One of the most talented painters in the Dutch Golden Age , 1632-1675 was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of ordinary life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death. Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours, sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. What strikes in most of his paintings is a certain love, which easily could be called a love sickness, for the people and the objects in his paintings. He created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. After having been virtually forgotten for nearly one hundred years,   Related Paintings of Johannes Vermeer :. | Art of Painting | Private Collection | The Little Street, | Woman Reading a Letter | The Art of Painting, |
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MELeNDEZ, Luis
Spanish Painter, 1716-1780
VROOM, Hendrick Cornelisz.
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1563-1640. He was one of the founders of Dutch marine painting. Painter and draughtsman. By his own account, he received his early training in Delft, home of his mother's family. Van Mander reports that Hendrick's stepfather, like his father a ceramic artist, forced him to work as a decorator of ceramic vessels, which caused the young artist to leave home and embark on extensive travels in Spain and Italy. After working for ecclesiastical patrons in Florence and Rome, he was employed for at least two years (c. 1585-7) by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, who in October 1587 succeeded Francesco I as Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ferdinando's keen interest in ships and the navy seems to have been a determining factor in Vroom's choice of subject-matter. According to Lanzi, he was known in Rome as 'Lo Spagnolo' (since he had arrived there from Spain). Among his earliest works may be a group of marine paintings attributed to him (Rome, Villa Colonna). His friendship in Rome with Paul Bril, mentioned by van Mander, had no effect on Hendrick's painting style, but Bril's influence is discernible in a group of landscape drawings
Willem van de Velde the Elder
(c. 1611 - 13 December 1693) was a Dutch Golden Age seascape painter. Willem van de Velde, known as the Elder, a marine draughtsman and painter, was born in Leiden, the son of a Flemish skipper, Willem Willemsz. van de Velde, and is commonly said to have been bred to the sea. In 1706 Bainbrigg Buckeridge noted that he eunderstood navigation very welle. He married Judith Adriaensdochter van Leeuwen in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1631. His three known legitimate children were named Magdalena, born 1632; Willem, known as the Younger, also a marine painter, born 1633; and Adriaen, a landscape painter, born 1636. His marriage was stormy, at least in its later years. David Cordingly relates that Willem the Elder fathered two children out of wedlock in 1653, one eby his maidservant, and the other by her friend. Nine years later the Elder and his wife went through a legal separation, eon account of legal disputes and the most violent quarrelse. The immediate cause of the dispute was his affair with a married woman.e Michael S. Robinson noted that eon 17/27 July 1662, he and his wife agreed to part. A condition of the separation was that the Elder could recover from his son Adriaen etwo royal giftse, presumably gifts from Charles II for work done in England.e Cordinglyes account further relates that the dispute was still continuing after another ten years, since ein the autumn of 1672 Judith complained to the womanes husband.e Robinson adds that by 1674 the couple emust have been reconcilede, for at a chance meeting with Pieter Blaeu in Amsterdam in July the Elder explained that he was only visiting for a few days ein order to fetch his wifee. His son, Adriaen, had died in Amsterdam in 1672, and Willem the Elder was also fetching his grandson, similarly named Adriaen, who was then aged two. After his move to England, the exact date of which is uncertain, but reportedly at the end of 1672 or beginning of 1673, he is said to have lived with his family in East Lane, Greenwich, and to have used the Queenes House, now part of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, as a studio. Following the accession of William and Mary as King and Queen of England, it appears that this facility was no longer provided, and by 1691 he was living in Sackville Street, now close to Piccadilly Circus. He died in London, and was buried in St Jameses Church, at the south end of the street.