Vermeer, who painted exquisite light-infused scenes of middle-class life in Delft, was a slow craftsman and produced few works in his lifetime. Many of his paintings were scooped up by wealthy Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven, which may be why his fame didn't spread to other Dutch art centers. In fact, Vermeer was relatively unknown until 1866, when French critic Théophile Thoré saw his "View of Delft" in The Hague. This book features detailed walking tours of Delft, the Hague and Amsterdam where the artist lived, loved and labored. Readers will discover the sights and stories behind such an iconic work like "Girl with a Pearl Earring."

Van Gogh, Munch, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Goya are five iconic European artists whose inspirational works have been obsessed over by art lovers and travelers for years. To see masterpieces such as Starry Night and The Scream up close is awe-inspiring, but this guide offers true devotees even more. The book provides detailed walking tours of Van Gogh's Arles, France; Munch's Oslo, Norway; Vermeer's Delft, Netherlands; Caravaggio's Rome, Italy; and Goya's Madrid, Spain; as well as meticulously researched articles on the artists' lives. It is packed with useful sidebars, suggested itineraries, museum locations, and an extended index of artwork, and features color photographs of more than 150 paintings.

This study of Marcel Proust's creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author's dependence on secondary visual sources. Gabrielle Townsend argues that reproductions play a key role in the work's complex, multi-layered structure.

In this critical darling Vermeer's captivating and enigmatic paintings become windows that reveal how daily life and thought-from Delft to Beijing--were transformed in the 17th century, when the world first became global. A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty--but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur from North America, and it was beaver pelts from America that financed the voyages of explorers seeking routes to China-prized for the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time, including Vermeer's. In this dazzling history, Timothy Brook uses Vermeer's works, and other contemporary images from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to trace the rapidly growing web of global trade, and the explosive, transforming, and sometimes destructive changes it wrought in the age when globalization really began.

Van Gogh, Munch, Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Goya are five iconic European artists whose inspirational works have been obsessed over by art lovers and travelers for years. To see masterpieces such as Starry Night and The Scream up close is awe-inspiring, but this guide offers true devotees even more. The book provides detailed walking tours of Van Gogh's Arles, France; Munch's Oslo, Norway; Vermeer's Delft, Netherlands; Caravaggio's Rome, Italy; and Goya's Madrid, Spain; as well as meticulously researched articles on the artists' lives. It is packed with useful sidebars, suggested itineraries, museum locations, and an extended index of artwork, and features color photographs of more than 150 paintings.

Johannes Vermeer's luminous paintings are loved and admired around the world, yet we do not understand how they were made. We see sunlit spaces; the glimmer of satin, silver, and linen; we see the softness of a hand on a lute string or letter. We recognise the distilled impression of a moment of time; and we feel it to be real. We might hope for some answers from the experts, but they are confounded too. Even with the modern technology available, they do not know why there is no evidence of any preliminary drawing; why there are shifts in focus; and why his pictures are unusually blurred. Some wonder if he might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture what he saw before him. The few traces Vermeer has left behind tell us little: there are no letters or diaries; and no reports of him at work. Jane Jelley has taken a new path in this detective story. A painter herself, she has worked with the materials of his time: the cochineal insect and lapis lazuli; the sheep bones, soot, earth, and rust. She shows us how painters made their pictures layer by layer; she investigates old secrets; and hears travellers' tales. She explores how Vermeer could have used a lens in the creation of his masterpieces. The clues were there all along. After all this time, now we can unlock the studio door, and catch a glimpse of Vermeer inside, painting light.

Art historians have long speculated on how Vermeer achieved the uncanny mixture of detached precision, compositional repose, and perspective accuracy that have drawn many to describe his work as "photographic." Indeed, many wonder if Vermeer employed a camera obscura, a primitive form of camera, to enhance his realistic effects? In Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman traces the development of the camera obscura--first described by Leonaro da Vinci--weighs the arguments that scholars have made for and against Vermeer's use of the camera, and offers a fascinating examination of the paintings themselves and what they alone can tell us of Vermeer's technique. Vermeer left no record of his method and indeed we know almost nothing of the man nor of how he worked. But by a close and illuminating study of the paintings Steadman concludes that Vermeer did use the camera obscura and shows how the inherent defects in this primitive device enabled Vermeer to achieve some remarkable effects--the slight blurring of image, the absence of sharp lines, the peculiar illusion not of closeness but of distance in the domestic scenes. Steadman argues that the use of the camera also explains some previously unexplainable qualities of Vermeer's art, such as the absence of conventional drawing, the pattern of underpainting in areas of pure tone, the pervasive feeling of reticence that suffuses his canvases, and the almost magical sense that Vermeer is painting not objects but light itself. Drawing on a wealth of Vermeer research and displaying an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of the work itself, Philip Steadman offers in Vermeer's Camera a fresh perspective on some of the most enchanting paintings ever created.