Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon
Rediscovered in the 19th century Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is the mystery man among the Dutch masters, the “Sphinx of Delft” he’s been called. His paintings have an almost enigmatic character; most are portraits of women caught in a moment—reading a letter, making lace, playing music, dozing. He offers no grand narratives. His subjects are at peace with an inner glow.
Vermeer was no outsider, a la Vincent Van Gogh, but despite the appearance of being fully integrated into his society, the painter left few records and kept quiet. For Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, British writer Andrew Graham-Dixon found no lost letters or diaries, drawing instead on a telling, overlooked detail: two-thirds of Vermeer’s surviving paintings (and nearly all the ones on which his reputation stands) were originally purchased by one family, the Van Ruijvens. He suspects that they were among the liberal dissenters against the Calvinist dogma of the Dutch state church. Women, Vermeer’s principal subject, “became genuinely equal partners in the movement,” the author writes.
Graham-Dixon connects the dots to plausibly speculate on the influences that shaped the paintings, reverberant with the hope of a better world than the one he inherited, writing “Vermeer was a painter not of things but ideas.”
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