A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene. That scene is everyday – and yet. Vermeer’s best paintings have a meditative quality exceeding the genres to which they belong, or the ordinary situations they depict. The devotional attentiveness of The Milkmaid (as she is now called), slowly dispensing her milk in a thin trickle from jug to waiting bowl; the absorption of the Woman Holding a Balance as her own poise allows it to reach an equilibrium; the rapt fixation of the gaze of the Woman with a Pearl Necklace: all suggest that the worldly objects and tasks they show are suffused with a significance beyond themselves.

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. Despite a childhood in the Reformed tradition, Vermeer married a Catholic, Catharina Bolnes, and lived in the Papenhoek or ‘Papists’ Corner’ of Delft. Scholars have often placed him in the ambit of the hidden church and intellectual culture of the Jesuits, operating in his immediate neighbourhood. Graham-Dixon, however, situates him in a radically different milieu. 

It has long been known that Vermeer’s major patrons were a couple living in Delft in a house called the Golden Eagle. Maria de Knuijt and Pieter Claesz van Ruijven owned and probably commissioned twenty of Vermeer’s paintings, about half his total oeuvre. Recent research has discovered that Maria had the money and a childhood connection to Vermeer. The couple were Remonstrants: followers of the Dutch church inspired by the theologian Jacobus Arminius, who preached against Calvinism, for free will and action in securing salvation, and for toleration of religious difference. Remonstrants were, like Catholics, forced to worship in private. In the book’s most significant archival finding, Graham-Dixon establishes that the Golden Eagle was situated immediately in front of Delft’s secret Remonstrant church. But he also claims that Maria de Knuijt convened a cell of ‘Collegiants’ – a radical association of Christians of various denominations who met to discuss the New Testament. Heterodox of opinion, they encouraged individual speculation and free thinking, to the alarm of those concerned with religious and social conformity. Graham-­Dixon’s major claim is that ‘most of Vermeer’s paintings were devotional pictures, painted to assist Collegiants in their worship’ at the Golden Eagle. 

The consequences are rich with implication for the paintings. The Little Street – whose specific location has always been a matter of debate – is claimed to depict the hidden Remonstrant church. Girl with a Pearl Earring becomes a portrait of de Knuijt’s daughter Magdalena as Mary Magdalene, turning from the empty tomb to recognise her saviour on Easter morning. The Milkmaid and Woman Holding a Balance are a pendent pair, representing the virtues of active and contemplative life. View of Delft is a picture of the celestial city. The new theory prompts some beautiful interpretations, especially an account of the nail studding the wall behind both The Milkmaid and the Woman Holding a Balance as a minor memorial of Christ’s death on the cross, riveted through time and seemingly contingent, but in fact the unifying point of everything.

The claim that Vermeer’s paintings for Maria de Knuijt form a cycle as vital and religious as Giotto’s or Michelangelo’s for the Arena or Sistine Chapels is an ingenious and suggestive thought experiment which will no doubt invigorate the pens of Vermeer specialists, not least because of the confidence with which it is asserted. What Graham-Dixon introduces as speculation, hedged by the usual temperings of biography – ‘presumably’, ‘possibly’, ‘probably’ – turns with the flick of a page into asserted fact. No Collegiant groups or activity have hitherto been associated with Delft, as Graham-Dixon acknowledges. A lack of evidence for a secret group is not surprising, but it is an imaginative leap to conjure a whole cell of Collegiant women and their quasi-liturgical practices from that gap in the record. 

From the sparse scatter of documents testifying to the life of Vermeer, many of them forbiddingly brief or boring or purely legal, Graham-Dixon constructs a compelling story. But it is a story – like those fictions which Vermeer’s paintings, with that mysterious charge of meaningfulness, have frequently inspired. Here, narrative drive is supplied by Vermeer’s supposed enmity with his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, a Catholic woman who, though she at first refused to condone her daughter’s marriage to a Protestant, thawed sufficiently to allow him and his family to live in her house. Facts which suggest Vermeer accommodated himself to the Catholic faith, an assumption which has informed much recent scholarship, are explained away as the triumphs of Maria. Two of the Vermeers’ many children were called Ignatius and Franciscus and another sent away to train for the priesthood – Graham-Dixon sees this as ‘a resounding victory’ for Maria’s ‘militant Catholicism’ over Vermeer’s Collegiant will. The accoutrements of a Catholic household chapel which appear in the inventory of his goods drawn up after his death were only acquired ‘through gritted teeth’. Early modern confessional hostilities are still being fought in the book’s prose: the Catholics ‘were all in it together’; Vermeer was ‘living in a nest of Jesuits’. 

Most dramatically, Graham-Dixon speculates that Maria Thins might have precipitated her son-in-law’s death. Maria and Catharina claimed that Vermeer died of the humiliation and anxiety attendant on losing all sources of income in 1672, the Dutch ‘Year of Disaster’. This is dismissed as ‘hard to believe’. He then suggests that Maria Thins might have ‘given him such a hard time that he had a seizure’. ‘It cannot be ruled out’, Graham-Dixon suggests; equally, it cannot be ruled in. 

‘There is no ambiguity about it’, Graham-Dixon writes, interpreting the early Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window; later, he suggests that ‘there can only be one answer’, claiming that the Girl with a Pearl Earring is Magdalena van Ruijven, and therefore Mary Magdalene. Such assertion of one’s own belief is at odds with the tolerant spirit of the Remonstrants and Collegiants lauded elsewhere in this book. It is also counter to the brimming latency of light and meaning, the immanence, of Vermeer’s paintings. 

The problem with immanence – that simmer of the sacred in the everyday – is that the phenomenal world appears the same whether or not it is present. A culture which compelled unofficial religions to practice in private fostered this kind of indistinguishability. In at least two of his most famous paintings, Vermeer painted over walls that originally had something on them. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace, there was once a map; in The Milkmaid, a shelf with hanging jugs. Whitewashing surfaces where images used to be was not neutral in the Dutch 17th century. The soaring blankness of church interiors painted by Vermeer’s contemporaries Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte show great vaults of vacant space, stripped of image and icon, the whiteness making salient what is no longer there. Vermeer’s walls, of course, are domestic, not spaces of worship. As this book shows, however, that distinction cannot absolutely hold. The walls figure the occlusion of devotional meaning, and the corresponding potential for its discovery, in latency, anywhere. 

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.