Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

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Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found , rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change. Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover…