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Vermeer
  • Published: 23 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141974903
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

Vermeer

A Life Lost and Found

Formats & editions
Hardback
28 Oct 2025
EBook
23 Oct 2025
Audiobook
23 Oct 2025
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A revelatory new biography of the enigmatic Dutch artist, published to coincide with the 350th anniversary of his death

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation. Following new leads, and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter’s hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.

He also vividly evokes the world of the Dutch Republic as it was in its so-called Golden Age. This was a watery world of fortresses and flood plains, taverns rocked by argument and cities stunned by devastating attacks and explosions: all linked by a network of canals where a uniquely efficient public transport system, operated by horse-drawn passenger barge, enabled people, goods and ideas to glide effortlessly from one place to another. The author sets Vermeer firmly in the context of his time, revealing the patterns of patronage that make sense of his work, and also exposing the difficulties posed by his home life, which was dominated by his Jesuit mother-in law and disturbed by the psychotic behaviour of her only son.

In the past Vermeer has been imagined as a remote and enigmatic figure, but he emerges from this new account as a man deeply engaged with his own society: well-travelled, a reader of books, a man personally connected to many of the most interesting people of his time, including merchants, philosophers, preachers, bankers and regents, as well as his childhood friend, a philanthropic baker named Hendrick van Buyten. Vermeer was also deeply affected by the struggles that shook his world, the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence and the yet more terrible Thirty Years War, which ravaged the neighbouring German lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. The author shows how he was moved to become a pacifist by such atrocities, and thereafter made many of his closest friends in the ranks of Europe’s first peace movement. A further revelation is that Vermeer’s closest collaborator and chief patron was a woman, as were many others in his immediate circle. These are all previously untold stories.

The many piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s pictures, which are the heart of the book, shed new light on the intentions of the artist. Nearly all of his best loved works, Graham-Dixon shows, were originally painted for a single significant location in Delft. In light of such discoveries every one of Vermeer’s major paintings, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft and The Milkmaid, are reassessed and their meanings rethought. As a result the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer – why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? – are persuasively answered here for the first time.
  • Published: 23 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9780141974903
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

About the author

Andrew Graham-Dixon

Andrew Graham Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television programmes in the English-speaking world. He has presented six landmark series on art for the BBC, including the acclaimed A History of British Art, Renaissance, and Art of Eternity, as well as numerous individual documentaries on art and artists. For more than 20 years, he has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and, more recently, in the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of books on subjects ranging from medieval painting and sculpture, to contemporary art.

AG-

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Praise for Vermeer

Andrew Graham-DIxon is that rare thing - a tireless scholar and critic who looks beyond the analysis and appreciation of art into its very soul ... [his] book seems to be driven by what other works on the artist lack: passion. Anyone who loves art with warm to the beguiling, personal nature of this beautifully written narrative ... this is art history as an imaginative leap into a world in which the enlightenment was the only bulwark against chaos, and toleration was - and still is - necessary for civilisation.

Bel Mooney, Scottish Mail

Densely researched and highly original .... this book is an extraordinary portrait, flooded with light and colour, and a splendid unfolding of the pressure of meaning in everyday life; in other words, it emulates the special charge of Vermeer’s paintings

Kathryn Murphy, Literary Review

Eloquently argued, engagingly written and ultimately rather moving

Michael Hall, Country Life

This book is going to revolutionize the way we understand Vermeer. I read it slowly, feeling 'like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken'. How extraordinary to realise that things are not the way you have imagined all your life

Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is a powerfully persuasive investigation into the intellectual and devotional world of Vermeer and his circle. Painting by painting, the riddle of the Sphinx is masterfully unravelled ... [Andrew Graham-Dixon] trawls the archives, lays out new evidence, links pictures never linked before, and teases new meaning from signs, symbols and sitters ... His reading of the paintings is revelatory

Laura Freeman, The Times

Andrew Graham-Dixon places Vermeer's work in the context of its time. He convincingly makes clear that Vermeer's paintings are not simply atmospheric genre pieces, but coded works with a deeply religious meaning. In doing so, he presents a completely new vision of the artworks of Vermeer

Professor Paul Abels, Leiden University

Challenging existing scholarship, Graham-Dixon has a radical new sense of Vermeer [that] focuses afresh on the artist’s social networks and the history and religion of the Dutch Republic

Sam Phillips, Arts Society Magazine

Graham-Dixon is an experienced and diligent writer on art, and the book contains much absorbing factual information about Vermeer's mysterious life and his circle ... [it] attempts to return Vermeer to his own period

Philip Hensher, Financial Times

Graham-Dixon puts forward a revolutionary theory... Right, or wrong, it is a theory that will change the way people look at that famous pearl earring, as well as at the painter’s other luminous portraits of lone women

Vanessa Thorpe, Observer

This is a phenomenal book. The research and originality are staggering, suddenly creating a coherent character simply out of understanding the religious, social and political setting properly. I was utterly absorbed by it

Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of <i>Lower than the Angels</i>

With the skill of a good showman and the meticulousness of a scholar, [Graham-Dixon] .... sets out to illuminate the elusive life of Johannes Vermeer [and] to solve the riddle of the ''Girl'' herself .... In his quest to decode Vermeer's work, he draws together a piercingly analytical gaze and some well-informed speculation ... There are few better writers to take on the task

Evgenia Siokos, Telegraph