YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Graham-Dixon

lines on the record: 51
first: 2025-12-19
most recent: 2025-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, because then if I had the view of doubt on my desert island, you know, I imagine Desert Islands are quite hard work, and I imagine a desert island is if Robinson Crusoe is anything to go by, most of life on a desert island involves hard labor and waiting for help that maybe comes along once every 25 years. There's a lot of salt water and hardship. So it's not a perfect world. But if I had the view of Dalf, as long as I had, I'd obviously be very responsible and create an extremely temperature controlled hut. But I'd look after it very well, I promise.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's possible also that there's an element of deliberate disguise involved because religion, as you know in this time, is an immense cause of trouble. And just because the trouble is not on at that moment in the 1560s, 1660s doesn't mean the trouble can't come back. And indeed, Vermeer lives with his Jesuit mother-in-law.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stained glass and paintings and so on. So they'd always been very suspicious of that aspect of art. And so They didn't rebel against that, the collegiates or the remonstrance. They supported that. So they didn't want to look at images of Jesus Christ. They wanted images from the mirror that were paintings of everyday life such as were common in the Dutch Republic, but they wanted them to be given this religious twist. It's fine to look at yourself in the role of Mary Magdalene. A perpetual reminder to yourself that you must live up to her example. But what you don't want is a picture of Mary Magdalene herself anointing the feet of the dead Christ. That's beyond the pale. They're very avant-garde, these people, and so they've invented essentially with Vermeer a new kind of painting. And it's”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. Of course, that's a big question. If all these pictures are religious pictures, as I say, well, why aren't they explicitly religious pictures? Why aren't they depictions of the actual Martha and Mary, which Vermeer did paint in one of his earlier paintings, probably done for a very liberal Catholic, I imagine. As I said at the beginning, these remonstrants and collegiance to whom Vermeer was so close, and in fact he was part of, they grew up within Calvinism. And Calvinism right from the beginning was very anti-image, anti-religious image. They were very suspicious and wary of idolatry. Calvinism announced its arrival in the low countries with what was called the Budenstorm in the 1560s, this great sort of outbreak of destruction of churches, mobs going into churches and pulling down statues and smash.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sustain each other so if one person doesn't have enough money, someone else will give them the food and so on. And Paul at the end of it says, let all things be done for edification. Edification meaning in Hebrew, I believe, as it does in Latin as it does in English, meaning simultaneously education support, but also building, literally building. And this is how we build a world. And I think that's what Vermeer's paintings, contrary to what Ruskin said, Ruskin said, oh, Dutch art, it's just... Ditchwater and Well, yeah, but they're very meaningful bricks, those bricks.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a Muslim, and I'm a Christian, or what kind of a Christian am I? It doesn't matter whoever we are, if we mend each other's houses, we can live together and then we can build this heaven on earth where the children play peacefully. And two women go about Their needlework and their washing, but this is what we are trying to dream of. Very interestingly, they cleave to a particular passage. It's one of their favorite passages is from Paul's epistles to the Corinthians, where he's talking about people coming together to read the Bible and to spread the word of God and to...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relationship to these ideas of what happened, what because they are, that is what they want to build, essentially. Adrian Pats and these collegiate women and the men of the movement too. That's what they want to do. They want to build peace on earth. They want to, and I think that's what the other beautiful architectural painting of the mayors, the little street, which I believe is a depiction of the corner of Delft where he and his patrons worshipped. We see the Remonstrant Church just behind the house of his patrons. We see. But again, it's a sort of vision of heaven on earth. And there's a lot of emphasis on the brickwork in that painting. And you can see where the brickwork of one house has been mended perhaps by the people who live in the other house. And I think that's a very deep idea. It's like saying, well, if I mend your house and you mend my house and I respect your house and you respect my house, whether you're a Jew.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day when I can go shopping, you know, and Protestants and Catholics alike can go shopping in the same street. There won't be barbed wire and we won't be worried about someone choosing our sons. We just want, it just can be ordinary, thank you. And I sort of always remembered that. And when I was looking at a Vermeer and his...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is what peace on earth. This is what it will look like an ordinary town or an ordinary day just after a storm has passed, the sun's shining, the storm is the storm cloud of all those wars. It's past, they passed. Now we've got sunshine, and this is what heaven on earth will look like. A woman going down to the quayside with her baby to chat with some other women while they wait for the bus, the water bus. That is what peace on earth will look like. It won't be, you know, they won't be fanfares and angels coming down from heaven and like a baroque painting. No, it won't be like that. I think that's very touching thought. I remember years ago seeing one of the mothers who was trying to bring an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland saying, what do you dream or somebody asks her? And she said, I just dream of...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had known just apocalypse beyond apocalypse, terror beyond terror, and so they naturally concluded because they are living the mirror and is painting all these pictures for these people in this time when for once Europe is at peace. Peace treaties have been signed, and they think the date stuck up 1666. It must be that this peace is permanent. This is the beginning of the thousand years of peace on earth that we've been told about. They actually believe it. And the collegiants believe it in this very beautiful way. And it's my belief that the view of Delft is an expression of that idea. This is what the New Jerusalem.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world will just become a better place. And to those people there, Is the other aspect of it which I think is actually very sad. Which makes me cry when I think about it, is that they They had lived these people, had lived through the worst wars in all recorded history, the Thirty Years' War was without question the worst war that has ever been described and ever been measured, believe it or not, far worse, far worse, not just a bit worse, than the Second World War, even given the terrible things that happened with the Holocaust and that in the Second World War. It was just six times more damaging to the civilian populations of Europe.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, you probably won't. He's going to come down in spirit Explain what he meant. What he meant was that everybody gradually would, you know, they would literally levels are very high in Holland, which is also partly why they had these hopes. And they felt, everyone will be able to read. And when everyone will read, everyone will be able to read the New Testament and they'll be able to read Socrates. They'll be able to read the great wisdom of mankind. Everyone will of course realize that war is pointless and mean and cruel. And there'll be no such thing as wars where entire cities are bombarded where innocent children are killed and hospitals are blown up. That won't happen anymore. No, of course it won't. Peace will come down because a sort of reverse version of Pentecost where the fire of the Holy Spirit lit up from the head of each apostle. No, it'll be the other way around. Each and every individual received the Holy Spirit into themselves. And we will all just become naturally peaceful. And before we know it, if you are, almost without first noticing.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The last days. So it wasn't at all a fringe belief. But what was unusual about the collegiance, you know, the Jesuits had this belief that lots of different people had thought Christ was going to come down again, but most people believed that Christ was going to come down for them and them alone. So the Calvinists said, yes, when Christ comes back, only us Calvinists, everyone else will go to hell, we'll be saved, we'll all live to 500 years old, and it'll be a thousand years of peace here on earth, and Christ will talk to us. But everyone else, they'll be off. Likewise, Catholics believe. But the collegiants said, no, no, no, it won't be like that. It won't be like this. It's not going to be divisive. It's not going to be only some will be saved. No, what's going to happen? And this is what Daniel De Brain says in his book. And it's such a beautiful idea. He says, you may not even see Jesus Christ.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These ideas are more than in the air. And they're in the air across Europe and indeed the Middle East millenarianism is rife in the Middle East. It's rife among the Jews of the Middle East. And it's rampant in England among Puritans and other Protestants. Someone did an estimate based on analyzing the letters of Protestant ministers in Britain in the 1650s and 60s and they came to the conclusion that about 90% of them genuinely believed that we were on the brink of”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we know, I mentioned earlier, the figure of Adrian Patz, who's the spiritual leader of the collegiate movement, which is this very extreme version of the Roman strip movement. He's also a Remonstrant. They have feet in different camps. Adrian Patz is publishing in 1665. He is overseeing the publication of a collegiate text by a writer called Daniel de Brain about what will happen at the end of days. So this isn't an abstract interest in millenarianism. It's very concrete, very precise. We can say that at just the time that Vermeer is painting this picture for Adrienne Pats' friends and Adrienne Patsy's his friend, a picture such as the view of Delft, which I think is ultimately beautiful millinarian painting of what a perfect world might look like when Christ comes back to rule on earth.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came as a result of oh my goodness, that is really what I think these pictures mean. I mean, it was what they told me, not what I told them to mean.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particularly the milkmaid, as being a kind of sexy kitchen-made painting to what I think it is, you can see there's really quite a gulf has opened up. And I think essentially the best way to express that gulf would be that I'm saying to people, well, let's just forget the male gaze, if you like, for these pictures. Let's think about what the female gaze might give us. And I think whether I'm right or wrong, I must always be humble if one's, you know, Talking about such wonderful pictures, you can't say, I'm right. It's not about being right. But I hope that it. It gives this alternative way of seeing the pictures, which I feel is much richer and more respectful for women. It didn't come from, it honestly didn't come from any desire to be right on and feminist in my work.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By including in each painting a nail in the wall at exactly the same place, at exactly the same angle, banged into the wall to exactly the same depth. And the nail Has an established meaning in such context, in devotional context, in Dutch art, what a nail like that stands for the fact that these women are thinking always about the fact that Christ died for us. He sacrificed himself on the cross. His hands and feet were nailed to the cross. And that nail symbolizes the fact that these women will never forget that and their knowledge of that and their eternal memory of that is the wellspring for all their actions. So you can see from... If one travels from the previous consensus idea about”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That in the book, but it has occurred to me since writing the book, but that might be going on. So you've got this woman who is thinking, meditating, contemplating. And then on the other side, exactly to the same scale, same transverse light, very similar scale, room, the picture's the same size. You've got a woman measuring out milk, preparing a dish of bread and milk, which is what you traditionally give to the poor, but pouring out milk is also associated because of biblical reference to the milk of the word. She might be taking her faith evangelically out of the room, out of the house, you know, along with the dish of bread and milk. She might be spreading the word. So on the one hand, you've got the active outward spiritual life, and on the other hand, you've got the inward contemporative spiritual life. And to sort of literally nail down my absolute certainty that these pictures are a pair, Vamir has made it inescapable for us vision.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my opinion. And one of the side effects of this is that once one does see them through this perspective of early women's rights movements, if you like, or women choosing, taking responsibility for their own prayers and their own spiritual life, then you can also see that these pictures pair up with each other. So the milkmaid actually has a pair in the form of a painting that's never, as far as I know, been actually hung next to it, but it's a painting in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called a woman with a balance. And when we look at the two pictures, we can see that on the one hand, we've got a woman weighing, she's got weighing scales, she's got a painting of the last judgment behind her. There's actually nothing in the scales. What she's weighing is her conscience, she's thinking about, and maybe I didn't say this in my book, but maybe also she's pregnant, she's thinking about, you know, the fate of her child's soul and how that might relate to her own conduct as a mother.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were a genre painting like any other Dutch genre painting done essentially for the open market done for the male gaze you know a sexy kitchen mode hard to believe but that if there is a consensus view that mine displaces it would be that the milkmaid is a sort of sexy kitchen maid painted for titillate men who have these sort of fantasies about you know Having affairs with their servants, and so on, which of course I would say, of course, is mad. But if you see it suddenly from a woman's perspective, And these pictures are painted to help women to pray and help women to articulate their values and their beliefs and how they should behave and so on. Suddenly it becomes totally different and all that other stuff, frankly, begins to look a bit toxic.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that this beautiful girl with a pearl earring who's been the subject of a film in which she becomes the obscure object of desire? You know, she's a young woman who's very sexually desirable and all that, very much from a male perspective. I know that Mubble was written by a woman, but it's seeing her from a male perspective and seeing her as a woman of a certain age. Actually, she was probably, in my interpretation, around 13 years old and the picture was probably done for when she was going to be full immersion baptized, because that's what the collegians did when you're an adult, because you have to take responsibility for your own Christianity. You can't just be baptized into Christianity when you're a baby because you've got no say in it. It has to be that you choose it. But it's very, very germane to this because if you look at, I mean, for the milkmaid would be a classic example, actually. In the past, the milkmaid has just been seen as if it...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think just going back to what you touched on, that it's in quotes, a feminist reading, or it's certainly a woman's perspective, looking at the pictures from a woman's perspective. That I would say, in a way, that is the biggest shift that I'm trying to sort of engineer in the interpretation of the pictures because they have for a very long time the assumption about them has been that they are paintings of women painted for men to look at. So, you know, there was the girl with the, I think this is part of the shock and the strangeness of these new ideas.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into milk that we see the milk made preparing, and she's certainly preparing it to give to poor people, people, children or old people, people who haven't got very strong teeth. It all adds up once you get to know these people and get to know what they believe in and how they behave. The pictures, I believe, suddenly really fall into place and make sense as a coherent ensemble that would have been in this house performing a number of very helpful spiritual tasks, if you like.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just makes so much sense. And there are so many different angles from which you can come at it. And it makes sense from all those angles. It's not just, oh, that's an ingenious interpretation, if you like. There's so much in the stories of these people to substantiate this idea that it would be Magdalena. And the portrait would forever be there to remind her of her duty to act like Mary Magdalene, to be repentant and humble and give to charity, be charitable. And that's what they all did. Our whole family did that. Her mother gave a third of her money to the orphans of war. They were really good people. Her father, Peter Klaus and Van Rauven, prepared, he was a head of the charity chamber. He would have overseen the preparation of just that dish of bread.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question it, but the only thing that I would say is that even if I didn't know how much the collegiance and collegiate women cleaved to the personality and the legend of Mary Magdalene, how much weight they gave to her? Because of course Vermeer painted Martha and Mary, who we think of Mary, the Martha and Mary story as being Mary of Bethany. That's modern theology. But in those days, they thought that that Mary was also Mary Magdalene. So Mary Magdalene is all over Vermeer's paintings. It's all over this world. So for her to be called Magdalena, and it just...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's got her large liquid eyes. She looks like she's just been shedding tears, but has now suddenly turned in wonder. And it was, to me, that was a eureka moment. Very moving, actually. And I just thought, my goodness. I had to go, I think I had to go for a run, get rid of my excess energy. But yes, I mean, you know, people”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suddenly thought, of course, that's what the picture, that's what the picture is. It's a picture of Magdalena van Rauven. And this was a Dutch tradition you would have yourself portrayed in the character of someone else. Rembrandt did it all the time. Rembrandt painted himself as Aristotle, for example. He painted himself as a Turkish pedent. He took on characters. It was a particular type of portrait called Atro ⁇ a. And in the auction of the girl, when the girl with the pearl earring was sold, it's described as a tronia in historical fancy dress. So of course historical fancy dress. She's wearing this sort of headdress of turbans, a headdress of scarves that have been folded together to make a turban exactly the kind of costume that you would give.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The account from the Gospel of John of Mary Magdalene going to the tomb to try and find Jesus and to try and she wants to anoint to do her duty by Christ's corpse and she can't find the body and I'm reading that passage and I've got the girl with a pearl earring on the screen and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking Get to the part where. Mary Magdalen Having spoken to the angels in the tomb and having gone into the garden, she's confronted a gardener and said, where, where, where is the body of Christ? Where have you laid him? Where have you laid my master? And she thinks, oh, he's never going to tell me. He's just a gardener. He doesn't know anything. She turns away. And then the gardener who is Christ. Says Mary and she turns. It's at that moment she turns and she realizes. she is looking at the risen Christ.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In addition, we've got very strong evidence that Mary Magdalene was personally venerated by the Van Rauven family, the Maria de Canaut's family. She's the mother of Magdalena. Her mother was called Magdalena. She gave Magdalena as a name to her daughter. So you can see. And a number of Vermeer's early pictures clearly allude to the figure of Mary Magdalene. So she's a really strong presence in the imagination of these people. And I think when you I remember sort of shivers going down my spine because I've got a two screens here. I've got one there. And one day I was researching the book here sitting in this chair and I happened to have”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Showed himself resurrected to one human being after he had risen from the dead, and that human being was a woman. It was Mary Magdalene in the garden. He showed himself to her. So if she hadn't told the apostles, we would never have known about the resurrection. Mankind would not have been saved. So don't tell me that women are not supposed to speak. So she was hugely important.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was venerated by the collegiate women. We know this because they talk about it a lot. She has very important to them not only spiritually and that she was close to Christ and they aspire themselves to be very close to Christ or to the memory of what it might have been to be close to Christ. Not only that, but she was politically important to them. We know this because when the Calvinists said to the collegiate women, why are you speaking about God when you shouldn't be speaking? Don't you know women are not supposed to talk and they're not supposed to talk in church? Never mind that it's a house church. You shouldn't be talking about God at all. It's up to us men to talk about God. Their response, and we've got a very feisty example of it, they would say, oh, really, women are not supposed to speak, are they? Well, what about Mary Magdalene? It's called the Mary Magdalene Defense of Women speaking and women ministry. They would say, well, what about Mary Magdalene? Because, after all, Christ...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Divisions that had been made by the establishment of this or that church, they wanted to go back to a time before Christianity was riven by descent and division and discord to its pure source. And the purest source of all would be the community of Christ and his apostles. But of course, because none of the apostles are male, these women identified very strongly with people in his female entourage, if you like. And above all, they identified with Mary Magdalene, who had Close a relationship with Christ as any woman barring Mary Mother of God herself. And she wept over him, she anointed his feet with oil, she dried his feet with her long hair and so on and so forth.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Magdalena Van Roven, that was her name, she was the daughter of Maria de Kraut and Peter Klaazon van Rauven. She was their only surviving child. I should say she owned all 21 of the paintings that were in the Van Hauven collection. She just happened to have 11 in her front room. And I suspect perhaps those were the 11 that were most... Helpful to her in her worship with her friends. I'm assuming that she met in a group like the others did. One of the things, these people were very much in a mild and rational way. They were Christian fundamentalists in the sense that they wanted to cut through all of the...”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reconstruct, but in some way these paintings were there to aid them in their devotions, perhaps to serve as role models. Some of the women, you know, most of the women seem very virtuous, full of their thinking good thoughts, they're being responsible. I think the pictures were there too. They believed a lot in charity and in doing charitable good works. I think some of the paintings were there to encourage that, to remind them of their duty. It'd be wonderful one day to make an exhibition of Vermeer's major pictures, perhaps just focusing on the ones that were once owned by that family, to try and perhaps have a little play with seeing how they might have hung together. A number of them, I think, seem to invite being displayed in pairs, compare and contrast.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eleven paintings by Vermeer, three of which, the notary added, were displayed in boxes, which to me suggests, and there is a record of this elsewhere, that those boxes, they were not storage boxes because she died, then the pictures have been crated up. No, they were boxes that could be opened and closed, like the wings of a portable altarpiece, which suggests to me, there were no other paintings. There's a landscape and a seascape, probably at either end of the room. Imagine a big, beautiful Dutch front room with 11 vermez in it. Some of them displayed as if they were altarpieces. Now that, to me, suggests that the daughter of the patrons, Magdalena, just as her parents had done, preserved her front room as a space where women would gather and worship and these pictures would be there in ways that we cannot, cannot sadly”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patrons, but we know that they left them all to their daughter Magdalena, and we've got her death inventory. And we know that she hung, can you believe it, when she lived herself in a different part of Delft, she lived on the Great Market Square, the Golden ABC, the house is still there. It's above a restaurant now. Little House, printing establishment, she lived there quite modestly with her husband, but guess what she had in her front room at the time of her death?”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Under the benevolent patronage of a very enlightened man called Adrian Patz, who was the head of the collegiate movement and lived in Rotterdam, very powerful, important man, head of the Duchy, one of the directors of the Duchy East India Company. But he supported these women's groups and often would send people from his own circle to help them with books or to help them with ideas or to help them have a trip to somewhere particularly holy. If they wanted to go and visit someone. So we know that he was involved and we know that he was a friend of Vermeer. And we know that he was friends of friends of Vermeer's patrons. So it all begins to look very convincingly like a circle. When you look at the paintings themselves, you know, they do seem very, very much to be geared to the contemplation of one of those groups. And from what we can tell, we can't tell exactly how they were hung when they were in the house of Vermirs.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, what they said when the Calvinist authorities said, How dare you meet on your own in houses to discuss the teachings of Christ? You should be coming to church and listening to what we tell you. They said, well, we're sick of listening to what men tell us. Thank you very much. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And that's one of the favorite parts of my book is a part where I gather some of these women's testimonies. very precious, these documents where they are called in. And so we've actually got written down what they said and what they were asked and how they were ticked off and they ticked off back. So that's one of my favorite bits. But we know that these women were meeting in groups. We know that this was happening.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the idea of a church because these women had concluded that churches themselves were perhaps part of the problem and they were very interested, they were very learned, clever, bright, feisty, intelligent women who'd probably a lot of them very frustrated at not being able to express their intelligence and their spirituality openly. And so they've embraced this new movement with fantastic enthusiasm because it was one, it basically created a space in the front room of a woman's house where people could meet women, above all women, could meet and they could talk about what they believed in. They could read the text that mattered to them more than any other, the New Testament. They could draw conclusions from it, discuss them without the interference of male priests or men telling them what to think, what to do. And so Leitif is not me imposing that on them.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take very seriously the idea that perhaps all of these pictures painted for that house in some way reflected the practices of remonstrance and remonstrant women in particular. We know that there was, and by the way the dates are astonishingly congruent with this whole thesis. In 1655, 1656 which is exactly when Vermeer started to paint for his patrons or a year before a female driven movement called the collegiate movement suddenly went from strength to strength in the Rotterdam and Delft area. And what that meant was that a whole series of women in groups began meeting in their houses in order to practice what they saw as a form of uncorrupted Christian gathering, uncorrupted even”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite late on in my research, I suddenly found with great deal of help from my friends in Rotterdam, I found the address of the house in which Alvermere's paintings hung. And the address of that house turns out to have been 106 Auder Daft. And of the several thousand houses in 17th century Delft that we can today identify. It's the only one, that is directly in front as in the relationship of a porter's lodge to a university college, it's directly in front of the hidden remonstrant church in Delft, which seems to me to be given that I had already concluded that what joined Vermeer and his patrons was a mutual attachment to the ideals of remonstrantism that seemed to be a truly amazing coincidence, i.e. not a coincidence at all.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although it's his wife, really, I think, who's the driving force behind getting Vermeer to paint pictures for them and their house. But he, his father, is almost bankrupted by the size of the fine that's imposed upon him for sheltering a remonstrant preacher during the Dutch Civil War. So wherever I looked, when I was researching my book, wherever I looked into Vermir's circle, into his life, into his past, likewise that of his patrons, it seemed very clear that this was what they had in common, this remonstrant pacifist, and also I should have added, extremely feminist. These people believed proto-feminists. These people believed in the absolute equality of men and women. So this is what you have to understand. This is the background I believe that you have to understand in order to understand why Vermeer's painting has been done for this very particular environment, why they were never widely known, and of course.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realizing that, or remembering properly, that Christ said, Love thine enemy and never kill anybody. So they were pointing out fundamental truths of the Christian faith, but they were treated as pariahs, and they were all thrown into exile, driven underground, and there's very strong evidence that Mir's father, when the movement was an underground movement, he was part of it. His pastor, a man called Johannes Taurinus, after whom I believe Johannes Fermir was named because it's a very unusual name for a working class boy from a family of tailors. He should have been called Jan, but no, he's called Johannes. His parents, by the way, are living virtually next door to this Johannes Tarinus, leader of the Renaissance movement in Duft. Likewise, if you look over the other side to Vermeer's patrons, his future patrons, their families too, are part of this movement. Peter Klaus and Van Rauven, who will be Vermeer's, as it were, main male patron.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having to tell them that their child is almost certainly on their way to hell. So, not only do they have to confront the awfulness and for death, but they've also got to try to stomach this terrible doctrine. So they rebelled against that. And in fact, they also weren't trying to split the church. What they were trying to do was to unite the church and just make it a little bit more forbearing and forgiving. And they even dreamed of putting an end to the difference between the church.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it turns out that Vermeer and his family's connections to this religious sect go back to before when he was born, they go back to his father's time. It's hard to put in a nutshell, but I'll try. In the 1610s, dissident groups sprung up within Orthodox Calvinism, the Church of the Reformed Dutch. And these people, who were themselves Calvinists, but they were dissidents within it, they said that Calvinism as it then was too warlike. They hated the doctrine of predestination, partly for the reason that it was an age of high infant mortality. And according to this very severe doctrine, every single human being has been predestined either to go to heaven or to go to hell. And this includes babies. And most people, by the way, are predestined to go to hell. So as the dissident Calvinists, these are Raymond strances, they were called, pointed out, we are trying to minister to these grieving mothers of babies who've been killed by the plague in Amsterdam.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Religious sect the terms a little misleading, but that's essentially what they were. And all his pictures, nearly all of his major pictures hung in the house of one particular husband and wife who had a single daughter named Magdalena. So the pictures were never very widely disseminated, never very widely known. They were just made for this one house, which of course explains why Vermeer became the Sphinx of Dulft because nobody really knew where he'd come from. And this information has only really emerged, say, 130 years after Torre, and not very much was made of that discovery by Montias, I must say. And that's where my book begins.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he called him the Sphinx of Dove. And it's a great name, a great nickname. And it stuck. And the reason, as my research and the research of a man called John Michael Montias, who preceded me and did extraordinary work in the archives in the 1980s, as he discovered, the reason for this is actually not so hard to find. Vermeer was not actually known in his own lifetime because he painted essentially just for one group of people Particular”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discipline in the 19th century. But he was mystified because he said, why is there no evidence of this painter in history? He's a Dutch art had its Vasari figure, its chronicler of the lives of the famous artists of the Low Countries, a man called Arnold Haubrachen. And yes, if you look at his lives of famous artists of the low countries, you'll find, of course, Rembrandt, you'll find France Haus, you'll find France Valmieris, you'll find Heraard Dau and Pieter de Hoch, but you won't find Vermeer. So it seemed like a great mystery, especially because, as Thor ⁇ said, you know, this Vermeer seems to be every bit as great, not as prolific, but every bit as great as the most famous of them all, Rembrandt, who why have we never heard of him? What's his art all about? To which he answered, I don't know.”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was rediscovered in the mid 19th century by a disaffected French revolutionary, a man called Terfu Torre, an intellectual who participated in the 1848 revolutions, was exiled from France, went to live in the Low Countries, and became deeply interested in the painting of the Low Countries, and found this series of pictures that he was fascinated by and he had the sense that they were perhaps all painted by the same person. And eventually by piecing together whatever evidence he could amass, including one or two, but only one or two signatures, he managed to recreate, will create, find a body of work that he attributed to the painter Johannes Vermeer. It was one of the great acts of art's history in its infancy. It's still a relatively new”
2025-12-19 · Intelligence Squared · Have We Finally Solved The Mystery of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring? With Andrew Graham-Dixon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT