Vermeer's paintings radiate an almost supernatural calm — quiet domestic scenes bathed in perfect light. But the man behind them was drowning in debt, fathered fifteen children, left only thirty-four known paintings, and died at forty-three in financial ruin during a Dutch economic crisis. The serenity of his art was not a reflection of his life but an escape from it.

This episode traces Vermeer from his Delft tavern-keeper origins through the paintings that now sell for hundreds of millions, the financial catastrophe that killed him, and the centuries of obscurity before a French critic rediscovered the most mysterious painter in Western art.

• Vermeer's life in Delft — the tavern, the art dealership, the fifteen children, and the crushing debts
• The thirty-four surviving paintings and the optical techniques that produced t ...