Johannes Vermeer

Around thirty-five paintings by Vermeer are generally accepted, which for a career of roughly twenty years is about two a year — a rate that tells you most of what you need to know about how he worked. He spent his whole life in Delft, ran an art dealing business inherited from his father, served twice as head of the painters' guild, had fifteen children of whom eleven survived him, and died in debt at forty-three, leaving his widow to petition for bankruptcy. Almost all the paintings are interiors, most lit from a window on the left, and many reuse the same objects and the same corner of the same room. The technical questions about him are still live: the stippled highlights and certain optical artefacts have led many scholars to argue he used a camera obscura, and others to argue the evidence is overread. After his death he was largely forgotten for nearly two centuries until the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger assembled and published the attribution in the 1860s.