A new interpretation of most, though not all, of Vermeer’s work ... It’s hard to predict how readers of the book will respond to these readings of the art. They are delivered with a confident brio, though the author is careful to enter caveats ... Amen to that—and, indeed, to the arguments that are sustained throughout Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. You may disagree with them, fiercely so, but they could not be more persuasively put, and they rescue Vermeer from the shelf, as it were, on which we have placed him for our convenience ... Graham-Dixon’s task, as it was in his biography of Caravaggio, is to resacralize an art that the current age consigns to the realms of the secular ... Andrew Graham-Dixon may be on a mission, but so, he believes, was Vermeer.
In his densely researched and highly original book, Andrew Graham-Dixon aims to account for that strange suffusion in Vermeer’s painting through the artist’s contexts, contacts and religious affiliations ... 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. But it does not exhaust them, or guarantee their final meaning. The paintings retain their mysterious absorption, with an immanent charge we can still feel.
A whopping great study ... This is impressive detective work ... For all the historical heavy-handedness, Graham-Dixon still contrives to give us the deepest and most rounded portrait of Vermeer we are ever likely to have ... What’s oddest about Graham-Dixon’s readings is that he feels the need to make them ... Looking for meaning in these pictures is like looking for significance in the fact of your being alive ... I am being hard on this book because parts of it are so impressive ... In the end though, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is no truer to its subject than Tracy Chevalier’s high-end period-piece potboiler Girl with a Pearl Earring. Case dismissed.
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 ... His reading of the paintings is revelatory. He trawls the archives, lays out new evidence, links pictures never linked before, and teases new meaning from signs, symbols and sitters ... This is a fascinating portrait of Vermeer, his times and his mind. The reading and reframing of the paintings will hold you rapt. You’ll never look at a Vermeer in the same way again.
Compelling and informative ... But the test of an artist’s biography is always going to be how it treats the paintings, and here Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is much less successful ... With a life meagrely documented even by 17th-century standards, largely because his art was admired only in small and private circles, the biographer has no choice but to speculate, infer, and suggest. But the purpose of such speculation should surely be to expand and multiply the possible meanings of the artist’s works. Time and again, Graham-Dixon does the opposite, and presents his interpretation as having solved the mystery of a Vermeer painting once and for all ... This book is well-grounded in scholarship and, apart from these passages of purple prose claiming to enter the minds and bodies of Vermeer’s figures, the writing is lively and adroit, but it lacks the most elusive and characteristic feature of Vermeer the artist: tact.
Through detective-like research and analysis, Graham-Dixon removes the varnish of historical interpretations to reveal the light of love and faith that this devout sect lived by and how these beliefs inspired Vermeer’s paintings ... Art and spiritual history are woven throughout this luminous and fascinating biography.
Bold new claims about Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer and why he painted are at the core of this exemplary biography ... Convincingly repositions Vermeer, about whom relatively little is known ... Along the way, Graham-Dixon makes informed, well-researched guesses about whom Vermeer might have apprenticed with, among other mysteries. Serious Vermeer fan won’t want to miss this.
New perspectives on an iconic painter ... The author analyzes Vermeer’s paintings, beautifully reproduced in color plates, to reveal religious allusions, evidence of Vermeer’s thorough knowledge of the New Testament and Dutch dissenting literature ... A well-researched, penetrating investigation.
