The Dream by Henri Rousseau

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

JOHANN KERNER saw the woman coming out of the darkness. She looked ancient and she moved as slowly as a snail, her back bent. She was the most likely source of information he had seen on his travels.

France

The gargantuan, bewildering Louvre

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