Vermeer was one of the leading Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The subjects of his paintings are mostly bourgeois characters portrayed as they perform very simple gestures and actions of daily life in serenity, fitting into a rather recurring trend in Dutch art of the era. Rediscovered only in the mid-nineteenth century, he is today considered one of the masters of his time for the innovative use of light in his paintings, conceived in an almost scientific way, thanks to the interest in optics that had developed in Holland ;weather.
