A matter of faith

Andrew Graham-Dixon tells Carla Passino why he thinks we have read Vermeer wrong all along- and who the Girl with a Pearl Earring really is

-  Carla Passino

VERMEER is beauty and enigma. What makes his pictures at once mesmerising and challenging is the sense that there is more to those frozen moments of daily life than meets the eye, that a pensive look or the hint of a smile hide an elusive message we can’t quite catch. Now, however, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon believes he has grasped that concealed meaning and has put forward his own interpretation in a new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, which sets out to upend all received wisdom on the painter and, therefore, as Michael Hall wrote in COUNTRY LIFE earlier this year (Books, October 22), is bound to be controversial.

With no diaries, correspondence or even drawings surviving, Vermeer’s personality and inner life are shrouded in mystery. Thus, scholars have offered different readings of his work, from Lawrence Gowing’s belief that his paintings are the product of the ‘detachment to which he clings as if in self-preservation’ to Gregor Weber's take that they are rich in the Jesuit symbolism in which he would have been steeped after marrying into a Catholic family (and possibly converting himself).

Mr Graham-Dixon's view of Vermeer’s oeuvre similarly hinges on the artist’s faith—except it’s not Catholicism. Inspired by the work of John Michael Montias, who traced Vermeer’s social sphere in