Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft, where his parents kept a tavern. He painted mainly interior genre subjects, depicting his patrons, who were members of the aristocracy and upper-middle-classes, but seems to have depended on his activities as an art dealer to support his family. Nearly half of these paintings show solitary figures of women, absorbed in ordinary, everyday activities, such as his masterpieces Girl with a Pearl Earring and Young Woman Reading a Letter. His interiors combine a microscopic observation of objects with a meticulous depiction of the gradations of daylight on varied shapes and surfaces captured on canvas with the help of a camera obscura. His work was not widely appreciated in his own time, and he remained in obscurity until 1866, when Theophile Thore celebrated his work and attributed 76 paintings to him; later authorities have reduced the number to less than 30.