He is best known for his true-to-life Baroque portraits of women and girls in domestic settings. Vermeer was productive during the Dutch Golden Age, a significant period in Dutch art history.

One of his most famous paintings is the Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665. This particular work has received a lot of interest over the centuries and has been the subject of much academic study.

The majority of Vermeer’s portraits are set indoors, apparently in the same house, as many of them show similar interior scenes with the same furniture and decoration. Several of his paintings show the same people, mostly women.

The paintings were created with great care and much attention to detail, often using very expensive paints. Vermeer employed subtle and effective lighting techniques in his paintings for which he was highly accredited.