Girl with a Pearl Earring

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

c. 1665-1666
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Vermeer: The Complete Works , New York, 1997)

c. 1665-1667
Walter Liedtke (Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008)

The fine, plain-weave linen support, which has been lined, has a threadcount of 14.7 x 14.3 per cm 2. Only fragments of the original tacking edges survive.

The composition was laid in with light and dark areas. The ground is a thick, yellowish-white layer containing lead white; chalk, and possibly umber.

The dark background and the deeper shadows of the girl's face, turban, and bodice were established with a mixture of black and earth pigments and further modeled with a paler, ocher color. The shadow of her nose was underpainted with red lake while the highlights on her nose, right cheek and forehead have a thick, cream colored underpaint. The turban was painted with varying shades of an ultramarine and lead-white mixture; wet-in-wet, over which a blue glaze was applied, except in the highlights. A thin, off-white scumble of paint over the brown shadow of the girl's neck defines the pearl, and is painted more opaquely at the bottom where the pearl reflects the white collar. Small hairs from Vermeer's brush are found in the half-tones of the flesh areas.

* Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and the Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock)

literature

exhibitions

Man in a Turban
Jan van Eyck
1433
25,5 x 19 cm
National Gallery, London

Turbans were a popular fashionable accessory in Europe as early as the 15th century. During the war against the Turks, the remote way of life and foreign dress of the "enemy of Christendom" proved to be very fascinating. Turbans appeared quite early in European painting. Perhaps one of the most illustrious examples is Jan van Eyck's self portrait. Vermeer, as well as many other European painters, had obviously enjoyed introducing an exotic note in their paintings and welcomed the possibility to show off their technical prowess.

The appearance of the young girl's turban within the context of Vermeer's seemingly quintessential Dutch oeuvre should not come as a complete surprise. Other objects of Turkish origin may be associated with the painter. Some of the carpets which appear as table coverings in Vermeer's interiors (contemporary painters rarely represented these precious imports lying on the ground where in reality they were usually placed) are of Turkish origin. They must have been appreciated for their sensual floral motifs and the large mass of warm red color both which enlivened and otherwise chaste geometrical interiors.

Furthermore, in the inventory (29 February, 1676) taken shortly after the artist's death was listed: "a Turkish mantle of the aforesaid Sr. Vermeer," "a pair of Turkish trousers" and "a black Turkish mantle" all in the "great hallway" of his house. Some scholars have suggested that the two tronies in "Turkish dress" found in the kitchen could possibly have been by Vermeer's hand.

Vermeer's women are often associated with the pearls eleven of them wear, so much that his oeuvre itself has become synonymous with the pearl. In 1908 Jan Veth articulated a widespread sentiment while observing the Girl with a Pearl Earring: "More than with any other VERMEER one could say that it looks as if it were blended from the dust of crushed pearls". In the 17th-century pearls were probably an extremely important status symbol.

A careful consideration of the Girl with a Pearl Earring gives rise to the question of how far the painting is to be taken as a portrait. P. T. A. Swillens, who compiled the first exhaustive study of the artist's life and work in 1950, believed that one of the most important characteristics of a 17th-century portrait was its likeness and although we can no longer judge of this anymore, the face would not be called a beauty in an aesthetic sense. Swillens writes that Vermeer made no attempt to idealize her. Contemporary scholars are not in agreement on the subject. According to Arthur Wheelock the painting is an "idealized study" which reveals Vermeer's "classical tendencies" while Walter Liedtke rejects the Vermeer's "classical tendencies" altogether. Rather, "in Vermeer's work "the restrained emotion and contemplation had nothing to do with Poussin or "Neo-platonic" concepts," but were, more simply, consistent with the local artistic tradition and character of Delft."

Not a single sitter in Vermeer's extant paintings has ever been identified, including the young girl in the Girl with a Pearl Earring. Many critics believe that she may have been Vermeer's first daughter, Maria who would have been about 12 or 13 years old in 1665-1667, the dating scholars have assigned to the painting. However, this painting was certainly not a portrait in the 17th-century sense of the term, but rather a "tronie". In any case, she strongly resembles the model in Vermeer's Art of Painting (see above).

The Girl with a Pearl Earring reemerged in the Netherlands 300 years after it left the artist's studio. Shortly after it was sold for next to nothing.

The history of the acquisition of the Vermeer has by now become legendary. Des Tombe purchased Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1881 at a sale at the Venduhuis der Notarissen in the Nobelstraat in The Hague for 2 guilders with a 30 cent premium. Unfortunately, the invoice, which was given to the Mauritshuis in 1944, has disappeared without a trace. Thanks to a notice in the former daily Het Vaderland of 3 March 1903, in which the bequest was made public (pasted in the Mauritshuis' cuttings album), we know that Victor de Stuers had recognized the painting as a work by Vermeer. De Stuers was Des Tombe's neighbor—his collection in his residence at 24 Parkstraat was also open to all interested parties—and the two gentlemen had gone together to the auction preview. Des Tombe and De Stuers agreed not to bid against each other. After its acquisition, the badly neglected canvas was sent to Antwerp, where it was "restored" by the painter Van der Haeghen. In the Des Tombe family, however, the story was that Des Tombe and his friend De Stuers had seen a painting that "seemed rather beautiful but was too dirty to evaluate properly." In this version, it was only after the picture had been cleaned that the signature became visible, making clear the identity of the painter.

After Des Tombe's death on 16 December 1902 (his wife had died the year before and their marriage had remained childless) it turned out that he had secretly bequeathed 12 paintings to the Mauritshuis, including Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring.

To modern eyes certain components of Vermeer's art, such as perspective, which is today taken for granted, were quickly noted and highly appreciated in his own times. The young Dutch collector Peter Teding van Berckhout who visited Vermeer's studio was shown "curious and exceptional works" which he described in his diary as "perspectives." If we were to believe that one of the tronies Vermeer is known to have painted was the Girl with a Pearl Earring, it should not be too much of a surprise that it was not appreciated as it is today. Perhaps in the eyes of contemporary collectors, a tronie such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring, however esthetically appealing, lacked the pictorial, intellectual and moral complexities they generally associated with his art.