google Doodle honored the legendary Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer on Friday, on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the opening of an exhibition at Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art featuring 21 of his works.
Throughout his career, Vermeer was a moderately successful Dutch genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague.
He was born in Delft, Holland, in 1632 to a middle-class family, but little is known about Vermeer's personal life, as none of his personal writings has ever been found, according to Dutch art and cultural magazines.
He is well-known for his seminal artworks, such as the 1665 oil painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Music Lesson or A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, The Girl with the Wine Glass, The Girl with the Red Hat, Mistress and Maid, The Astronomer (1668), and The Geographer (1669).
However, he produced relatively few paintings and evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.
Vermeer can’t be viewed as an artist who only succeeded in capturing in exquisite detail the tranquil scenes of daily life in domestic interior settings.
Indeed, he was endowed with a special style of creating his own golden-age fascinated works that distinguished him from those who made such works their specialty to the extent that he became the founder of a painting technique emulated by others.
His works also are characterized by their dynamic formal qualities of sinuously, curving shapes, or crystallized strata. This sums up as a kind of special Baroque, a sensuous, more vibrant, and engaging type of art.
In the same context, he is an artist who consistently penetrates the boundaries of art and urban design.
His projects during the late 1600s were marked by a deep understanding of early 15th Century avant-garde artists and painters.
It's noteworthy to mention that his notable oil painting Girl with a Pearl Earring has made several literary and cinematic appearances, including a 1999 historical novel of the same name that told a fictional tale about the painting's creation.
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