Book review: “Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found” by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Johannes Vermeer was called the Sphinx of Delft by Théophile Thoré, the man who rediscovered the Dutch painter’s art nearly two centuries after his death in 1675.

And Vermeer has remained a mystery down to our day, even though his compelling, enigmatic and evocative paintings — there are only about 36 of them — have become among the most famous in the world, particularly his Girl with a Pearl Earring.

That work was the subject of a bestselling 1999 novel by Tracy Chevalier and a widely praised 2003 movie, starring Scarlett Johansson, both of which created a complex story of romantic/erotic tension.

However, like most of Vermeer’s paintings, it’s not clear what Girl with a Pearl Earring is about. Vermeer is called a sphinx because little is known of him as a man but, even more, because his paintings, for all their art, for all their beauty, never seem to be telling a clear story.

Now comes Andrew Graham-Dixon with an ingenious, intriguing and sure-to-be-challenged answer to all of the Vermeer questions.

 

A kind of a sacrament

Pure and simple, Graham-Dixon argues in Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Vermeer was a religious painter whose paintings didn’t look like religious art. Painting, for the artist, was religious contemplation and a kind of a sacrament.

It is an extraordinary reading of Vermeer’s paintings, unprecedented and idiosyncratic, unexpected and remarkable.

Most of the works, according to Graham-Dixon, were created for/commissioned by his neighbors, Maria de Knuijt and her husband Pieter van Ruijven, for use in and around the meeting room in their house, used for regular private “hidden” prayer gatherings of women in the Collegiant movement of Dutch Protestantism.

Graham-Dixon, an art historian, documentarian and newspaper art critic, writes that, from the start,

Vermeer was painting pictures of a deeply pious nature, showing women in search of salvation. Such were the stories he wanted, and was encouraged, to tell.

“This element of disguise”

Although two of Vermeer’s earliest works were clearly religious in nature, such as Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, those that followed have been described by art historians over the past century and a half as masterful works on typical Dutch subjects of that era. But Graham-Dixon asserts:

The distinction that needs to be made is that his early works are religious pictures that look like religious pictures whereas his later works are religious pictures that do not. They carry religious meanings, but do not seem at first sight to be doing so, because they have been given the appearance of other, more secular types of painting.

The reason? The Collegiants were a liberal and tolerant offshoot of the strict Calvinistic Dutch Reformed Church and needed to keep a low profile. At the same time, they, like all of Calvin’s followers, were leery of the sort of religious decoration that had been featured in Catholic churches.

To anyone outside their circle Vermeer’s pictures appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary. They looked like genre paintings, or topographical views of buildings, or portraits, all the while carrying their deeper meanings within like secrets. This element of disguise helps to explain why Vermeer’s pictures have tantalized so many people for so long.

Many, like Marcel Proust, felt that there “must be something more to his pictures than meets the eye,” writes Graham-Dixon.

 

Washed feet and a prodigal son

It’s an adroit and creative premise that leads Graham-Dixon to detect religious meanings in nearly all of Vermeer’s paintings.

For instance, in Diana and Her Companions, painted before Vermeer began supplying Maria de Knuijt and Pieter van Ruijven with art for their meeting room, Graham-Dixon looks beyond the Greek legend to focus on the washing of Diana’s feet.

 

This, he writes, calls to mind Jesus’s washing of the feet of his followers at the Last Supper as well as their washing of his feet:

Vermeer has included two details that strongly evoke all this: a bright brass basin and a white linen cloth of exactly the kind that appear in countless Flemish altarpieces of the Crucifixion, Lamentation and Descent from the Cross.

Another early Vermeer painting The Procuress seems to be “about a seedy sexual transaction taking place in a backroom of some anonymous tavern.” But Graham-Dixon focuses on a young well-dressed man at the left of the pictures whose face, in shadow, has been thought to be a self-portrait of the artist.

 

But, knowing the strong appeal that religious themes had for Vermeer, it seems likely that he had in mind the parable of the Prodigal Son recounted in the Gospel of Luke.

By the way, the titles of nearly every Vermeer painting were put on the works many years, even centuries, after they were produced. There’s no way of knowing what the artist called the painting now known as The Procuress.

 

Three holy women

Graham-Dixon sees A Maid Asleep as Mary Magdalene in the midst of a religious meditation.

“With an open heart the woman has been praying and reflecting, perhaps repenting,” he writes. The woman, he suggests, has just been visited by Jesus.

Vermeer’s picture is such a specific and precise depiction of a moment of visionary experience that it seems possible it was intended to record an actual moment in someone’s life, perhaps that of the woman who commissioned the picture, namely Maria de Knuijt.

Graham-Dixon sees the paintings known as Woman with a Balance and The Milkmaid as having been created as a pair to represent Mary and Martha from the Bible story in contemporary dress.

 

But, instead of featuring Jesus and the two women as Vermeer did in the earlier picture, the two women are shown alone — Mary thinking and Martha doing.

Each picture, each woman, is a mirror image of the other. Between them, they complete one another…The woman weighing is reflecting, assessing, meditating. The woman pouring milk is preparing a meal, working for others. One is contemplative, the other is active…Are they not Martha and Mary, the Active Life and the Spiritual Life, in another guise?

 

A licentious king and a holy city

Graham-Dixon sees the painting known as Mistress and Maid, in which the servant is handing her lady a letter, as a retelling of a Biblical story — the account of King David spying the married woman Bathsheba bathing on a nearby roof and then sending for her to begin an adulterous relationship.

 

Prior artists depicting this story presented Bathsheba nude, all the better to illustrate the salacious story of a licentious ruler, but Graham-Dixon notes:

Vermeer’s version is more decorous, which is unsurprising in view of its intended audience. He shows us a decent woman shocked by an indecent proposal….

Bathsheba, if this is she, clearly knows who sent it: she looks stunned and serious and uncertain all at once. She is on the threshold of a fate that she cannot resist but is yet to understand.

Graham-Dixon sees Vermeer’s masterpiece View of Delft as a depiction of his hometown, not as it was, but idealized — “a prophetic vision” — as the New Jerusalem that is predicted in the Book of Revelations.

Transfigured in painting, Vermeer’s home town, for all its deceptive ordinariness, is the same holy city. He has imparted to it the airborne, spectral quality of a vision, so that it seems to hover between the sky above it and the waters below, rising up from its own slate-gray reflections in the harbor like an person waking from a dream.

 

Mary Magdalene again

And Girl with a Pearl Earring?

 

Graham-Dixon sees that as another representation of Mary Magdalene, this time, after Jesus’s resurrection. Mary has found the tomb empty, and she goes into a nearby garden where she approaches a man there. And Graham-Dixon quotes the King James Version account from John’s gospel:

Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou has borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him, and I will take him away.

And, Graham-Dixon writes, the Vermeer painting depicts the next two sentences:

Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say Master.

Graham-Dixon sees this painting as the moment when Mary Magdalene recognizes the risen Jesus and feels a cascade a great, deep emotions.

The look on her face expressed dawning recognition and wonder, mingled with awe, humility and love.

 

His stunning readings

Graham-Dixon’s readings of Vermeer’s paintings as religious works are likely to stun fans of the artist because no previous biographer or art historian has even suggested such an interpretation.

Vermeer, after all, has been called the Sphinx of Delft for good reasons. Yet, Graham-Dixon asserts that he has deciphered a great many insights into the artist’s life and work by tracking the better-recorded lives of those around him as friends and colleagues and by figuring out their social and especially religious connections.

He writes that he has discerned the details of a tight religious community that included Vermeer through a great mass of documents, many of which were first detailed in John Michael Montias’s 1989 book Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History.

It’s a highly complex interlacing of obscure facts and plausible suppositions, but the sheer weight of the details that Graham-Dixon and his researchers have developed — as well as his assertive building of his case — make Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found a work that art scholars are going to have to contend with.

 

The first word

Graham-Dixon’s book is filled with words such as “probably” and “must have” and “could have.”  Yet, his theory can’t be discounted out of hand for that.

Ideally, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found will be the start of a debate about what Graham-Dixon asserts as well as the beginning of other researchers delving into the great amount of documentation that he has assembled.

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is far from the last word on the painter. But it may be the first word in a new chapter in the efforts to understand the great artist and his masterpieces at a deeper level.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

4.20.26