Life
For a long time relatively little was known about Vermeer's life. He seems to have been exclusively devoted to his art, living out his life in the city of Delft. In the 19th century the only sources of information were some registers, a few official documents and comments by other artists; it was for this reason that Thoré Bürger named him "The Sphinx of Delft". John Michael Montias added a lot of details on the family from the city archives of Delft, in his Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (1982).
Read more about this topic: Johannes Vermeer
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Thou art a toilsome mole, or less,
A moving mist;
But life is what none can express,
A quickness which my God hath kissed.”
—Thomas Stanley (1625–1678)
“The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)