Johannes Vermeer – Homeschool Oklahoma

Picture Study is simple. Look at the picture with your children for a few minutes, and then talk about what you saw. Try to remember as much about the piece as you can. Enjoy the beauty of it. Art is not a chore; it’s a pleasure. We’ve chosen some works by Vermeer for this month.

Biography:

Johannes Vermeer van Delft was a Dutch artist who lived from 1632-1675. Very little is known about his life and career, but the art he left behind is beautiful. Vermeer created some of the most exquisite works of Western art, in which he displays everyday life. Many of his pieces highlight a single character inside a room, such as this Milkmaid and Geographer. Unfortunately, once Vermeer passed away, his thirty-five works were lost or ignored for two centuries.

Vermeer experimented with the camera obscura, which was a device that projected the image of objects in sunlight with extraordinary realism. The camera obscura eventually led to the development of photography. Indeed, the portraits Vermeer painted were very much in the spirit of photography – capturing a person doing something normal in a beautiful way.