Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life. His entire life was spent in the town of Delft. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime. He seems to have never been particularly wealthy, perhaps due to the fact that he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt at his death. Virtually forgotten for nearly two hundred years, in 1866 the art critic Thoré Burger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 34 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown astronomically, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

Vermeer was apprenticed as a painter, but it is not certain where he studied, nor with whom. It is generally believed that he studied in Delft and that his teacher was either Carel Fabritius (1622 - 1654) or Leonaert Bramer (1596 - 1674). On the 29th of December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Saint Luke's Guild, which was a trade association for painters. During the Dutch Golden Age, painting was not considered an art, but a trade, a way to make a living. His financial difficulties are revealed by the guild's records, which establish that he could not initially pay the admission fee. However, in later years he evidently was well established: One of the town's richest citizens, Pieter van Ruijven, became his patron and bought many of his paintings. If he indeed completed only a small number of paintings, his income probably relied largely on his business as an art-dealer. In 1662 he was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670 and 1671, evidence that he was considered an established craftsman among his peers, and a respectable middle-class citizen.

Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Religious and scientific connotations can be found in his works. His famous painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is now in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.