Sign-In
Cart
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $45.00
ISBN13: 9781324124115
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: Apr 7 2026
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.95
Height: 1.51 Width: 6.39 Depth: 9.38
Language: English
One spring day in 1683, a notary's clerk in Delft entered the home of the late Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven and stumbled upon one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world: twenty paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Rather than dispel the mysteries of Vermeer's life, this discovery merely gave rise to more questions: How had this one Dutchwoman come to possess the majority of the master's work? And why have these images--among the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art--defied explanation for so long?
Following new leads and drawing on freshly uncovered evidence from Dutch archives, acclaimed art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon fills these long-standing gaps in art history, presenting a dramatic and transformative new interpretation of Vermeer's life and work. Dixon considers Vermeer holistically, placing him in his complex historical, social, religious, political, and artistic context in order to understand what spaces he occupied in his life and how the texture of these spaces inspired his paintings and distinguished him from his artistic contemporaries. Dixon also interrogates the nature of Vermeer's relationship with the Van Ruijven family, which was unlike any other known relationship in that time period, and discusses how this dynamic shaped his artistic practice.
Rich with piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer's paintings, Graham-Dixon's biography is full of revelations. It upends the master's enigmatic reputation and depicts him instead as a pioneer of the early Enlightenment, a pacifist who was deeply affected by the wars and religious conflicts of the Dutch Republic and allied to a radical movement driven underground by persecution. In Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Dixon does what countless art historians and scholars before him failed to: he brings Johannes Vermeer, renowned for his use of chiaroscuro, out of the shadows and into the light.
2 different editions
Also available
Also from
Graham-Dixon, Andrew
Also in
Artists
Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art
Kendall, Joshua
Hardcover
Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World
Johnson, Victoria
Hardcover
The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers
McKissack Daniel, Cheryl
Hardcover
The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki: The Influences and Inspiration Behind the Iconic Films
Rapold, Nicolas
Hardcover
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Egan, Timothy
Paperback
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises
Blume, Lesley M. M.
Paperback
Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It
Kurtz, Glenn
Hardcover
The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry That Transformed Rome
Morrissey, Jake
Paperback
Autopsy of My Former Self: A journey through grief, transformation, addiction, personal triumph, and purpose
Burse, Jermaine Danté
Paperback
Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired
Naumann, Francis M.
Hardcover
Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
Rozzo, Mark
Paperback
Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination
Jones, Brian Jay
Paperback
Modigliani: Man and Myth - Biography and Works of Italian Painter and Sculptor Amedeo Modigliani
Modigliani, Jeanne
Paperback
Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan: Personal Histories of Two Icons of American Architecture
Thoreson, Trygve
Paperback
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin
Weschler, Lawrence
Paperback
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [50th Anniversary Edition]: From A to B and Back Again
Warhol, Andy
Paperback
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World
Hoare, Philip
Hardcover
Composing Olana: A Journey on Foot Through Frederic Church's Greatest Work of Art
LaFarge, Annik
Paperback
Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr: My Words, My Photographs
Jones, Wendy
Parr, Martin
Hardcover
Warhol's Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine
Leamer, Laurence
Hardcover
The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island
Monkman, Kent
Gordon, Gisele
Paperback
Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator
Roy, Sandip
Hardcover
Art Above Everything: One Woman's Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life
Griest, Stephanie Elizondo
Hardcover
Footnote to History: From Hungary to America. The Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor
Laszlo, Andrew
Paperback
The Artist and His Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Public Museum in the United States
Webber, Diane
Paperback