Andrew Graham Dixon for Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found

"This book is going to revolutionize the way we understand Vermeer. I read it slowly, feeling 'like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken'. How extraordinary to realise that things are not the way you have imagined all your life." ~ Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize.

Andrew Graham-Dixon is an art historian, biographer and broadcaster who has made more BBC television series about art than any other presenter. He was for many years the main art critic of the Sunday Telegraph and Independent. Of his biography of Caravaggio, Peter Carey said 'it is a thrilling lesson in the art of seeing' and Neil MacGregor wrote 'the man and his work emerge enriched and enlightened.'

Andrew joins us for Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation.

Following new leads, and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter's hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.