Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter whose works are among the most admired in art history. With their sophisticated color harmonies, inventive compositions, and poetic use of light, Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1658) and Woman Holding a Balance (1663) glow with a supernatural quality. Born on October 31, 1632 in Delft, Netherlands, his father was a weaver and later an art dealer, this is thought to have sparked the young Vermeer’s interest in painting. His training as an artist is unknown, as he had no identifiable teacher and no attributable students. Adding to this, there are only 36 surviving paintings by the artist, half of which were purchased by a single collector over the course of his career. Despite his mysterious schooling, Vermeer’s mature works exhibit subject matter which is very much in line with the milieu of several other genre painters of the time, including Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch the Younger. Though he mostly painted scenes from a middle distance, one of his best known works is the celebrated bust-length portrait, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), which depicts a young woman in exotic dress. The artist died on December 15, 1675 in Delft, Netherlands. Though not as well known as other painters during his lifetime, Vermeer’s work rose from obscurity to reverence during the mid-19th century. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Maurithuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Courtauld Institute of Art in London, among others.