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In Search of Lost Time [volume 1] vocabulary

423 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.

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Johannes Vermeer: tags: [artist]

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Definition:

[1632-1675]
a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime but evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women."

^{text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike}
^{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/}

^{image 1: The Glass of Wine, https://www.wikiart.org/en/johannes-vermeer/the-glass-of-wine}
^{image 2: The Mildmaid, https://www.wikiart.org/en/johannes-vermeer/the-milkmaid}
^{image 3: The Little Street (Delft) https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13409022}

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Uses:

Tim Jenison: You know, sometimes when I'm laying in bed at night trying to get to sleep all I can think about is this goal of trying to paint a Vermeer, you know, really I'm going to try to paint a Vermeer. And on the face of it that seems almost impossible and I don't know if I can do it. You know it'll be pretty remarkable if I can because I'm not a painter.

Tim's Vermeer. A Penn and Teller Film (2013)

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As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman that had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she had lost all interest in that painter.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost TIme [volume 1]

^{(also in proust 2,3,4 & 5)}

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But one of the critics having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s Street in Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an Exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself,

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost TIme [volume 5]

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They talked. Fred mentioned Stravinsky and Strauss, Vermeer and Van Dyck, making unnecessary references, quoting too often, his spirits attuned across the Atlantic, too transparent in his performance, too eager to show how much he knew of the Western world.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Americanah, p.505 (2013)