The gargantuan, bewildering Louvre

From gleaming presents to inebriating parties, discover five artists’ interpretations of the festive season

Whether it’s a rosy-cheeked girl wrapped up warm, sun-bathed sheep at twilight or a snow-blanketed apple orchard, myriad pictures sum up the festive season, as 16 friends of COUNTRY LIFE tell Carla Passino

Between a Constable resonating with Nature and a Castiglione blaring with turbulence, a picture by Algernon Newton captured the quietude of absolute stillness

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