Vermeer

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

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

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

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

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 ... T here are few better writers to take on the task

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.

Eloquently argued, engagingly written and ultimately rather moving

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

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

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

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

Andrew Graham-Dixon is an art historian, biographer and broadcaster who has made more BBC television series about art than any other presenter. He was for many years the main art critic of the Sunday Telegraph and Independent. Of his biography of Caravaggio, Peter Carey said ‘it is a thrilling lesson in the art of seeing’ and Neil MacGregor wrote ‘the man and his work emerge enriched and enlightened.’ It has been translated into many languages.