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Look at a Vermeer painting, and everything seems crystal clear.

Simple scenes of women going about their daily tasks.

And then you look again, and realise that nothing is quite what it seems.

There's a mystery unfolding before your eyes.

The pictures are as elusive as their creator,

who was virtually unknown in his lifetime,

his reputation based on less than 40 works,

but who created some of the most intensely mesmerising images in Western art.

Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632 here in Delft,

a thriving market town in the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

He was actually born here in this building,

which was a tavern called the Flying Fox owned by his father,

a man called Rainier Jantz, who also was a master silk weaver.

And Vermeer himself was christened in the shadow of his birthplace

in this, the Protestant Neukirk.

When Vermeer was nine, his family moved around the corner,

here into the Grand Marketplace, the commercial centre of Delft.

And in fact, they opened another tavern just down there called the Mechalan,

from where his father operated as an art dealer.

It also became a place where local painters began to congregate.

And so from an early age,

Johannes Vermeer was immersed in the Delft art scene.

Vermeer embarked on a career as a painter in his teens,

but when he was 20, he inherited his father's inn business

along with the small art dealership.

The mid-17th century has become known as the golden age of Dutch art,

of which Amsterdam was the centre.

The country's wealth meant that artists such as Rembrandt and Jan Steyn flourished.

Delft, though, was a minor place in comparison,

but this prosperous provincial town did have its own distinct style.

Delft painters were known for architectural painting

and a particular interest in perspective and optics.

This is a view of Delft,

painted midway through Vermeer's career, around 1660,

and considered by many as his masterpiece.

The town's wealth was based on trade,

through its connections to other Dutch cities,

via an intricate network of waterways,

which is subtly evoked here by Vermeer

with his view of the river and canals.

He depicts the city on a lazy Sunday afternoon,

with strollers out enjoying the tranquillity.

The buildings and their shadows create a continuous band across the canvas,

beating a gentle visual rhythm

as the eye is taken from left to right.

The sun, breaking through the clouds,

reveals deep patches of blue

and illuminates the roofs on the right-hand side of the scene.

By making the sky dominate two-thirds of the picture,

Vermeer is paying homage to that

which will bring all of his paintings to life, daylight.

But all was not as tranquil as this painting might suggest.

The United Provinces, or modern-day Holland,

was a Protestant Republic,

whose struggle for independence from the Catholic Spanish Empire

was finally realised in 1648.

And for most of Vermeer's life,

Holland was at war with its European neighbours, England and France.

Calvinism, a form of Protestantism,

became the official religion in Holland in the mid-17th century.

The display of paintings, or frescoes, was banned in Calvinist churches,

so there was little call for religiously-themed artworks.

However, in the art world,

biblical subjects, along with mythological ones,

were still considered the highest form of painting.

Vermeer's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

is considered his first major work

and is the largest painting he ever made.

Initially, it seems far removed from Vermeer's later works,

where he mainly concentrated on the subject of domestic scenes.

However, the picture does anticipate classic Vermeer

in a number of ways.

Although it's a biblical story,

it's set in a household, illuminated from the left-hand side.

Also, like much of his later work,

Vermeer uses intense, contrasting colours

and the surface texture is incredibly smooth.

The composition, too, is simple but striking.

The figures form a triangle,

with Christ's hands central to the image,

stark against the white tablecloth.

The picture depicts a story from the New Testament

when Christ visits two sisters.

Martha is annoyed that she's doing all the work,

preparing food, while her sister does nothing.

But Christ points out that Martha's good deeds

are not the only way of being a Christian.

The contemplation of Mary, listening at his feet,

is equally valid.

This contrast between the two sisters

highlighted the central dispute between Catholics and Protestants

about the proper path to salvation.

Protestantism affirmed the idea of justification by faith alone,

whilst Catholicism stressed the necessity of good deeds

in order to gain eternal life,

both of which are suggested in this painting.

Interestingly, this duality was also reflected

in Vermeer's personal life.

On the 5th of April, 1653,

Vermeer registered here, at the town hall in Delft,

that he was going to get married

to a girl called Katerina Boulness.

She was a Catholic, a minority in the northern provinces,

and it seems as if Vermeer converted to Catholicism

in order to appease his mother-in-law.

They got married in a small village just out of town,

and then moved back to his mother-in-law's home,

and over the next two decades, they had 15 children.

As his family grew, Vermeer became more dependent on his mother-in-law,

as well as the inn and the art dealership for his income.

He'd never have made enough money to support the family from painting alone.

Vermeer only painted two or three paintings a year,

believed to be because of his meticulous way of working.

He had a few loyal patrons who always bought his pictures.

The Delft printer, van Rauwen, owned about 20 of Vermeer's paintings,

over half of his known works.

In this picture, Vermeer is undergoing a major shift in subject matter,

from historical or biblical paintings to domestic images,

from epic subjects to the everyday.

And what we see is a view of a street in Delft,

and people think that perhaps it's a view

from Vermeer's second-floor apartment, looking down,

but also he's presented us a composite view.

He's also invented a lot of this in his mind.

What we see is a woman sitting here, in rapt attention,

doing her lace-making.

In the foreground here, sitting on the street itself, are two children.

And then, down this little alleyway, is the maid.

She's getting water out of this wooden vat,

and in some ways, she's our first major point of contact in the painting,

because of this water trough that comes out to meet us

and guides us into looking at this figure.

There's some brilliant pictorial devices used by Vermeer in this image, too.

Look at the white here, the whitewash along the bottom.

In some ways, you can say this is a young artist

learning the tricks of the trade.

He doesn't have to do all the bricks.

But also, he highlights the figures themselves,

and it mirrors the white in the sky of this dull day,

which in turn makes the buildings stand out more.

But the effect, certainly from afar, is almost photographic.

Look at the way Vermeer has the buildings parallel to the picture plane,

and yet we get a sense of a fragment of a small world that we're looking at

that's part of a much bigger world beyond.

He doesn't give us one building centre stage, he gives us two, and we only see part of them.

Also, notice how he skewed the door here.

The door and the window aren't dead centre, as they must have been in the view that Vermeer actually saw,

but this fits the painting better.

And apart from having this sense of parallel, or going along the street,

Vermeer then takes us in.

In here, to the doorway, where the maid is, but also in here.

Now look at all the other shutters in this building.

They're all closed up.

It's the idea of a closed world, a world that we can't quite get into.

But he gives us a glimpse through this door, and he gives us a glimpse through this window.

And for the next 16 or 17 years in his art,

he takes us away from the street, from the outside,

into a domestic, closed, private world,

and creates some of the most memorable images of Western art.

A certain amount of tension is created by the placement of these figures here,

at the boundary between the home and the outside world.

In 17th century Holland, the place for virtuous women was firmly in the home.

To stray beyond these limits meant opening yourself up to potential vice.

And in this picture, Vermeer gives us a supreme image of the virtuous woman,

the maid pouring milk from a jug into a bowl.

It's a humble scene, illuminated from the left,

as natural light floods in through a window.

You can see one of the panes, though, is broken.

On this bleached wall, we can see the details that show us

that it's a very modest room.

There's plaster flaking off from a hole in the wall.

There's a nail on the wall where a picture might hang.

But everything draws our attention to this simple but rich drama in the foreground.

The milk seems suspended in perpetual motion.

Likewise, the folds of the maid's dress and her arms

focus us in on the simple act of pouring.

So do her eyes.

It's a moment of intense concentration and a very private moment.

It's as if we've stumbled into a scene that we perhaps shouldn't see.

There's also something else that Vermeer does, though,

that's more formal, that makes this image seem grander than it is.

It's tiny, jewel-like, and it's on my eye level.

And yet, because of the angle of composition,

because he tilts the table up slightly

and shows us the image as if seen from below,

it monumentalises the woman herself.

And so what Vermeer is doing in this image,

as he does throughout the rest of his career,

is make the everyday seem epic.

There's another crucial feature in this work

that can tell us more about Vermeer's technique.

The almost photographic representation of the effects of light,

seen here in the highlighted spots on the bread,

has been related to the artist's use of a camera obscura.

This was effectively the predecessor of the camera.

It's a simple optical device, incorporating a pinhole or lens,

and mirrors, with which an image of a scene

can be projected onto a small screen.

The image can then be traced or copied,

making it easier for artists like Vermeer

to study the effects of light and shade,

and thus help capture the subtle effects of daylight

in a room on different surfaces,

miraculously bringing the visual world to life.

17th century Holland was a culture

which encouraged the avid pursuit of scientific knowledge,

based on intense observation.

Delft was a centre for the manufacture of precision instruments

like microscopes and lenses.

Vermeer's admiration for the pursuit of knowledge

is demonstrated in two memorable pictures he painted around 1668,

the geographer, and this one, the astronomer.

Elaborate geographical maps and globes are a common detail

that feature in his work.

He reproduces them with such extreme precision,

revealing a deep personal interest.

By the 1660s, Vermeer had established his reputation

as the most innovative painter in Delft.

His paintings were fetching up to 600 guilders,

much higher than the prices commanded by his contemporaries,

and he was asked to serve as the head of Delft's Artists Guild.

But his fame was not widespread,

perhaps because he didn't paint many pictures,

maybe because he didn't travel much beyond Delft.

And in spite of his intellectual curiosity,

Vermeer's concerns remained, above all,

within a world behind closed doors.

Johannes Vermeer had developed a very particular subject matter and style.

There's something clean and beautiful about all his pictures.

There's no angst, no noise, and no melodrama.

His pictures feature the same generic characters.

Clothes or props appear from one work to the next.

The tapestry rug, the globes, the maps.

The women nearly always wear pearls.

The flooring is usually black and white.

Wealthy young women predominate.

They play lutes or virginals.

They read or write letters.

Their faces lit up by the light streaming through a window

on the left of the picture.

Yet there's always something ambiguous about his pictures.

They capture only one brief moment of a narrative.

We're never given the whole story.

In fact, Vermeer plays with us by giving us visual clues.

There are many ambiguous features in a maid asleep.

The woman's gestures aren't clear.

Are they signs of melancholy?

Or is she just sleeping?

The half-full glass of wine might indicate that she's drunk

and has fallen asleep, therefore is neglecting her household duties.

The story gets more intriguing when we learn that x-ray examinations

of this picture show that Vermeer has painted out a man in the doorway.

Now we might read the angled chair as an indication

of recently departed, probably male, company.

Has she been entertaining a man when she should have been working?

Ultimately, though, it's left up to us, the viewers,

to work out the story for ourselves and complete the picture.

In the middle of the 1660s, Vermeer changed his compositional emphasis

and the results were quietly spectacular in this painting.

What we see is a young girl against a black background

which pushes her out towards us.

In fact, her face is very close to the picture plane itself.

There's no background detail at all.

I think that it does seem like a real human being.

She seems to be alive before our eyes as you look at her.

At the same time, there is the idea of perfection here,

but also, as in the best of Vermeer's work,

there's a wonderful sense of ambiguity.

She's a young girl who is innocent,

but at the same time, her open mouth with slight moisture on it

and the sparkle in her eye make her seductive at the same time.

She's knowing and innocent in one and the same moment.

She's also beautifully illuminated from the left

and colour is wonderfully alive and balanced in the picture too.

He uses expensive pigment, ultramarine, this is the dark blue,

and then this tin lead yellow.

And if you look at the lips as well, where there's red,

it means that he's using three primary colours.

The earring itself, which is almost comically oversized,

is a sign, I think, of opulence and ornateness.

It amplifies her beauty, but also it casts its own reflection

on the side of her chin.

And in those details, particularly where the edge of her face

meets the stark black background,

but also the way that her nose is defined,

we start to realise that this is a technique

pioneered by Leonardo da Vinci himself,

the idea of sfamato, of blurring the edges.

And in fact, when this work was revealed,

a couple of centuries after Vermeer painted it to a Dutch public,

they immediately hailed it as the Giaconda of the North,

or the Dutch Mona Lisa.

Vermeer's palette is reminiscent of the colours he saw

in the ceramics for which Delft was and still is famous.

Delft wear blue and white was used for kitchenware and tiles,

which can be seen on the skirtings of the walls

in many of his works.

And an indication that he was lavish when it came to painting

was found in his fondness for natural ultramarine blue,

a rare and expensive colour which he used frequently in his work.

As well as his use of colour,

it's Vermeer's meticulous composition

which makes him stand out as such a major artist.

The lady writing a letter with her maid,

painted, we think, when Vermeer was 38,

shows his mastery of perspective,

the way that the chequered floor recedes so convincingly,

the way the table and chair seem like real,

believable objects in a real space.

But Vermeer's interest in perspective goes beyond creating a tangible space.

He uses it to move the eye about the canvas.

The maid in this painting is placed right in the middle of the canvas,

but her face and folded arms form a strong link with the window frame,

and that leads our eye to the head of the seated woman who's writing.

It links the figures,

but in a way that's unforced, almost unnoticeable.

These serene domestic images

heighten the preciousness of the private world

that he depicts in his interiors,

whilst turmoil continued outside.

Some art historians think that this painting was begun in 1673

and referred directly to the political events

that were happening in Holland

when Holland was involved in a war against the French.

But the subject matter, like the dating of the painting,

is open to all sorts of interpretation.

It's a fantastically ambiguous work.

It's also, for many people, me included,

the height of Vermeer's artistic achievement.

The politics stems from the fact that centre stage,

or at least on the wall at the back of the painting,

is a map of the Netherlands, about 100 years old,

of the United Provinces.

And that, combined with the double eagle head on the chandelier,

and the fact that the muse here

has her laurel head in front of the Hague,

which is the seat of the House of Orange,

all this information has been fused into one interpretation

that says this is Vermeer allying himself to the House of Orange

in this conflict against the French.

But if you take that view of the painting,

it's extraordinarily limited.

It's looking down, in a way, rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Because what we see here

is a time-honoured subject in art history,

a painter showing us, exploring what it is that he does.

And the crucial thing is that we have a view of a painter

painting in his studio,

and that this image here is first and foremost,

to our eyes, of a beautiful young girl standing by the window.

Then we look at the details.

She's wearing a laurel.

She's clutching a trumpet and a book.

And, in fact, she's supposed to be Cleo, the muse of history.

And, in fact, what Vermeer is doing here

is presenting us with an image of history painting,

which, in the hierarchy of painting, is the highest form of art.

So he's showing us what he can do in this field.

And after his early career,

this is the only example of Vermeer doing history painting

in that short 17, 18 years that he's active as an artist.

We also see how brilliantly staged the painting is.

It's almost as if an invisible hand

is pulling back the curtain

to reveal what it is the artist does.

There's something theatrical or dramatic about what we see.

You look at the floor, the way that these black and white tiles are.

You look at the lovishness of the curtain itself.

You look at the individual objects on the table.

You look at the map in the background, the ceiling itself,

wooden beams and the chandelier itself, too.

And all of this gives you this fantastic visual melting pot.

But, ultimately, we notice the painter,

who many think is Vermeer himself,

in the middle of sketching the outline of the figure

and just starting to have painted her laurel crown.

And it's almost as if Vermeer is giving himself,

or the art of painting, a laurel.

Finally, the picture itself is one that we complete in our own minds.

Vermeer has only begun it, or at least the artist has only begun it,

and we can see what he's trying to do.

But what we can also see, because Vermeer gives it to us,

is a much bigger and broader picture.

And for all those reasons,

it's as if Vermeer feeds everything he's learnt

into this final masterpiece.

But these ideal worlds of peace and beauty that Vermeer created for himself and others

were shattered by the cruel reality of war.

The wealth of the commercially successful United Provinces

generated a continued rivalry with neighbouring countries,

which led to repeated fighting.

And it marked a turning point for Vermeer himself.

He earned almost nothing during his last years

because of ruinous economic conditions brought on by the wars.

Vermeer no longer received rent from the inn.

No-one could afford it.

And he didn't sell one work of his own, or from his art dealership.

The following years were an uphill struggle,

and eventually the financial strain was too great.

His wife, Katerina, recalled,

because of the war with France,

and because of the large sums of money we had to spend on the children,

sums he was no longer able to pay,

he fell into such a depression and lethargy

that he lost his health.

And in the space of one and a half days, he died.

Vermeer was just 43.

Ultimately, the real world had impinged

on Vermeer's tranquil painted universe.

After his death in 1675,

Katerina was left to pick up the pieces.

She was declared bankrupt and had to sell the only two paintings

that remained in her possession.

One of them was the art of painting.

Vermeer's own fame and place in history

dwindled to the point of obscurity over the next two centuries.

But the idea so strongly implied in his grand allegory,

that his paintings would live on in posterity,

has since blossomed to the point that he is now

one of the most cherished of all the great artists

by the gallery-going public,

even if, with his back turned away from us,

he remains essentially a thing of mystery.

To be continued...

To be continued...