{"id":508227,"date":"2026-06-19T17:01:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/508227\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T17:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:01:10","slug":"art-historian-believes-he-has-uncovered-the-identity-of-vermeers-girl-with-a-pearl-earring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/508227\/","title":{"rendered":"Art historian believes he has uncovered the identity of Vermeer\u2019s Girl with a Pearl Earring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Author and art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has identified the sitter for Girl With a Pearl Earring.Supplied<\/p>\n

People love Johannes Vermeer\u2019s paintings partly because of their special glow, a soft radiance emanating from gentle scenes of daily life. In a new biography of the 17th-century Dutch artist, the British art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon believes he has uncovered the mystery behind that glow, a secret rooted in Vermeer\u2019s religious convictions. Most of Vermeer\u2019s paintings can be traced to the patronage of a single Dutch family who belonged to a small Christian sect: Graham-Dixon explains how that monopoly may be the reason Vermeer was largely unknown until the 19th century and how their religiosity shows up in the art. On top of it all, he has identified the sitter for Girl with a Pearl Earring.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you realize that all the paintings were painted for one house, owned by these profoundly idealistic, highly meditative Christian people, the pictures just make so much sense in that context,\u201d Graham-Dixon said in an interview during a recent visit to Toronto. \u201cIn 20 years, everyone will be thinking that this is essentially the truth about Vermeer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham-Dixon\u2019s work is based on the research of the American economist John Michael Montias, who in the 1980s introduced economics into the study of Golden Age Dutch painting, eventually discovering in Dutch archives a trove of documents relating to Pieter van Ruijven, the husband of Vermeer\u2019s chief patron, Maria de Knuijt. <\/p>\n

Graham-Dixon made a film about Montias\u2019s work for the BBC but felt the economist had not plumbed the depths of Vermeer when he died in 2005. <\/p>\n

Summer culture preview: Five visual arts exhibits to catch this summer<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI ended up feeling that he\u2019d begun something but he hadn\u2019t finished it, because his conclusions were very tentative. Vermeer was still a huge mystery,\u201d Graham-Dixon said. He signed a contract to write a book about the artist but in the meantime wrote two others, on Michaelangelo and Caravaggio, and served on a committee with Prime Minister Mark Carney when he was Governor of the Bank of England. Their assignment was to pick a British artist for the \u00a320 note, and they agreed on J.M.W. Turner. In 2015, Graham-Dixon finally cracked open the Vermeer file and discovered the story of the van Ruijvens and their daughter. <\/p>\n

The first crucial piece of information was that the family owned two-thirds of Vermeer\u2019s output and, at Pieter and Maria\u2019s death, that art was inherited by their daughter, Magdalena. She died prematurely aged 26 \u2013 perhaps in childbirth \u2013 and her husband inherited the art. In turn, it was passed to his father, who finally auctioned it, scattering it to the winds about 20 years after Vermeer\u2019s death in 1675 at age 43. <\/p>\n

Within another few years, the same paintings were being resold as the work of other, better-known artists. Graham-Dixon believes the way the van Ruijvens both held Vermeer\u2019s art and disposed of it explains why the artist was little recognized in his lifetime and why his legacy was not secured at his death. He was considered a lesser-known Dutch artist until the 19th century rediscovered him. <\/p>\n

So, who is the Girl with a Pearl Earring? If most of Vermeer\u2019s work was executed for the van Ruijven family, Graham-Dixon concludes that she is Magdalena herself, and dates the painting to the late 1670s, when the girl would have been 12 or 13.<\/p>\n

Graham-Dixon decided his quest was to find something in common between Vermeer and his patrons, which leads the reader to the second important thing about the van Ruijvens: In Calvinist Holland, they were non-conformist Remonstrants, as were Vermeer\u2019s parents.<\/p>\n

The Remonstrants were a pacifist group who objected to the Calvinist notion of predestination, believed in good works and freedom of worship, and argued that Catholics and Protestants, who had just fought the bloody 30 Years\u2019 War from 1618-1648, should unite in their shared Christian faith. <\/p>\n

\u201cAll the terrible atrocities and deaths and murders of the past 80 years, that\u2019s now over, and these people believe that their message of tolerance will land on fertile ground. They actually believe that they are on the brink of world peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Graham-Dixon speculates that Vermeer’s The Music Lesson shows a religious gathering.Supplied<\/p>\n

Dutch women were relatively independent in this period, compared to other European women, and the Remonstrant women delved further into their beliefs, founding a splinter movement known as the Collegians. They concluded that anyone could have a direct relationship with God and so dispensed with ministers in favour of meetings to discuss scripture and moral behaviour, similar to the Quaker movement in Britain. Graham-Dixon believes that many of Vermeer\u2019s paintings are allegories for Collegian beliefs or depictions of Collegian meetings, which lasted hours with talking and arguing before ending in joyous music-making.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese pictures aren\u2019t genre paintings. That isn\u2019t a painting of a concert. That isn\u2019t a painting of a music lesson. Put those two paintings together; they\u2019re a pair. And what they depict is a Collegian meeting happening at Maria\u2019s house,\u201d he said, referring to The Concert and The Music Lesson, two of Vermeer\u2019s best known works. <\/p>\n

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The Milkmaid by Vermeer may be an allegory for charitable work.Supplied<\/p>\n

Graham-Dixon sees Collegian morals hidden in the paintings. For example, he believes that the picture identified as The Milkmaid, showing a woman at a table with bread and milk, is a companion painting to one of a woman in a similar pose using a hand scale. Pointing out that a softened bread pudding was a standard dish served to the poor or elderly, he argues that the pair represent the active life (with a figure engaged in charity) and the contemplative life (with a figure weighing her soul.) The paintings exude a glow of goodness because they don\u2019t show mundane domestic tasks but acts of devotion.<\/p>\n

The Remonstrants and the Collegians believed that when the Kingdom of Heaven arrived, it would not manifest itself by some great disruption but would rather feel like the best days of one\u2019s everyday life. Graham-Dixon points to the famed View of Delft as a depiction of that glory \u2013 no thunderbolts, no apotheosis, just a beautiful day down by the river.<\/p>\n

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Vermeer’s View of Delft shows a heavenly day by the river.Supplied<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s something called a \u2018plunder painting,\u2019 which was very popular in the 1640s, where you\u2019d see soldiers going into people\u2019s houses and stealing things, because the 30 Years War was a terrible plunder war, holding people hostage and threatening children. If you\u2019ve been looking at that kind of picture, you see all the more that this is a kind of heaven on earth. It\u2019s not just a painting of what\u2019s happening on a particular day in Delft,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s an aura of blessedness about the painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found is published by W.W. Norton in the U.S. and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Author and art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has identified the sitter for Girl With…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2522,307,304,2511,305,306,2523,2476,2503,2524,289,2502,2516,2517,2513,2504,2501,308,113,835,93,246,2515,2509,2533,2505,2506,1523,61,60,2512,166,1529,2525,768,2528,2529,2531,2526,2530,2152,2527,2507,2519,2520,1650,2518,2153,2510,80,2521,2514,2508,268,2532],"class_list":["post-508227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-alberta","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-arts-news","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-design","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-entertainment","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}