A Timeline of Vermeer's Life - 1632-1640
Childhood
Vermeer and his Milieu: A Web of Social History
by John Michael Montias
1991
available at AMAZON.COM
Modern art enthusiasts should always keep in mind the the twentieth-century art world has little in common with that of Johannes Vermeer. There existed no private art galleries, no queuing up to major international exhibits, no critical reviews in newspapers and painfully little art writing at all. Dutch painters wrote next to nothing about themselves or their work since most considered themselves little more than skilled artisans. The Dutch population at large was hardly aware of the "Golden Age of Dutch Painting" in the way we are today and art lovers spoke in different terms about the paintings we so treasure today.
The material evidence for seventeenth-century Dutch artists, including Johannes Vermeer, consists chiefly of depositions, business transactional and other documents drawn up by notaries and municipal clerks that force us to consider a person's life from a particular angle closer to his adversarial than to his amicable relations with his fellow men. Notorial depositions such as these give us a partial view of individual personalities not only because they emphasize the controversial side of their activities but because they are by and large woefully one-sided and incomplete. Only major events of Vermeer’s life, baptism, marriage, and burial-were recorded in the vellum-bound registers of the Old or the New Church which are preserved now in the Delft archives.
After Johannes Vermeer's baptism in 1632, little or nothing is known of the artist himself until he marries Catharina Bolnes in 1653. However, surviving archival from the following years documents provide an interesting picture and while little can be deduced about the artist's personality, his family background and immediate social milieu is fairly well defined.
John Michael Montias' invaluable Vermeer and his Milieu : A Web of Social History
Vermeer: A
View of Delft
Anthony Bailey
2001
Another colorful book which fleshes out in a highly readable fashion is Vermeer: A View of Delft
In order to insure reasonable loading time, the timeline has been divided into five sections which can be accessed from the upper left-hand corner of each section.
1. 1632-1639 childhood
2. 1643-1652 adolescence
3. 1653-1660 early career
4. 1661-1667 maturity
5. 1668-1675 last years
this timeline is dedicated to the late John Michael Montias who has contributed so much to our understanding of the Great Delft Master
1632: Vermeer' Age, 0
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | Joannis, son of Reynier Jansson (c. 1591-1652) and of Dignum Balthasars (c. 1595-1670) , is baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft. They had been married for seventeen years. Among the witnesses is a certain Pt. Bramer, perhaps Leonaert Bramer the painter of Delft who 21 years later would witness Vermeer's marriage. The future artist was named for his paternal grandfather, the tailor, Jan Reyersz. His Christian name was favored over the prosaic "Jan" by Catholics and upper-class Protestants. Vermeer's family background would be described today as lower middle-class. Vermeer's mother was illiterate and his father was a hard working man. Vermeer himself never used the name Jan. Nonetheless, most Dutch authors, in the century since his rediscovery, have dubbed him Jan, perhaps unconsciously to bring him closer to the mainstream of Calvinist culture. Vermeer's father had joined the Delft artists' guild in Oct.13, 1631 as an art dealer. Between 1629 and 1631 Reynier Janz he had been described as an innkeeper. Art-dealing and innkeeping often went hand in hand. Vermeer's father is mentioned in a notary document as a "caffawerker", a silk worker. The population of Delft is 21,000. In 1600 it was 17,5000. |
| DUTCH PAINTING | 
Still-Life 
Landscape with c. 1632 Rembrandt establishes a successful career as fashionable portraitist. Rembrandt paints "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp" |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
Anthony Van Dyck becomes the court painter to Charles I and favorite portrait painter of the aristocracy. |
| MUSIC | Feb. 18, Giovanni Battista Vitali, composer, was born. Nov 28, Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer, was born in Florence, Italy. At his death Lully was widely regarded as the most representative of French composers. Practically all his music was designed to satisfy the tastes and interests of Louis XIV. The ballets de cour (1653-63) and the comédies-ballets (1663-72) were performed as royal entertainments, the king himself often taking part in the dancing. Monteverdi takes holy orders. |
| LITERATURE | 
Spinoza Aug 9, Isaak Walton, author of the classic "The Complete Angler," was born. Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher, (d. 1677) is born. Spinoza was one of the great philosophers of the age of Rationalism and a major influence thereafter, as on, paradoxically, both of the bitter enemies Arthur Schopenhauer and G.W.F. Hegel. Spinoza's God is not the God of Abraham and Isaac, not a personal God at all, and his system provides no reason for the revelatory status of the Bible or the practice of Judaism, or of any religion, for that matter. Second Shakespeare Folio published. |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Galileo's book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" was published with the full backing of the church censors. It was soon recognized to support Copernican theory and Galileo was put under house arrest for life.  Antony van Leeuwenhoek Oct 24, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Dutch naturalist, was born. Van Leeuwenhoek was internationally recognized for his studies in optics and scientific observations. It is believed that because interest in optics and lens grinding abilities, he and Vermeer may have frequented each other. Christiaan Huygens (d. 1695) was born in 1629 in The Hague. He was the son of Constantijn Huygens, one of the most influential statesmen in the history of the Republic and a grand supporter of the arts and science. Christiaan became the most renowned mathematician and astronomer of his age (he was even more famous than Van Leeuwenhoek), while also grinding hundreds of optical lenses. It is highly likely he and Vermeer were well acquainted. Christiaan also wrote music and played the virginal. He was also a good friend of a man who was likely one of Vermeer’s clients, Diego Duarte, the Antwerp banker, jeweler, and art collector who was also a leading composer of the fugue. Indeed, it seems likely Christiaan may have introduced Vermeer’s works to Duarte. Christiaan and his family were also well-acquainted with both Pieter Teding van Berckhout and the Baron de Monconys, and the latter two men rather famously enjoyed the camera obscura and its effects and had come to visit Vermeer's studio in the 1660s. Isaac Beeckman makes a sketch of a Drebbel microscope. René Descartes pioneers use of exponents in mathematics by introducing the symbol a3. |
| HISTORY | 1632 Cardinal Richelieu ordered the construction of the Palais Royale in Paris, France Aug 29, English philosopher John Locke was born in Somerset, England. The philosopher of liberalism influenced the American founding fathers and was famous for his treatise "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Galileo's trial for heresy. November 16, Battle of Lützen. Christina becomes queen of Sweden. Rotterdam's population reaches 20,000. The city will become the world's largest seaport. |
1633: Vermeer' Age, 1
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | Vermeer's father, Reynier, is called to a hearing concerning a brawl in which he and some fellow caffa (silk) workers were involved while playing "kolf" on the ice. Knives had been pulled out following sharp insults among the two parties, but the brawl was momentarily subdued (A Dutch saying at the time was "A hundred Hollanders, a hundred knives"). When it recommenced a certain Cornelis Theunisz was beaten on the head several times. From the raccount it would seem that Reynier and his companions had tried to keep a lid on the violence and all in all, Vermeer's father was most likely an industrious man who was strongly attached to his kin and through great sacrifice, was willing to provide a costly for his son, Johannes, the future master painter. |
| DUTCH PAINTING | Dec 18, Willem van de Velde the Young (d. 1707), Dutch seascape painter, was baptized. He was the son of the marine artist Willem van de Velde the elder. Willem van de Velde the Younger and his father, Willem van de Velde the Elder, were reputed to have been at the Battle of Solebay, in their capacity as official naval artists. In the confusion of the battle neither would have been able to study the ship closely but nonetheless it is accurately portrayed. In 1673/4 the van de Veldes moved from Amsterdam to work in London, especially as 'painters of sea fights' to Charles II. Their presence, and the flourishing studio they established at the Queen’s House in Greenwich, laid the foundations for the practice of marine painting in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pieter Lastman (b. 1583), Rembrandt's master, dies. The son of a goldsmith, Pieter Lastman became known as one of the most important artists of his day for his ability to paint small cabinet pictures. At the age of nineteen, Lastman went to Italy, where he spent five years. After he returned to his native Amsterdam, his painting style exhibited striking changes. He began to use strong contrasts of light and shade that intensified the drama of the scene and to specialize in narrative subjects from the Bible, mythology, and Roman history. He gave Rembrandt a good sense of composition and made him perceptive of religion and history as sources of inspiration for this work. |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
Adoration of the Magi 
Port Scene with the Villa Medici Nicolas Poussin develops antiquarian interests in Rome. c. 1633 Claude Lorrain discovers in Rome his distinctive landscape style. Davis Teniers the Younger joins the painters' guild in Antwerp. |
| MUSIC | Apr 10, Werner Fabricius, composer, was born. Operatic composer Jacopo Peri dies at Florence August 12 at age 71, having pioneered the art form that will become the most popular theatrical entertainment in most of Europe. |
| LITERATURE | Rene Descartes wrote "Le Monde" which embodies an attempt to give a physical theory of the universe; but finding that its publication was likely to bring on him the hostility of the church, and having no desire to pose as a martyr, he abandoned it: the incomplete manuscript was published in 1664. He then devoted himself to composing a treatise on universal science; this was published at Leiden in 1637 under the title Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, Descartes may be considered the first of the modern school of mathematics. |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Galileo Galilei goes on trial at Rome April 12 although he is suffering from arthritis, hernias, kidney stones, and gout (see 1632). The Inquisition threatens the astronomer and mathematician with torture on the rack if he does not retract his "heretical" defense of the Copernican idea that the sun is the center of the universe and the Earth a movable planet. Torn between wanting to fight for the truth and not wanting to offend the Church, Galileo equivocates, saying that the heliocentric design "may very easily turn out to be a most foolish hallucination and a majestic paradox," but he does what is necessary to save himself, saying, "I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged 70 years, abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and I swear that I will never again say or assert that the sun is the center of the universe and immovable and that the Earth is not the center and moves." He is sent to his villa outside Florence, where he will be confined for the remaining 9 years of his life. René Descartes takes warning from the trial of Galileo Galilei; now living in Holland, Descartes stops publishing in France. English astronomer and mathematician Henry Gellibrand [b. London, November 17, 1597, d. London, February 16, 1636] discovers that magnetic north (the direction to which a compass points) changes slowly. |
| HISTORY |
Feb 23, Samuel Pepys (d.1703), English diarist, was born. Pepys was an informal and spontaneous English diarist who left many interesting accounts of contemporary Netherlands. Oct 14, James II Stuart, king of England and Scotland (James VII) (1685-88), was born. 1634-1637 The Dutch tulip craze was known as the "tulipomania." A futures market was created for tulip bulbs in Dutch taverns and prices crashed 95% in the end. Dutch colonists from Nieuw Amsterdam establish a trading post on the Connecticut River at what later will be called Hartford (see 1636; Connecticut colony. Dijon, France, imposes regulations on mustard makers, requiring, among other things, that mustard be made only by workers wearing "clean and modest clothes." Later rules will require that moutarde be made only from brown or black mustard seeds and seasoned with wine or vinegar plus spices and herbs. |
1634: Vermeer' Age, 2
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | Vermeer's father is mentioned as Jansz Vos, tapster and caffaworker (silkworker) and living in "The Flying Fox," an inn in Delft that he had leased. The name of the inn was taken from the name "Vos" which means fox. |
| DUTCH PAINTING |
Nicholas Maes (d. 1693) is born in Dortrecht. Maes was an excellent genre painter who had studied with Rembrandt and is know to have briefly lived and worked in Delft in the years Vermeer was active. Rembrandt married art dealer Hendrick's van Uylenburg wealthy niece Saskia van Uylenburg. A daughter of a patrician, she introduced him in higher social circles, which made his fame rise further. He never distanced himself of common people though. Saskia posed for many times for Rembrandt. Hendrick Avercamp (b. 1558), known particularly for his winter scenes, dies. He was deaf and dumb and known as `de Stomme van Kampen' (the mute of Kampen). His paintings are colorful and lively, with carefully observed skaters, tobogganers, golfers, and pedestrians. Avercamp's work enjoyed great popularity and he sold his drawings, many of which are tinted with watercolor, as finished pictures to be pasted into the albums of collectors (an outstanding collection is at Windsor Castle). Cornelis Bisschop (d. 1674) is born. He attained some fame as a painter of trompe-l'oeil pieces. Hendrick van der Neer (d. 1703) is born. He is best known for his elegant genre interiors. Jacob Ochtervelt (d. 1682) is born. He was a co-pupil of Pieter de Hooch under Nicolaas Bercham in Haarlem. He worked in his native Rotterdam from about 1655 to 1674, and then moved to Amsterdam. He was influenced by Pieter de Hooch and through him by Vermeer. Apart from a few portraits and some early hunting party and "merry company" scenes, his paintings are almost all elegant upper-class interiors, in which he showed off a skill in painting silks and satins to rival that of Terborch. |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
Luca Giordano (d.1705), Neapolitan baroque painter, was born. He was nicknamed `Luca Fa Presto' (Luke work quickly) because of his prodigious speed of execution and huge output. French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin begins work on his series of "Seven Sacraments," completed in 1642. Poussin's rational classicism influenced pictorial classicism. Pietro da Cortona's ceiling fresco in the Barberini Palace, Rome, imagines a sculptural canopy with multitudes of foreshortened heavenly figures coursing through it. This enormous work establishes in a definitive manner the Baroque values |
| MUSIC | |
| LITERATURE | |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Mar 13, Academie Francaise was established. Its task was to preserve the purity of the French language, which included maintaining a dictionary. Members came to be known as the "immortals" and by 1998 they were struggling to with masculine nouns of positions held by women who desired feminine endings. Founding of University of Utrecht. |
| HISTORY | Mar 25, Maryland was founded by English colonists sent by the second Lord Baltimore. The United Provinces and France allie against Spain. Speculation in tulip bulbs reaches new heights in the Netherlands as steadily rising prices attract middle-class and even relatively poor families to invest. One collector pays 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed, and a suit of clothes for a single bulb of the rare Viceroy tulip. Most sought after are so-called "broken" bulbs whose blossom displays beautiful designs as the result of a virus. The tulip's attribute of variation has been discovered only recently by a professor of botany at the 59-year-old University of Leiden, whose botanical garden is the first in the north (see 1636). |
1635: Vermeer' Age, 3
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | 1635-1636 The pestilence claims the lives of nearly 2,000 Delft inhabitants. |
| DUTCH PAINTING | Apr 16, Frans van Mieris (d. 1681), the Elder, Dutch painter, was born. Van Mieris painted finely detailed genre interiors and was believed to have influenced Vermeer's work in theme and technique. Caspar Netscher, (d. 1684) is born. Netscher. There are a number of genre subjects from his earlier years spent in The Hague and he painted some history subjects and pastorals, but from c.1670 he concentrated on portraiture, a practice which earned him a considerable fortune. He is said to have declined an invitation from Charles II to come to England. He died at The Hague on 15 January 1684. Rembrandt paints "Self-Portrait with Saskia" Gerard Terborch, who would become one of the most refined interior genre painters of the time and whose painting technique and themes would also influence the young Vermeer, is admitted to the painter's guild in Haarlem c. 1635 there is a great demand also for Rembrandt's religious and historical paintings. |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
Anthony Van Dyck, outstanding student of Rubens working for the English court, paints his outdoor, leisurely "Portrait of Charles I Hunting." The work greatly influences aristocratic portraiture. Nicolas Poussin paints "Kingdom of Flora" Diego Velazquez paints "Surrender of Breda" Pieter Paul Rubens buys a large country house, Het Steen Jacques Callot dies of a painful stomach ailment at Nancy March 24 at age 42. |
| MUSIC | Sep 7, Pal Esterhazy, composer, was born. |
| LITERATURE | The Académie Française is founded at Paris to establish rules of grammar and correct usage and to cleanse the French language of "impurities" |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | |
| HISTORY | The world's first free medical clinic for the poor opens at Paris under the direction of physician-journalist Théophraste Rénaudot, |
1636: Vermeer' Age, 4
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | Nothing is known of Vermeer's life in this year. |
| DUTCH PAINTING |
Leonaert Bramer, active in Delft, was once believed to be Vermeer's master. He was an acquaintance of Vermeer's family and was present at Vermeer's marriage in 1653. Bramer had been to Italy. Dutch still-life painter Jan Davidsz de Heem, 30, moves to Antwerp because "there one could have rare fruits of all kinds, large plums, peaches, cherries, oranges, lemons, grapes and others, in finer condition and state of ripeness to draw from life." |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
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| MUSIC | French theorist Marin Mersenne publishes his most important work, "Harmonie Universille," with full descriptions of all contemporary musical instruments. |
| LITERATURE | Pierre Corneille: "Le Cid". Educated by the Jesuits, he studied law and then entered the Rouen parliament in 1629. He would serve as the king's counselor in the local office of the department of waterways and forests for 21 years, and remarkably, he still found the time to write 20 plays during this period. After his retirement from the legal profession, he would write 12 more. Although Corneille is considered by most critics to be the father of French tragedy, six of his first eight plays were comedies. The Comic Illusion (L'illusion comique) by Pierre Corneille is given in January at the Théâtre du Marais, Paris. |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | In the "Dioptrique," Descartes describes the construction of single microscopes. |
| HISTORY | Mar 26, University of Utrecht held its opening ceremony Welsh Puritan Roger Williams (1603-1683) banished from Massachusetts; establishes Providence, R.I.; proclaims complete religious freedom. Harvard College (so called from 1639 in tribute to John Harvard, who endowed it by a legacy) founded at Newe Towne, Cambridge, Mass., with Nathaniel Eaton as first president. Dutch West India Company forces in the Caribbean occupy the island of Aruba. The town of Haarlem is founded by Dutch colonists on Manhattan Island. The University of Utrecht has its beginnings in a school opened in the Dutch city. It will become a great center of European learning. A Dutch planter introduces sugar cane from Brazil into the West Indian island of Barbados, whose English settlers have been cultivating cotton, ginger, indigo, and tobacco for export while growing beans, plantains, and other food for their own consumption. Sugar will become the chief crop of Barbados and of all the Caribbean islands. Dutch merchant serves a sailor a small breakfast of herring; while his back is turned, the sailor by some accounts spies what he thinks is an onion, he eats it in a few quick gulps, and the merchant finds that he has lost a tulip bulb so valuable that its sale would have yielded enough money to outfit and man a substantial ship. |
1637: Vermeer' Age, 5
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | Nothing is known of Vermeer's life in this year. |
| DUTCH PAINTING |
Willem Claesz. Heda, Dutch still-life painter, active in Haarlem. He and Pieter Claez are the most important representatives of "ontbijt" (breakfast piece) painting in the Netherlands. His overall grey-green or brownish tonalities are very similar to those of Claesz., but Heda's work was usually more highly finished and his taste was more aristocratic. Jan van der Heyden (d. 1712) is born. After 1668 he was increasingly concerned with improvements to street lighting and fire-fighting equipment; in 1672 he constructed the first fire-engine (publishing a book on the subject in 1690) and he seems to have painted only infrequently after c. 1680. He died in Amsterdam on 28 March 1712. Known chiefly for his accomplished townscapes, he also painted landscapes and, in later life, some still lives.
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| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
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| MUSIC | Dietrich Buxtehude (d.1701), Danish composer , is born. Buxtehude belongs to the generation of organists before Johann Sebastian Bach, who, like Handel, once traveled to Lübeck to hear the master perform at the Marienkirche, where he served as organist for forty years, from 1667 until his death in 1707. He wrote a considerable quantity of music, choral and instrumental, for church use, as well as chamber music and keyboard music of a more secular kind. |
| LITERATURE | |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Daniel Sennert, German scientist who formulated the conception "Atom," d. (b. 1572 The States Bible is first published. A Dutch-language translation of the original Greek and Hebrew texts, this edition of the Bible is intended to allow ordinary citizens to study religion without reliance on clerics. The creation of the States Bible reflects the importance of Calvinism in the Netherlands. |
| HISTORY |
1638: Vermeer' Age, 6
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | |
| DUTCH PAINTING |
Meindert Hobbema, Dutch painter. was born. He painted landscapes, one of the most famous being "The Avenue." It was common for seventeenth-century Dutch painters to hold down held moneymaking jobs apart from their true profession. After his new wife's influence won Hobbema a job as a wine guager, painting seems to have become a part-time occupation. He checked the weights and measures of imported wines for more than forty years and had little success as a painter; the couple were buried as paupers. Adriaen Brouwer (b. 1605) dies. Brouwer specialized in tavern and low-life scenes, worked in Haarlem and Amsterdam and spent the last seven or eight years of his brief life in Antwerp. Rubens had 17 of his paintings in his private collection. Brouwer, a painters' painter was also collected by Rembrandt. Hercules Segers (b. 1590), dies. Segers’s etchings are remarkable for their experimental use of color and innovative combinations of techniques. |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
Nicolas Poussin paints "Et in Arcadia ego" Pieter Paul Rubens paints "The Three Graces" Borromini: San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane |
| MUSIC | Monteverdi composed the madrigal "Il Combattimento de Tanncredi e Corinda." Monteverdi: "Eight Book of Madrigals." Venice's Teatro di San Cassiano opens early in the year to give the city its first opera house with seats for the general public. The Tron family has financed the house, and it will lead to other such venues that make opera available to virtually everyone where heretofore it has provided entertainment only for royalty and the nobility |
| LITERATURE | |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Galileo smuggled out his book "Two New Sciences" to a publisher in Holland. Joost van den Vondel: "Gijsbrecht van Amstel," historical drama. Discours de la Mèthode by René Descartes lays the foundation for mathematical geometry, reducing everything to numbers and establishing the "Cartesian" principle of basing metaphysical demonstrations on mathematical certitude rather than on scholastic subtleties (see 1619; 1632). The proper guide to reason, says Descartes, is to doubt everything systematically until one arrives at clear, simple ideas that are beyond doubt. He rejects any doubt of his own existence by saying, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). A permanent astronomical observatory is established at Copenhagen by King Christian IV of Denmark. Pierre de Fermat is thought to have written in the margin of a copy of the Arithmetica of Diophantus that an equation of the form a + b = c can have no integral solutions for a, b, and c if n is greater than 2. His note continues, "I have found a truly marvelous demonstration which this margin is too narrow to contain." The statement has since come to be called Fermat's last theorem. |
| HISTORY | Sep 5, Louis XIV, "The Sun King" (1643-1715) of France, was born. He built the palace at Versailles and ruled France from 1643 to 1715. The Dutch West India Company dismisses its New Netherland director general Wouter van Twiller and replaces him with Willem Kieft. Van Twiller has fired the public prosecutor Lubertus van Dincklagen and sent him back to Amsterdam without giving him the 3 years' pay that was owed to him. Van Dincklagen has complained to the Company about the director general's corruption, the Company sends him back to New Netherland as assistant director, and it will take back much of the land that van Twiller has acquired. Van Twiller remains in New Netherland, where he enjoys his status as the richest citizen. Dutch tulip prices multiply 20-fold in January, with transactions taking place not on any organized exchange but basically through tavern betting pools (see 1636). Government authorities float a proposal that would allow a buyer to avoid early execution of certain contracts by paying 10 percent of the sales price to the seller. New supplies of bulbs flood the market, doubts arise that prices will continue to rise, and prices collapse on the first Tuesday of February after years of speculation. Hundreds who have been caught up in the "tulipmania" (tulpenwoede) are ruined as the bottom falls out of the market, and prices fall to a few cents per bulb, their intrinsic value, down from the equivalent of thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. Courts do not consider the bets to be legal contracts and refuse to enforce them. But the end of the tulip "bubble" does not produce any economic downturn or slowdown: money that should have been spent on more productive purposes has gone into speculation on tulip bulbs, so the end of tulipmania will ultimately have a salutary effect on the Dutch economy. |
1639: Vermeer' Age, 7
| VERMEER'S LIFE & ART | |
| DUTCH PAINTING | In 1639 Rembrandt and Saskia moved to a prominent house in the Jodenbreestraat, in the Jewish quarter (which later has been turned into the Rembrandt House Museum). Three of their children died shortly after birth. In 1641 they again had a child, a son, whom they called Titus (1641-1668). Saskia died soon after. |
| EUROPEAN PAINTING & ARCHITECTURE |
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| MUSIC | Marco Marazzoli and Vergilio Mazzochi:"Chi soffre, speri," first comic opera. Monteverdi's opera, "Adone" given at Teatro San Cassiano, Venice. |
| LITERATURE | Racine, French dramatist, b. (d. 1699) By 1677, Racine was to achieve a remarkable amount of success for a playwright. In fact he was the first French playwright to live almost entirely off the earnings from his plays. |
| SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY | Jeremiah Horrocks observes the transit of Venus, which he had predicted Descartes published his "Discourse on Method." It is here that his famous statement "I doubt; therefore I am," was expounded. "He then proceeded to discover a method of achieving similar certainty in other realms, based on the reduction of all problems to a mathematical form and solution." He invented analytic geometry in order to reduce the description of phenomena to a set of numbers. His Discourse was placed by Catholic theologians on the Index of forbidden books. |
| HISTORY |  Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp Feb 7, Academie Francaise began its Dictionary of French Language Dutch Admiral Tromp obtains a glorious victory and defeats the Spanish with a Dutch fleet much inferior in strength at the Battle of the Downs in 1639. He is buried in Delft. |
