Johannes Vermeer brightened his native Delft with luminous pictures of women caught in intimate moments, but the serenity of his work, of which he produced remarkably little, is at odds with a life mired in debt, as Carla Passino discovers

Andrew Graham-Dixon tells Carla Passino why he thinks we have read Vermeer wrong all along– and who the Girl with a Pearl Earring really is

Goethe’s achievement as artist, scientist and statesman

Jewish teenager who volunteered for the Dutch resistance ...

Alexander Marshal–this country’s first major botanical painter–deserves to be better known, writes Tiffany Daneff, after seeing his luminous originals in the Royal Collection

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the