Picture the most tranquil room imaginable, pearly daylight from a leaded window on the left, a woman quietly pouring milk. Now imagine that the man who painted it lived in a cramped, noisy house with eleven surviving children, a domineering mother-in-law and crushing debt. This episode pulls back the curtain on Johannes Vermeer, dismantling the myth of the Sphinx of Delft and revealing a life that was a frantic scramble for survival in the 17th-century Dutch Republic.

We start with his father Reynier, a dealer in silk and caffa fabric who ran an inn, sold paintings and was involved in a fatal knife brawl before Vermeer was born. We follow Vermeer's conversion to Catholicism to marry Catharina Bolnes, the hidden churches of Delft, the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, his second-floor studio fortress, and the recent Rijksmuseum revelation that his  ...