Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer was a painter of the Dutch Republic, born in Delft in October 1632, who died in the same city in 1675. He specialized in scenes of middle-class life set in domestic interiors.

He is now considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and his work belongs to Baroque painting. His standing in his own lifetime was more modest: he was a fairly successful genre painter with a provincial reputation, known in Delft and The Hague. He painted relatively few pictures and earned most of his living as an art dealer. He also collected art. He was not wealthy, and at his death his wife was left in debt.

Among his best-known paintings are The Milkmaid, Girl with a Pearl Earring, View of Delft, The Geographer, The Astronomer, The Procuress, A Girl Asleep, Diana and her Nymphs, and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. His work is held today by museums and collections including the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Städel Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Scottish National Gallery, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Royal Collection.

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, also known as Woman with a Water Jug, is the painting shown here. It is oil on canvas, made about 1662 in the Baroque style. It shows a woman in an interior; a window, a water pitcher and a map also appear in the picture.

The canvas measures 18 by 16 inches (45.7 by 40.6 centimeters). Henry G. Marquand gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889 as part of the Marquand Collection, and it belongs to the museum’s European Paintings department.