Although only a scant few archival records have survived which directly regard Vermeer in recent years historians have nonetheless deduced a relatively clear picture of both his life and artistic stature utilizing those archival documents in conjunction with knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch social and artistic history and Vermeer's remaining thirty-five paintings.Vermeer was the second child and only son of Reynier and his wife Digna Baltens. Vermeer's family background would be described today as lower middle-class. His grandparents were illiterate and so was his mother. Vermeer spent his childhood in a large house which his father bought after having improved his economic situation, for Reynier was evidently a hardworking man who lived and invested conservatively. Mechelen, as the inn was called, was located on the Marketplace in the center of the town. Judging from contemporary etchings it must have been quite large, large enough to accommodate the inn downstairs and ample space for Reynier's caffa production.Vermeer probably painted very little in his last years. His death, three years later, at the age of forty-three, was described by his wife, "as a result and owing to the great burden of his children, having no means of his own, he had lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day or day and a half had gone from being healthy to being dead."
(http://www.essentialvermeer.com/)
