Johannes Vermeer was a painter in the classic sense. I don't mean because he painted “light” in the 17^th century or because his paintings are super realist with an attention to the mundane. I mean this because when he died he left his family penniless and was a forgotten artist, erased by time, for decades to come.

He was rediscovered in the 19^th century and is now considered one of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age. Vermeer led a pretty middle class existence and in his day was regarded as a moderately successful genre painter.

His wife's family had more money than he and she went on to have 14 children. The couple moved in with Vermeer's mother in law, who owned a spacious house. Vermeer went on to paint day in and out on the front room of the second floor.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665-1666, is astonishing as much for the ethereal beauty of the sitter as for its departure from the Dutch norm of painting every elaborate detail of nature, no matter how inconsequential.

The broad economical style in which Vermeer painted this portrait is in stark contrast to many of his other, highly meticulous, works. Of significance is the manner in which Vermeer paints several elements in soft focus.

Thesehazy details are what many art historians have pointed to as being the characteristic mark of employing an optical manner of working and subsequently lead to their belief that Vermeer was aided by a camera obscura when creating Girl with a Pearl Earring and other works such as Girl with a Red Hat.

What came to be known as the camera obscura, a term first used the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1604, was already known in the 5th Century B.C.. The discovery that lightshone through a pinholeproduced an inverted image on the wall of a darkened room was first made by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle had made similar observations in the 4th century B.C., when he noted that, “sunlight travelling through small openings between the leaves of a tree, the holes of a sieve, the openings wickerwork, and even interlaced fingers will create circular patches of light on the ground."