Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough Quarterly. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson. “Vermeer had a rare gift for painting light. And while the light in his paintings might have resembled the light of nature, what they are showing us is really another kind of light, not easily caught in a camera. The indwelling light of the soul, the light of hope and love.”

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. It’s a delight to be with you all today. And today I’m especially excited to welcome someone onto the show. I will prevent myself from doing the unbearable thing of fangirling, but it’s someone whose books I’ve enjoyed for a very long time and who I’m delighted to be able to speak with today. Today on the show, we will be speaking with Andrew Graham Dixon, who is a leading and beloved art critic and presenter.

He has presented numerous landmark series on art for the BBC and written several books on art and artists, including A History of British Art and Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. And most recently Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, which provided the context for the quote I read at the beginning of this podcast. I first discovered Andrew’s books when I picked up a copy of his book on Caravaggio while on a trip to Malta and I was captivated both by its depth of study and detail, but also by the cinematic quality of his writing that brought that mysterious character to life. It has been a real delight to dive into his new book on Vermeer, which will be the topic of our conversation today. Welcome to the show, Andrew. It’s wonderful to have you.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, thank you very much for having me. I’m blushing now.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So I usually begin these conversations by asking people where they physically are in the world because being in the sort of world that we live in today, I’m often doing it over Riverside with people from all corners of the world. But today we have the rare gift of being physically in the same room in London. So I will shift my question ever so slightly and say, where would I usually find you physically in the world?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, I don’t know that you could expect usually to find me anywhere because recently I’ve been in North America, I’ve been in Canada, I’ve been in India, I’ve been ... in Holland, been in France, I’ve been in Spain and I’ve been at home in Sussex but not very much. Home is on a farm in Sussex, if that’s what you were asking.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That was what I was asking and that sounds lovely and as I shared with you, the UK branch of Plough is also kind of in the countryside in Sussex so maybe you’ve been not that far away from us all this time. I’ve already given a bit of an introduction to you but the other thing I usually ask people is what you’re up to most of the time these days and how you spend your days?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, what I’m up to most of the time at the moment is either lecturing on Vermeer or trying to write a new book, which I can’t really say what it’s about except that it’s about a very, very famous picture and another painting that I’ve discovered that may be related to it.

And so I’m digging away at that at the moment. It’s another detective story. I didn’t go looking for it. It came and found me. But it’s definitely absorbing my interest and attention.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s very intriguing and exciting. And I can think of a few different “very famous” paintings that I might imagine it to be. I won’t say them, so you don’t have to confirm or deny.

Let’s talk about the book that we’re here to talk about today, which is your most recent book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. I really enjoyed reading this. Vermeer is someone that I have enjoyed very amateurly in the sense that I think probably like a lot of people, his paintings have just kind of stuck with me. But I know very little about him or I knew very little about him before I read this book. But it sounds like this book was a long time in the making.

And much like Vermeer, who we learned from this book, had several influential friendships and patronages, it seems like several influential moments and meetings in your life led to it. So could you tell us a bit about how you came to write this book?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well Vermeer has always been a mystery. As long as anyone can remember Vermeer has been a mystery. In fact, he wasn’t even known about until the middle of the nineteenth century when Théophile Thoré brilliantly worked out that he was indeed a painter with a nerve, put it all together. But my interest in him began when I met a wonderful American economic historian called John Michael Montias, whose hobby was Dutch art. And I was making a film for the BBC about the discoveries that Montias had made, touching on Vermeer’s life, his friends, his patrons.

And I made a very unsatisfactory film. Montias himself came to the subject very late in life and uncovered a remarkable amount about Vermeer, especially given that he wasn’t an art historian. It was an amazing achievement. But I remember him very much encouraging me as a much younger art historian at that time. I would have been only in my thirties. To go into ... the people that he’d discovered in Vermeer’s life, particularly his patron, Maria de Knuijt, in more depth. He really wanted somebody to build on what he’d found. And really, it’s during the last thirty years, if you can believe it. I signed the contract for the book in 2006, so it’s not quite that bad, but it’s still pretty bad. I was scratching around for many of those years to try and find, if I could, have something new to say about Vermeer, if I could discover something substantive that connected him and his patron. So it’s been a very long genesis because of that. It took me at least twelve years to really find that link. And it was only then that I could do serious work. Because only when you know what you’re looking for in an archive can you go and try and find it.

But the last eight years is really when I did the main body of the work and it’s been pretty focused and controlled. But it’s been difficult because it involved several years just reading all the documents that existed to try and see if I could find particular patterns or connections within those documents. And then when I did find the connections which touched very much on religion, I discovered that I really had to learn much better Dutch and I had to read for at least four or five years an awful lot of Dutch theology to actually get into the mindset, if I can use that word, of Vermeer and his patrons. So it’s been very, very involved, much more involved than the Caravaggio book was.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I was gonna ask, do your books usually take this long or has this been an unusually long gestation?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: This was unusually long because in the case of the Caravaggio book, which is very dramatic and as you said cinematic, it’s a gripping narrative – there’s huge amounts of archival information about what he’s doing along the road – the sad road of his life, whereas with Vermeer a great deal more has to be done by inference. The same narrative structure isn’t there implicit in the documents. The amount of, I think of the amount of work involved in this book, it’s … I dread to think, thousands and thousands of hours. But I’m delighted that I found something. And in fact, really, I think, in a way, I found maybe the main thing that one needs to know about him that no one had known before. So thank you, John Michael Montias for setting me on the path.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I mean, there’s a kind of a mythic quest quality to it that you kind of set on this quest and you found it. And as you were saying earlier, you said you were looking for something new to say about Vermeer. And you have, this book is, as you say in the preface, it is quite new, like nothing else has been written quite like this about Vermeer.

And I have many questions to ask you about it, but I want to begin, for a listener who perhaps has in their mind the girl with the pearl earring or the woman pouring milk. But if someone doesn’t know Vermeer very much, could you begin by giving a description of the kind of paintings that he does and why you think maybe they’ve captured people’s imaginations so much?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, they’re small, beautifully executed with a, he’s one of the first really pure tonal painters. His technique is implicit in what Leonardo da Vinci writes about how to paint in pure tonal terms, chiaroscuro, but no one really had ever done it quite to the deceptive extent that he does it. So you really are presented with these beguiling illusions of actual life, a woman, as you say, crumbling, these loaves of bread that sparkle and glitter in the light that comes through the window in a way that to me evokes ... miraculous bread, perhaps the bread at Galilee glittered and glimmered like that one day. But you believe it perfectly. The girl with the pearl earring turning to face you, the light in her eye. The illusion of actual presence is so intense. And the intensity with which the illusion has been achieved by the painter, the degree of concentration in each image, the meditative quality. The people in them look as if they might be meditating, but the paintings themselves seem to invite you in to meditate on what it is that they show and to wonder about the significance of what that might be.

And I think this has always drawn people in. In my experience of going to see Vermeer exhibitions over many, many years, you often see people, which is unusual for a painter who’s been dead for so many hundreds of years, you often see people in front of his pictures, perhaps crying, or at least with a tear in their eye, and they might be still in front of a painting for five minutes or ten minutes. And they’re often women, in my experience as well, often women are drawn into these pictures. Many of the people in the pictures are women. They seem to be speaking about the world as seen from a female perspective, even though they are painted by a man. But one of my discoveries, of course, was that his main patron was a woman and all her friends, for whom these pictures were probably also painted, were women. So it was in thinking about those sorts of things, actually, that the plot began to thicken for me. And it was thinking about things like that that really made me focus to see, well, what was it that he was trying to achieve for her? What did she believe? What did he believe? Is there some belief in common? The paintings seem to be all about belief. They seem to be about a kind of faith as well as being about the kind of light that you described earlier, the light of love, the light of belief. There’s more to them than meets the eye. And yet, they’ve always been treated by art critics and art historians who haven’t really known quite what to do with them, which is fair enough because they didn’t have the information, as if they must be like other Dutch paintings. So they’ve been often rather like square pegs shoved into round holes. The Milkmaid, that beautiful painting of the woman preparing, she’s been thrust into this really uncomfortable position of perhaps being like these other Dutch paintings where kitchen maids are clearly objects of male sexual attention, that she’s the object of a male gaze, that this picture must have been painted for a man who perhaps had some kind of fantasy about illicit congress with the home help. And it just has never worked. In fact, I once saw a woman crying in a museum in front of that picture, that very picture, and I dared to ask her why she was crying, and she said it wasn’t because she was moved by the painting, although she was, it was because she was so upset by the wall text that was telling her that this was a sexy kitchen maid. And she said, she’s not, she’s not. She’s serving God, I believe. And actually she was right.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s also, there’s a wonderful vindication in that, that perhaps the stories we can tell about an artist for many, many years might just be wrong. I’ll just share a personal anecdote about Vermeer, which I think connects to this, which is that the first image I ever saw of a Vermeer … obviously I’m American, and one of my aunts lives in Kentucky in a little coal mine town that’s very remote. And when my mother would do work conferences she would send me to stay with my aunt. And she lived in this little house that she lived in all her life where she was born, and it had a very small kitchen, and in it she had a very small image, I think she just maybe had gotten it as a postcard or printed it out, of The Milkmaid. And I remember as a little girl looking at it and it’s so beautiful, she’s just doing this ordinary thing but light’s falling on her and it just made this ordinary life seem cosmically important. And in my mind, I connected it with watching my aunt, who is a wonderful cook and who’s also a woman of faith. And it felt like this kind of, it helped me look at and see, even as a very young child, the way that my aunt was in the world, in her little intimate kitchen that she lived in for sixty years, basically, as being significant and important. And I’ll make a confession.

So I teach here at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. We have a course on, it used to be called Christianity and the Arts. Now it’s called Theology, Bible, and the Arts. But we do a class called “The Idea of Beauty.” And it goes basically from Plato over several semesters into modernity. And when I would give the lectures on the turn from the Reformation, I would often show images of Vermeer and totally baselessly. So this is me confessing to something and being thankful that your book now confirms my – I’m not an art historian, so I wasn’t making any statements on it art-historically, but to me there was a … the way that you describe it in the book is, it’s a representation but it operates like a revelation, right? That there’s something about it that’s not just saying here is this, it’s inviting you to see something significant in the everyday. And my personal agenda is often this is interpreted as a kind of secularization, right? That sometimes that’s how people might talk about these things. But to me it was more like a hallowing of these moments. And so to be able to read that there was this kind of theological religious attitude behind the paintings was very affirming because it was what intuitively felt true to me about viewing them.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, I love stories like that because that’s been my experience so often, so many times. I mean, there’s a programme on British radio called Thought for the Day where a priest or someone else with faith will reflect on something or other. It could be anything. It could be the war on Iran or whatever. But this week, the chap decided to reflect on what I’d said in my book about the girl with the pearl earring, which is a picture he’d always had in the vestry. So he’d look at it when he was getting ready to meet his congregation on a Sunday. And he’d always felt that this picture had a religious meaning.

So your story is one of many such stories. I do think that people have always known that something like this was happening. And the truth is, which I suppose is the punchline of the story, that Vermeer and his patron, his female patron, were actually members of a very distinctive nonconformist Protestant dissenting sect who believed in absolute toleration, who wanted to see an end to the warring factions of Christianity. They didn’t think Catholics and Protestants should be at war with one another anymore. They dreamed of a tolerant and inclusive faith, and they tried to reduce Christianity really to the Sermon on the Mount and to make it, in terms of your life, they wanted to make it simple as well. So you reflect at the end of the day on how you’ve behaved and then during your actual daily life you try to behave well. It turns out that the milkmaid is actually engaged in active charity. The bread that she’s crumbling, the sacramental bread that she’s crumbling into the milk, it’s not actually for mass but it’s for perhaps a more practical application of the same Christian charity. It’s to be given to the poor. It’s to be given to children whose teeth are too weak for solid food. She is preparing a charitable donation. So she represents, in terms of the Bible, Martha, and indeed the painting has a power which has never previously been recognized which is the Woman with a Balance in the National Gallery of Art in Washington where the lady’s the same size, she’s doing the same kind of thing. She’s measuring, she’s weighing rather. She’s got a little set of weighing scales. She’s got a painting of the last judgment behind her. What’s she weighing? She’s weighing her own soul. She is measuring her own conscience. The other woman is measuring out actual charity. So one is the contemplative life, the other is the active life. They represent the two halves of what these virtuous women, whom Vermeer was painting for, the two halves of their best selves. And interestingly, talking of Revelation, we know from the archival record that The Milkmaid in the Rijksmuseum once was displayed in a box, as the notary puts it, which I’m sure means it was displayed as if it were a devotional altarpiece, i.e. you could open and shut it. When you wanted to meditate on it, you’d open it. And likewise the other picture.

So, yeah, it’s very interesting. I think people have had these instincts about the pictures for a long time. I know I did. I mean, I was the same as you. I used to look at The Milkmaid and think, that blue, that blue she wears is so much, it’s the blue of the Virgin Mary. It’s the blue of, it’s not the blue of the sky, it’s the blue of the vault of heaven. There’s something holy about this picture. There’s something holy going on. So to me, it was very exciting and almost ... I almost felt sick with excitement when I first thought, my goodness, is this it? Is this what’s happening? Because all these pictures that had for so long been described as paintings of scenes of everyday life suddenly revealed themselves to me with the force of revelation as religious works of art, not what they’d seem to be.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So we’ve sort of danced a bit around this, but there are two things I want to ask you to tell the listeners a bit more about. And of course, if they want to know more deeply, they need to go and read the book. But one is this patroness who seems to have been kind of the main patron of Vermeer throughout his life and kept his paintings kind of to her world for long time. It’s part of why he wasn’t as widely known, it seems, until after her death. And then also this religious sect. Could you tell us a bit about those two things? You’ve already touched on them a bit, but a bit more, perhaps.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, the Remonstrants, as they were called, they were founded by a man whom I think of as the Dutch-Golden-Age Gandhi – this amazing character called Jacobus Arminius, who died in 1609, I think. He died early in the century, a long time before Vermeer was born, twenty-five years before Vermeer was born. But he was this extraordinary character who spoke out against the wars of the time and who pleaded with his fellow Calvinists, because he was a member of the orthodox Dutch Calvinist Church, to be more tolerant and less exclusive and less doctrinally fierce, to allow people to believe what they wanted, about predestination and things like that, just to be a bit more open and a bit, and certainly less warlike. And this movement was founded and as of course, as we know, sadly, peace movements are often, you know, they’re trouble. They were unpeacefully crushed by the Calvinists who were outraged that these ideas should have sprung up from within their own midst. But what I discovered was that Maria, Vermeer’s patron, and her husband, their antecedents, their grandfathers and grandmothers and parents were all involved in the moment of this. It became effectively a kind of revolution between the right and the left in Dutch society. And the Remonstrants were on the left. They were driven underground. They were sent into exile or they just hid. And among those who hid and who hid others and who looked after Remonstrants in this underground world that developed in the 1620s, we find Vermeer’s parents. We find Maria and Pieter, his patrons, their parents and grandparents.

So it seems that at the level of the very origins of the movement, the families on both sides were involved, the families of the artist and the family of the patron. And it was finding that connection that made me think, well, perhaps that continued all the way through. And I found that it did. And in fact, the most extraordinary thing, which is [that] I’d written the whole book about this Remonstrant connection, you know, the fact that he had painted his pictures for these Remonstrants. But the most extraordinary thing was that when I’d finished the book, I suddenly discovered that the house where Maria lived, the house where all his paintings hung was and still is directly in front of the hidden church of the proscribed Remonstrant movement. And I found that out after I’d written this whole book about the Remonstrants. So that was really a eureka moment. I got a phone call from a friend in Rotterdam who’d actually on my behalf found the stuff. He was an architect, he knew more about the Huizenprotocol as it’s called, the house archive of Delft. He found that for me. So that was a real gift. But they were fundamentally, they were just really good people.

They were fundamentalist Christians. They were 90 percent, certainly 80 percent women, very driven by women, women who are sick of seeing their husbands and their children die in these endless wars, women who dreamed of a world where everyone could live at peace with one another. They very much drove the movement. There were men involved, but it was a very female-led movement and they had a more radical wing. There was a more radical wing to the movement. The Remonstrants formed a church, or some Remonstrants formed a church called the Remonstrant Church. Other Remonstrant churches said, “well, churches, surely they’re the whole problem. Let’s not have a church. We’re going to call ourselves the Collegiants and we’re going to meet in rich women’s houses as the congregations around Saint Paul did in the very early years of the Christian faith before churches were invented when things were purer and better in our opinion.” And this is all the better because they were women who loved to speak, who loved to minister, who loved to who believed they had the right to spread Christ’s word, which all the orthodox churches of the day denied.

So my intel, as it were, is that Vermeer and his female patron were both part of the Remonstrant Church, which is the church of this movement, but they also held these Collegiant meetings. And that Vermeer’s paintings would almost certainly have been done for the meetings of Maria and her mostly female group of friends who are using the pictures in some way to meditate on, to take sustenance from, encouragement from. The paintings are perhaps also role models.

And once you know all this, it makes sense because in Vermeer’s pictures, I think, I don’t know if you agree, that what we see is women taken seriously. Women who are serious and who are being taken seriously. They’re not sex objects or glamorous, you know, people with no substance or anything like that.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And they’re also not archetypes. I mean, they might be, but they’re people. There’s a sense of wholeness and complication.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: I think that’s very well said. If you look at the Officer with a Laughing Girl in the Frick Collection, that’s a painting about the end of war, it’s a very optimistic painting. It’s done in the aftermath of the great peace treaties of 1648. These people believe that peace is here to stay, that maybe the thousand years of peace that Christ will reign over has arrived. And anyway, you see this soldier who had been a man of war, but now he’s just sitting entranced by this beautiful woman. You see him from the back. But I think she’s one of the most beautiful women in Western art because she’s not anything other than herself. She doesn’t look like a beauty with a capital B or an exclamation mark. She just looks, that’s a cliché to say, but she’s like the girl next door.

And you know that he is meant to live with her and that his wandering has come to an end. The light of God is shining through the window. There’s a map on the far wall which is there to tell us that the lines on the map have been drawn. War is over. It’s a wonderful thing.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It makes me think of the story of Mary and Martha in the gospels and how there’s this great resonance, these moments throughout Christian history of movements that are led by women. So, of course, Jesus himself was said to have been sponsored largely by wealthier women who sponsored his ministry. And then, as you said, that happened in the earlier church where you had these house movements and often wealthy, invested, and pious women would support the church. But you also have these other moments, like, I think of the affected devotional movement of the medieval era seems to have been largely started by either nuns, or also just women who wanted their own private devotional texts and images. And so it’s interesting to see that and think of that as something that, there are these moments of … this of course, this podcast is called Another Life – where this other different kind of life is made possible.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: There are echoes of that kind of affective devotion. I think there are echoes of that in Vermeer’s world. Very faint subtle echoes of it. I think one of the great themes I think of that affective female medieval mystical tradition, if we call it medieval it’s also Renaissance, is the idea that women have a really close connection with Christ because after all Christ is in a woman’s womb and that the woman’s relationship to Christ is this idea that when a woman gives birth perhaps she knows more fully than any man ever can what it feels like to be crucified.

That fact that it’s a woman’s lot to give birth makes a woman closer to that kind of extreme suffering in her normal life than most men ever will be. And I think you get that. There’s a painting called The Lacemaker in the Louvre, which I think is a painting all about the fact that she will give birth to this child that’s in her belly and she’s making the piece of lace that she’ll put on the door to tell her neighbors if the baby’s alive or dead.

It’s very subtle, there’s a sewing cushion next to her, which has no business being in a lace painting. And it’s covered with these red threads, where Vermeer has actually, like Jackson Pollock, we think of him as being such a careful painter, but here he’s thrown the paint. So it’s as if the surface of the canvas has actually got blood on it. And you feel, it’s very quiet, but this sense of the potential of suffering and of blood and of the idea that a woman’s blood mingled with Christ’s blood, that the placenta is involved, all of this physicality, it’s there. And I think also, if you look at the two pictures of The Milkmaid and the Woman with a Balance, which I was saying are a pair, one of the things that tells us that, is there’s a nail in the wall in exactly the same place in each painting. And so they’re Martha and Mary and Christ is in their house, but he’s in the nail. The nail is the crucified Christ. They will always know that suffering that he had. And that is something that is given to a woman more profoundly than it is perhaps given to a man. And that, I don’t know what you think of about that, but I think that that is there in Vermeer and it comes and that these women know that tradition. They don’t insist on it as perhaps graphically as someone like Julian of Norwich does, but it’s still there.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, I’m glad to hear you say that. That’s my intuition. And I think maybe something I like about it is sometimes when you get into the affective stuff, some movements more than others, it can kind of become an idealization perhaps of that. You can kind of become obsessed with the suffering of women. Whereas I feel like with Vermeer, it really focuses on women as human beings experiencing this in their own individual lives. At least that’s how I feel about it.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, that’s right. I mean, the thing about these people is they are very, very good people. So their type of meditative spirituality is very focused. It’s focused on trying to summon up into your existence a sense of real feeling that Jesus or Mary Magdalene or whoever you are thinking about, that they really are there to help you. But they’re there to help you to do the right thing in your life. So you’re not doing it … It’s the opposite of somebody who retreats to the top of a mountain. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing to do, but it’s the opposite of that. They are retreating into a private space, perhaps talking to each other or in some cases, at some times, they do it on their own. Remonstrant literature and Collegiant literature advises men and women alike to retreat to a private space and to really think for an hour about this or that aspect of the New Testament and to try and absorb that into your life and then give it back out into what you do. So it’s very practical. I mean they actually want, Maria for example, the patron, she leaves one third of her money to the orphans of war.

It’s very clear. Wars are terrible. Wars that make children into orphans or kill children are even more terrible than other wars and I want to do something about it. So you look at paintings of Vermeer, you read her will, they’re two sides of the same coin. These people are very consistent and very good.

Joy Marie Clarkson: A kind of, yeah, an attempt to have a real integrity of life. And I think something else that came across to me as I was reading the book was how suffused with violence that era, especially leading up to this, in ways that we kind of can’t even imagine were. So, you know, there might be a sense in which saying, oh we should be tolerant, we should live in a tolerant society where everyone is at peace can almost sound cliche to us now, but to be in a time when whole villages within memory were wiped out because they were Catholic or because they were Protestant …

And to have that message and for it to be something you devote your life to and devote your meditations to is much more radical now than I think we can imagine. And that was something that I found compelling about the book that kind of helped me inhabit that more.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, I must say I find it puzzling that if you go – and I go a lot to the Dutch sections of art museums, famous art museums – you very rarely find any text on the wall telling you what had happened, what these people had been through. To me, it’s as if you would be expected to go into a museum of twentieth-century German art and look at Anselm Kiefer’s huge, black, dark, brooding pictures with titles named after Jewish people who had died. And no one was going to mention to you that actually there was something called the Holocaust. And millions of people had been appallingly murdered. To make good that lack, I have written quite a long section at the front of my book because the fact is, the Eighty Years War, just its name alone tells you how terrible it was.

That was terrible, especially in the early phases when the Spanish were literally killing entire populations of towns as an example to others in the hope that those others would then just bow down to them and give up, but they didn’t, so they kept killing. That was utterly terrible and Vermeer’s, on both sides of his family, those massacres had been lived through and known and talked about. So he would have known all about that.

But then at the same time, when he was growing up, the worst war in the history of Western civilization, which is the Thirty Years War, was playing out just to the east of the Netherlands for hundreds of thousands of square miles all the way to what’s now Czechoslovakia. And in that war, we don’t know the exact figures, but between eight and perhaps twelve million out of a total population of twenty million people died in the course of thirty years. It’s almost unimaginable. Almost unimaginable. Even including the Holocaust, if you measure the terrors of a war in terms of the deaths of civilian population by percentage, it’s eight times worse than the Second World War. It’s that awful.

At the end of it, you’ve got, say, six million people left out of this large population. All the men have only got one arm or one leg and all the women have been violated. And these people are flooding in because their lands have been devastated in some parts of Czechoslovakia. The crops didn’t recover until the 1900s. So they’re all flooding into the Dutch Republic, which is rich, and they’re telling their stories. And this is what Vermeer is growing up with. So when they get the peace treaties of 1648, that’s when the Dutch Golden Age begins. Everything before that is not the Dutch Golden Age. It’s the age of blood and iron and death.

But the Golden Age, there’s this tremendous optimism. And Vermeer’s tolerant Remonstrants, who by now are completely tolerated within Holland and many members of the Dutch governing classes cleaved to the Remonstrant faith, a very tolerant society, they’re fantastically optimistic. They think that the peace that’s broken out across Europe at this time is perhaps going to

Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s an eschatological peace.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Yes, they really do. I mean, I think there’s strong evidence in my mind that some of Vermeer’s paintings directly allude to the idea that, you know, the time of wonders is at hand, the time of peace. It’s interesting, they don’t believe, unlike most other very pious people of the period, they don’t actually believe that Jesus is going to come down as in a kind of seventeenth century movie, you know, with lightning bolts flying from his fingers to strike down all their enemies. They believe that because of the publication of books and the spread of learning, what’s going to happen is that, you know, as we all get more information, ha ha, we will all become wiser and more compassionate and kind and tyrants will lay down their power and kings will lay down their scepters. Everyone will become equal. We’ll all love each other. And that’s how the spirit of Christ is going to come down, he’s going to come down into each and every one of our souls. We won’t see him but we’ll feel him. And I think that’s what that beautiful painting the View of Delft is an attempt to depict. It’s Vermeer’s way of saying, “Yes, peace on earth will come. It’s here to stay. We’ve got it already. Just look around you. It’s here in Delft on this sunny day. This is the New Jerusalem. You don’t have to actually look to myth or legend to find it. It’s here now.” Which is why the last part of my book, when all of this comes crashing down and the Dutch Republic is invaded and war comes back. It makes me so sad to think of it. And of course Vermeer hardly paints a picture after that happens because it’s as if all the stuffing has been knocked out of him.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Of course. I’m drawn back to, for reasons that I think do make sense, drawn back to Kentucky in my mind, for a novel which is by a Kentucky agrarianist, Wendell Berry, but it talks about the life of this simple woman, it’s just one life over eighty years, from World War II to kind of the early 2000s. One of, it just follows her somewhat tragic life, she loses one husband, she marries another who’s been to World War II and he’s kind of quite affected by it.

But as they’re wrestling with the wreckage of his experience of war, the husband says to her, “I want to live a life that is the opposite of war.” And to me there’s something interesting about the sense that these paintings come almost as something like that, right? It’s hard to think of these peaceful revelatory paintings as coming in this moment in between extreme violence.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: That’s absolutely right. There’s a wonderful novel of the time, actually, of Vermeer’s time written by German contemporary Grimmelshausen called The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus. And it’s about this boy who gets drawn into the Thirty Years War and becomes – his entire family are massacred. He gets drawn into the war and he serves on one hand for the Protestants and then he serves for the Catholics. He sees death and carnage all around him. He becomes brutalized. But at the end of the book, he suddenly manages to release himself from the chaos and the carnage and he goes to Switzerland, of all places, and he finds himself in a village.

And it’s a brilliant passage which so much reminds me of Vermeer’s paintings and some of those of Pieter de Hooch as well who also gives us this sense of amazing peace after the storm. And he says, I couldn’t understand it. I went to this village and there were no dead bodies in the street and there were shops that were open and you could buy bread. You could give somebody a little bit of money and they would buy bread. And the orchards on the outside of the town, all the trees hadn’t been cut down and they had apples on them. I’d never seen anything like it. I might as well have been in China or Brazil.

 And it’s this wonderful, and I think that sense of absolute wonder or the blessed, what is it that he’s wondering? It’s the blessed of the mundane. It’s the miracle of being able to go down to the quayside as the women do in the view of Delft and simply wait for a trekschuit boat that’s going to take you to Leiden. And there’s no bombs going off. There’s a storm cloud above the city in that painting and I always think that storm cloud contains at least twenty million dead bodies. We can’t see them. And if you’re looking at the picture as well, because of that cloud, you know that if you were to turn around quickly enough, you’d see a rainbow.

But it’s exactly that same feeling as you describe in your Kentucky novel and as I describe in the German novel about the Thirty Years War. It’s the same thing. And I think you find it also without quite as much depth and quite as much sense of how sacred it is in the work of other painters. I mean, Phillips Koninck, those beautiful landscapes painted in the 1650s and 1660s, or Pieter de Hooch, who paints that beautiful painting of a young mother just taking the nits. She’s checking her hair, her child’s hair for nits, which probably to many people now does not sound like heaven on earth. But to that painter in that time, that is heaven on earth.

Because there’s no soldiers coming in through the door. No one’s trying to assault or violate her or kill her child. She’s just in peace.

Joy Marie Clarkson: She’s peacefully looking for nits.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: And I think there may even be a dog looking. Dogs are often looking at God in paintings, in my experience. I think there might be a dog looking up into the light. I may have invented that.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So I had just a curious question, which was you opened the book with an epigraph from Spinoza, from the Ethics, where it says, “hatred is increased by being reciprocated and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.” So I was just curious why you chose that particularly and why Spinoza.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Vermeer had another patron apart from the lady who was his main patron, Maria, and that man was called Adrian Paets. And Adrian Paets, who is an incredible character and streets all over Holland should be named after him, but they’re not because he’s been forgotten. He was amazing. He was the spiritual leader of the Collegiant movement and the Remonstrant movement in Vermeer’s lifetime. And he, as well as being Vermeer’s patron commissioned the astronomer and the geographer from him. He was also Spinoza’s patron. And he settled Spinoza, who wanted to leave Amsterdam. He found Spinoza a place to live in the village of Rijnsburg, which was a Collegiant village. And Spinoza joined the Collegiant Movement. So Spinoza and Vermeer, who lived four miles apart, were both members of the Collegiant Movement.

And I believe that when Spinoza wrote the Ethics he was very self-consciously and in Adrian Patz’s mind also, would have been seen to be doing this, he was putting the messages, the ancient Christian message, the most important one, love thine enemy, which is the hardest one as well, be was putting that in the language of the new philosophy, just as Vermeer was putting that same message in the language of the new painting. They were sort of, in Patz’s mind, they were brethren. And the fact that they were both, you know, had Patz’s as their patron suggests to me that they surely must have met.

And by the way, there’s a phrase inscribed into the lid of the virginal in one of the music paintings of Vermeer, which used to hang in Maria’s house. And it’s probably a real virginal that she once owned, it says, “music is the cure for melancholy.” And we find that quote three times in the writings of Spinoza. And on top of that, I have just found out, which is not in my book, that Maria had a second notary. She made a second will that I don’t include in my book because it’s only just been discovered and published by a pair of Dutch scholars. But the notary who wrote that out is a man called Claes Verruyt. And he is the cousin of a lady called Gertken Geraut. And she was Spinoza’s landlady. So …

Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s all connected.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: You couldn’t make it up. So I put Spinoza there because I just think it’s a wonderful quote. Spinoza was a Collegiant like Vermeer. This is for me, in that one little phrase or two phrases Spinoza is encapsulating what the Collegiants believed and he’s putting it in the language of this new way of writing inspired by Descartes and philosophy and so on. And Vermeer is doing exactly the same thing. I mean, by the way, people may wonder if they’re listening to this, if they’re thinking well if these people were so pious and religious and if all Vermeer’s pictures are religious why do they not show actually Martha and Mary, why is it a milkmaid and a woman with a balance. The reason for that is that is these people came out of Calvinism and they don’t want images of Martha and Mary or Jesus. That would be image worship. They want to think about those characters, but they want their identities to be transmuted into those of modern people who are perhaps thinking about them or trying to embody them.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And you can think of it as a kind of resistance to idolatry in the sense of, you know, I was saying earlier that often even very beautiful paintings of women can be women as archetypes or kind of something inhuman, so it’s push against that, right?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Absolutely, exactly. Mary Magdalene is present in the house, but she is present in the house in the form of Mary’s daughter, Maria’s daughter, Vermeer’s patron’s daughter, a real person, Magdalena, who is impersonating Mary Magdalene. It’s a type of painting that’s called a tronie in Dutch, where it would be a painting of you as the person you want to incarnate. Rembrandt painted himself, for example, as Saint Paul.

The girl with a pearl earring – that’s what she is, it’s a painting of Magdalena van Ruijven, Vermeer’s patron’s daughter probably aged about fourteen, fifteen, as Mary Magdalene at the moment when Christ calls to her and she turns around and she sees him with her eyes full of tears and the pearl represents the state of her soul which is bursting with this joy and enlightenment. But it’s very important that she’s not a depiction of Mary Magdalene, she’s a depiction of a real person as Mary Magdalene because that’s the point for them. The point of thinking about Mary Magdalene is to embody her yourself.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Is to respond to Christ’s call.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Exactly. If you’re a man looking at that picture, you are Christ.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Interesting.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: By definition. So you’ve got a lot to live up to.

There’s so much. I’m making it sound as if I know everything, because of course, I should say with due humility, because I’m a Collegiant now, that of course I don’t know how they used the paintings. I haven’t got a time machine. I can’t go back to see. What did Magdalena think of the picture? How did she ... I mean, one thing we do know, which I think is fascinating, and I put that right at the beginning of my book, is that Magdalena’s parents commissioned all the pictures.

And they had all the pictures in that little house in front of the hidden Remonstrant church. But after they had died, Magdalena had them all. And she had them in an even tinier little sliver of a house. You can visit it on the Great Market Square in Delft. It’s still got the same name it once had. The Golden ABC. In the front room of that house, when she died, tragically young, at twenty-five, of childbirth as so many women did in that time, the notary found ... all of Vermeer’s paintings, his major works in her house, including – I forget exactly, either eleven or twelve in the front room, including, I’m sure, the Girl with the Pearl Earring.

And it’s interesting, this is not an art collection. It’s a Vermeer collection. There are a few other paintings there, but essentially it’s a Vermeer collection. And in her front room, it’s only Vermeers, plus one marine painting and one landscape by someone else, which are probably quite obscure, not very prominently displayed. And they’re certainly not important because when the notary made the list, he didn’t write down the name of the artists who’d done those pictures.

And it stays. This is of course why Vermeer was forgotten for so long and why he was a mystery for so long because he was always cherished. His work was just cherished and kept by that family for forty years. For twenty years after Vermeer’s death, they still own all the pictures. So no wonder he’s forgotten.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So you’ve alluded to this already, but how did undertaking the research for this book and learning about the Remonstrants, how did that affect you personally?

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Well, I thought it was very exhilarating to discover that this artist, that so many people love and so many people have been drawn to and so many people have almost made a kind of cult of. He’s one of those artists, a little bit like Caravaggio. People come up to me and say, “I’ve made a point in my life of seeing every painting by Vermeer. I’ve traveled everywhere to see them. I’ve even been to Dresden.”

It’s very encouraging to find that he should have been such an interesting and generous, that he should represent so much the best of humanity. That we’ve been looking for something, as if people have been looking for something to complete themselves in his work. It’s not that they’ve just been looking at the work. So I felt very powerfully moved by that. My main feeling was once I discovered it actually. I’m not usually very superstitious but I felt that I’d been given something very important and I’d been told to pass it on to everyone else.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s quite a thing to feel.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: I felt that very strongly because there were so many strange coincidences involved in how I sort of somehow, it was a bit, I don’t know. You know that story about Newton with the apple falling on his head, it was a bit like that. It wasn’t that I was so clever that I found it. It really did come and whack me between the eyes. I think it was because a book fell open at a particular page and another book fell open at another page and I suddenly thought, oh, oh, that’s, oh, there it is. It was like that. I can’t remember the exact moment. But I remember, and then there was another moment with the girl with the pearl and another moment with ... realizing suddenly that there were pairs of paintings, that these paintings were pairs. Because they’ve always been treated really as if they were done for the market and they were just, as it were, each one was a commodity, a separate product. The idea that they might all amount to one thing, which I think in the end is actually what they do … it’s almost as if, you know, the wonderful extraordinary Convent of San Marco in Florence, where all the paintings are done by, or most of the paintings are done by, Fra Angelico. [Well] it’s not quite like that. [But] a place that’s very sacred and holy where all the paintings are done by one person, that’s a very special thing.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And I think there’s something encouraging when you think about how many times … you were saying earlier the peaceful things tend to be quite unpeacefully quashed. But there’s something, I think, encouraging about the idea that even if people haven’t understood it all these years, that the quality of the love and hope and integrity behind Vermeer has persisted and has continued to draw people and has survived in some way for you to discover.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: That’s I think, the biggest miracle of all because after Vermeer died, when all these paintings were sold at auction, we know that within really a very short number of years, maybe ten years, twenty years at the most, his name had, because he didn’t sign his pictures much, he signed a few, but his name had totally been forgotten. And by 1730, 1740, if a Vermeer came to market, it would never be sold by the dealers because they couldn’t sell a Vermeer. Who’d heard of Vermeer? They would sell a Vermeer, but they’d sell it as a de Hooch or they’d sell it as Frans van Mieris or even on one occasion, the girl with the letter in Dresden, as a Rembrandt.

So Vermeer had literally disappeared by the beginning of the nineteenth century, he just wasn’t there. What’s amazing is that none of his pictures had disappeared. No one had thrown it, you know, if you get given a Prada handbag, you keep it because you know it’s valuable. If you just get given a handbag with no label, you might not keep it. But all of Vermeer’s pictures, he was, they had no, as it were, no brand to sustain them in the market and in the world. And yet nobody ever allowed one just to be put out with the rubbish or, you know, “oh no, actually I won’t keep that after all.” Not one as far as we know – that’s a slight exaggeration. There are two pictures that perhaps have gone forever. So if anybody ever sees a picture of a man in a see-through room washing his hands, what must that look like? That’s actually the name of a painting in the auction, we you don’t know where it is. But no, it’s amazing. It’s so encouraging that the sheer beauty and the moral purity and the generosity and the love that’s in the pictures, and the light, protected those pictures so that they survived three hundred years of just being a picture by somebody.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s incredible.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: But never made their way to the back of the junk shop and into the bin.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Because they were not meant to.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: They were not meant to.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It reminds me of another disciple of Spinoza, the concluding lines of Middlemarch by George Eliot, if you have read it.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: I have read it.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So the concluding lines are, “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you or me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Andrew Graham-Dixon: That’s perfect.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And there’s something about that to me, both of the women that Vermeer painted and the lives that they live faithfully, but also the hundreds of other lives that contributed to us eventually receiving and still having these paintings. And then you playing your role in finding their meaning. But it’s a nice thought.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Yes, it’s a lovely thought. No, I absolutely, I completely agree.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, I could have many more questions to ask you about this book and about your book on Caravaggio which I also very much enjoyed. But our conversation must eventually come to a close. So I will ask you what I ask all of our guests, which is what is one thing, and now you’ll have to remember that I told you I was going to ask you this at beginning. What is one thing, it can be a painting, a poem, a person, a practice, or something that doesn’t begin with a p, that reminds you that another life is possible.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: I think, that is, if I had to think of one thing right now, it would actually be what we’ve been talking about. It would be this extraordinary life of Vermeer. In the sense that ... What I take from what you say is, what is somebody’s life? We think we might know what somebody’s life is. The life that they have lived. But it’s always possible that we can see it new and we can see it fresh. And perhaps every life contains other lives within it. Perhaps every life contains infinite lives within it. I think we should always see things fresh. If you can see things fresh, you’re very close to the divine.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That is a wonderful thought to end on. Thank you so much for joining us.

Andrew Graham-Dixon: Thank you for having me.