One night, a girl was stolen from her home on Hampstead Heath. A ransom was demanded but no reward offered. Three months later she was found in St Bartholomew’s churchyard in Smithfield. She was returned home to an attic at Kenwood House, where I was then allowed to visit her. She was Vermeer’s painting The Guitar Player, and she had long fascinated me. For Vermeer obsessives, next year is to be an annus mirabilis. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum set itself the challenge of gathering together every one of the artist’s known paintings from around the world (estimates of the total settle at about 35 – with question marks over the attribution of a handful). Some 28 works will be on display, with only nine of the requested paintings omitted, several on grounds of their fragility. The exhibition is to open in February. I have booked my place in the queue. Johannes Vermeer, born in 1632, is seen as the most mysterious of the great Dutch painters because until the 19th century he was barely recognised. Though trained as an artist, his conversion to Catholicism on marrying at the age of 21 erased him from most Delft records. Unlike small-family Protestants, he had 11 children by his wife Catharina. They lived in his mother-in-law’s house in the town’s Catholic quarter, where he earned his living as a picture dealer. Painting was clearly a part-time pursuit, and it is believed that he probably produced fewer than 50 pictures in total despite the efforts of the forger Han van Meegeren to fraudulently add to this number in the 1930s). Unlike those of his contemporaries, Vermeer’s subjects were not civic or social gatherings. He was no Frans Hals or Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen or Adriaen van Ostade. When young, his themes were religious, but he moved on to meticulously arranged domestic scenes, apparently with family and friends as models. He had no known teachers, followers or “studio” and left no drawings or prints. He was barely mentioned among Dutch artists of his day, dying at 43 heavily in debt. Despite a frenzy of modern scholarship – some 200 works have been devoted to Vermeer – the Hercule Poirot of the field, the American John Montias, found barely a dozen references to him in 17th-century Delft. To Vermeer enthusiasts, these works cast a timeless spell. Marcel Proust saw them as “marked by withdrawal and silence … passion, suffering and sex are banished from his art”. His character Bergotte went dizzy and died on seeing the “little patch of yellow wall” in one of Vermeer’s only two landscapes, View of Delft. The critic Lawrence Gowing saw the poised figures as adrift of their age, reflecting “the subtlest and least expressive meanings of human aspect”. Most Dutch paintings are descriptive of their period, of prosperous society in the newly independent Netherlands. Yet Vermeer’s figures seem detached in time and space, trapped moments of domestic activity. A maid delivers a letter, lace is stitched, a jug is poured, a keyboard played, a young man arrives. The Kenwood guitarist is seated off-centre, glancing out of light into darkness. Space is claustrophobic, as if the artist is looking in from another room. Vermeer’s scenes are often set across a distorted foreground of curtains, tiles and furniture. This has raised controversy over whether he painted from an image projected through a lens. This was clearly the case. His only male subject was his friend and lens innovator, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The distorted foregrounds have been recreated by scholars and are inexplicable any other way. Their illusion meets Vermeer’s desire to isolate his subjects from the viewer. Copious efforts have been made to identify subjects of these works. Vermeer was plainly a devoted family man. As Proust noted, none is portrayed with any hint of sexual allure, notably his celebrated Girl with a Pearl Earring. The most plausible models would have been the often-pregnant Catharina, the eldest daughters, Maria and Elisabeth and their maid Tanneke Everpoel. All look remarkably alike. My preferred theory is that the Kenwood guitarist is Elisabeth, probably painted at the end of Vermeer’s life after Maria’s marriage. Almost all Vermeers are now in museums, but in 2004 one of the last in private hands, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, came to auction at Sotheby’s. I am sure it is of Elisabeth. The author of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier, and I recklessly decided we would bid for it. Fortified by a sound lunch, I started the bidding with a sum I could not possibly afford. The pause before others came in was agonisingly long. The picture went to Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino owner for £16m. As for the Rijksmuseum exhibition, the Art Newspaper has listed all nine “no shows” and their excuses. Boston’s Vermeer has been stolen. New York’s Metropolitan refused three works through their delicacy or terms of bequests. Buckingham Palace says its Vermeer is “too fragile” to move, while museums in Abu Dhabi, Vienna and Brunswick, Germany, just said no. The ninth, to my dismay, is the Kenwood guitarist, guarded by English Heritage. She made it to Smithfield unharmed, but it claims her travelling days are over. This means that the only Vermeer with a smile, the most puzzling, beguiling and delightful of them all cannot, like Cinderella, go to the ball. The Dutch are still nursing a “lingering hope” that some refuseniks may have a change of heart. So come on, English Heritage. Let your guitarist join the party. I will look after her. Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist