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

**Tyler Cowen** (0:04)
Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. I'm very happy to be here today in person with Andrew Graham-Dixon. He is one of the world's leading art historians, art critics, and he is prominent in the world of documentary. Andrew, welcome.

**Andrew Graham-Dixon** (0:42)
It's a great pleasure to be here, Tyler.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:45)
Andrew has a new and fascinating book out among his many books. It's called Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found. So let's start with Vermeer. Why was Vermeer's art forgotten for so long until the middle of the 19th century? How could that happen?
To us, it looks very accessible and beautiful and obviously better than most of his contemporaries.

**Andrew Graham-Dixon** (1:03)
Well, this was part of the general mystery of Vermeer that I have tried to explain in the book. I don't think it had previously been very well explained, but what has emerged quite clearly is that he painted basically all of these great paintings, the finest examples of his work, for one single family. They kept them very close. They left them to their daughter. She died young, left them to her husband.
He died only in 1696, 20 years after Vermeer's death, and only then did these paintings enter the world at large. Up until that time, they'd only been owned by one family. So I can't think of another case of a great artist, Rembrandt. Imagine if all Rembrandt's pictures had been painted just for one man, and his wife. We would never have heard of him, probably.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:53)
So where do they start being seen? What's the first public unveiling of Vermeer as a great artist?

**Andrew Graham-Dixon** (1:58)
It would be in the mid-19th century when they were finally, I mean, the miracle is that these paintings were sold at auction. No one's heard of Vermeer. So as soon as they then get resold in the later 17th century, they're being resold as if they were by other artists, because Vermeer is not a name.
He's not like Gucci. So Vermeer, if it gets sold, it gets sold as a Rembrandt or as a Gerard Dau, as even a Pieter de Hoogh. His work is being sold as under currency, if you like. What's amazing is that it all survives, and it survives long enough for this wonderful guy called Théophile Tauré, who's a French revolutionary exiled from France, goes to Belgium, a Frenchman's idea of purgatory. But in Belgium, he discovers Vermeer and puts together the fact that all these paintings, which are masquerading as those by other artists, are actually by Vermeer. He says, there is this painter called Vermeer, we never heard of him.
Isn't he incredible? Within 50 years, 60 years, Marcel Proust writes his great novel, A la Recherche du Tont-Perdue, at the center of which he places a man, a character, Swan, who is obsessed by Vermeer. Proust makes it very clear that he regards the View of Delft as the most beautiful painting in the world, Vermeer is one of the greatest. From that moment onwards, Vermeer begins his ascent to become one of the most loved painters in the history of civilization. But it's very light.

**Tyler Cowen** (3:25)
Does this whole history make you more persuaded by objectivist or subjectivist theories of aesthetics? That is, is it inevitable who becomes a great painter?

**Andrew Graham-Dixon** (3:34)
It makes me... Mystical aesthetics is where I would go with this, because it seems to me that it's a proper miracle, that a painting that has nothing, nothing on its side, no one fighting for it, no one rooting for it, no name, it's got nothing except itself, survives 400 years. And not only that, all of the other paintings, more or less all of the others survive. I think that's a true miracle. It's what Vermeer put into those paintings, and that's really the heart of my book, what's in the paintings that made them survive.
That faith, that belief, that idealism, that dream, that beauty, that's in the paintings. That's why they survived. That's why no one threw them away. They didn't not throw them away because they were valuable, they weren't valuable. They didn't not throw them away because they were by a famous person. They didn't know who they were by, but they kept them because they knew they had something in them.

**Tyler Cowen** (4:27)
And what sense was Vermeer a liberal?

**Andrew Graham-Dixon** (4:29)
Well, the main discovery of my book is that Vermeer was among the very first pioneers of what we now call the liberal tradition.