Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found

This revelatory biography persuasively addresses the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer—why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean?


One spring day in 1683, a notary’s clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled on one of the wonders of the seventeenth–century twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. How had this one Dutchwoman come to possess the majority of the master’s work? And why have these images—among the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art—defied explanation for so long? Following new leads and drawing on freshly uncovered evidence from Dutch archives, acclaimed art historian Andrew Graham–Dixon presents a dramatic and transformative new interpretation of the artist’s life and work. Rich with piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s paintings, Graham–Dixon’s biography is full of revelations. It upends the master’s enigmatic reputation and depicts him instead as a pioneer of the early Enlightenment, a pacifist who was deeply affected by the wars and religious conflicts of the Dutch Republic and allied to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.

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