THE GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING

(Meisje met de parel)

c.1665-1667
oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 15 3/4 in.  (46.5 x 40 cm.)
Mauritshuis, The Hague

an interactive analysis
scroll your cursor over the of the 8 hot areas painting or the 6 special topics below that interest you. (browsers: IE 4+, IE 5+, IE 6+, NS 4+, NS 6+)

 

speaker click here
Meisje met de parel
mp3 audio files courtesy marco schuffelen

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes vermeer
"It is always the beauty of this portrait head, its purity, freshness, radiance, sensuality that is singled out for comment. Vermeer himself, as Gowing notes, provides the metaphor: she is like a pearl. Yet there is a sense in which this response, no matter how inevitable, begs the question of the. painting, and evades the claims it makes on the viewer. For to look at it is to be implicated in a relationship so urgent that to take an instinctive step backward into aesthetic appreciation would seem in this case a defensive , an act of betrayal and bad faith. It is me at whom she gazes, with real, unguarded human emotions, and with an erotic intensity that demands something just as real and human in return. The relationship may be only with an image, yet it involves all that art is supposed to keep at bay."

Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979