Has the secret of Vermeer’s most enigmatic masterpiece finally been revealed? A British art historian’s controversial claim to have uncovered the true identity of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’

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, 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).

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Andrew’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 Vermeer and His Milieu — he began researching ‘a group of dissident, free-thinking, clever, compassionate, really good people’, the Remonstrants, and became convinced of their link with the Dutch painter. A strand of Protestantism that split from the main Dutch Reformed Church, the Remonstrants, who still exist today, rejected Calvinism’s theory of predestination. In the early 17th century, some of them, together with other Protestant splinters, began holding monthly meetings, or Colleges, in which everyone, including women, could speak of their beliefs on equal terms. Those Collegiants saw faith as a personal experience and called for tolerance and understanding among Christian churches, opening their meetings to anyone who accepted that Jesus’s teachings would save the world: ‘I was reading their reflective literature and some of the poetry and thinking, “Gosh, this really, this feels like Vermeer to me,”’ says Andrew. ‘“These words seem to me to feel the same feeling as a Vermeer painting, but there can’t be any connection” — and then I suddenly realised that, yes, there was a connection.’ Or rather, he maintains, there were at least two: Johannes Taurinus, the preacher who acted as a proxy to Vermeer’s late grandfather, granting his father permission to get married, was a Remonstrant (and later became a Collegiant); and so was the artist’s principal patron, Pieter van Ruijven. If Vermeer did convert to Catholicism, Andrew suggests, it was probably a feint: ‘He was living in a nest of Jesuits while painting for the opposition,’ he quips in his book.

Van Ruijven was married to Maria de Knuijt, who was, according to Andrew, as much of a patron to him as her husband. She was undoubtedly close to the artist: in her 1665 will, she made a provision to leave him a remarkable 500 guilders should she predecease him — possibly the only case of a patron doing so in the entirety of 17th-century Dutch history. Equally unusual was that de Knuijt and van Ruijven owned some 21 of Vermeer’s pictures — more than half his entire oeuvre. The artist had begun painting for the van Ruijven family in 1657 and for the following 13 years worked almost exclusively for them and their connections — people such as Adrian Paerts, a patron of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and ‘the man at the centre of the Collegiate web’.

Andrew is convinced that, as Protestants who shunned images of Jesus, de Knuijt, van Ruijven and their friends sought images that subtly encapsulated their faith — thus, Vermeer’s cryptic paintings could in fact be allegories. He dismisses the ‘powerful but small idea’ that Dutch art, as the product of and for a merchant society, is all about this world, that it has no soul: ‘I think it’s not true of Frans Hals, not true of any of the great landscape painters, deeply not true of Rembrandt, but profoundly not true of Vermeer.’ As an example, he quotes The Milkmaid: ‘The traditional interpretation is that she’s a woman in a kitchen. Now, a woman in a kitchen is potentially a sexy subject: the rich man who commissions the painting is having a little sexual fantasy about [her], or she’s a kind of object of attraction to him anyway. But if you look at Vermeer’s Milkmaid, there is none of that.’ Instead, he counters, it could be interpreted in a Christian key, if taken together with the painting that hung with it in the entrance hall of van Ruijven’s house: Woman Holding a Balance. ‘I believe they represent Martha and Mary, La Vita Activa, La Vita Contemplativa.’ The Milkmaid is making a bread-and-milk dish for the poor, as Martha would. Woman Holding a Balance is thinking about the state of her soul — and her soul is light, like Mary’s. Although the two pictures are traditionally dated six years apart, Andrew doesn’t think they are. ‘Their hands are in more or less the same position. They are in the same scale relationship to the rooms they occupy. The light comes in from the left in both paintings, they are both doing different versions of the same thing.’

Seen through that prism, the View of Delft becomes ‘a painting about what will happen at the end of time. There has been a huge storm, and [it] has just finished, the roofs of the town are wet and the sun is shining and nothing is happening. Some women are down in the shops; there are some boats; and that storm is not just a storm. That storm is the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War — and now this is what peace looks like’. Andrew references a novel, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus —published by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen shortly after Vermeer painted View of Delft — which tells the adventures of a man during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘At the end of the book, he goes to Switzerland and he says: “God, it’s strange. You can just buy bread, you can walk down the street and there aren’t any dead bodies in the street and the orchard outside hasn’t been burned. There’s trees and they’ve got apples on them. It’s like ordinary life, it is like a miracle.”’ This same spirit, he believes, imbues View of Delft: ‘In my view, it’s not just a topographical painting; that is a painting about all the hopes of this generation, of the first generation of European pacifists.’

His most revolutionary interpretation, however, concerns Vermeer’s most celebrated picture, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Despite its reputation as mysterious, it is, in his opinion, one of the artist’s most straightforward paintings. The Collegiants believed in baptism at an older age, usually about 13, which allowed the faithful to make the conscious decision of immersing themselves in Christ. Magdalena van Ruijven, the daughter of Vermeer’s patrons, was probably baptised in 1667–68, roughly the same year in which Andrew believes the Girl was painted. The author has no doubt it’s Magdalena’s face that gazes back from the canvas: ‘Who else can it be?’ Yet, he continues, this is no mere portrait. The Girl wears a turban made of scarves, which ‘is exactly what Dutch painters would choose to put on a person to indicate that they are someone from the Bible’, and the famous pearl earring. And what could that refer to, ponders Andrew, if not the moment in which Mary Magdalene at last recognises the risen Christ in the garden outside the Holy Sepulchre? ‘At that moment, her soul is so enormous we can only see it in the form of this pearl, which is purity. She is more pure than any human being has ever been, because she’s seeing God.’