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.)
Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis,
The Hague

In respects to other painters of the time, the broadness of brushwork of the turban is astounding. The object is reduced to two flat shapes of blue. The folds and tucks which would have certainly occurred have been entirely eliminated for the sake of simplicity.
The blue part of the turban was painted with natural ultramarine, an extremely costly pigment made of crushed lapis lazuli that Vermeer's contemporaries rarely used. The chromatic brilliance of this pigment can be clearly appreciated where it has been applied unadulterated (with lead white) in the rendering of the bright blue part of the girl's turban. Since Vermeer continued to employ without reserve this pigment even in the last few years of his life when he faced a dramatically deteriorating financial situation due to the war with France, it may be that his rich Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven covered the cost.

This daring slash of impasto white paint represents some form of garment worn under the rustic yellow ocher garment. Surprisingly, an almost identical brush stroke defines the same sort of undergarment worn by the model of Vermeer's Art of Painting. The brush stroke has most likely lost much of its character due to early restorations when hot irons were used to reline the deteriorating canvas.


Vermeer writers have frequently noted that no line follows the profile of the girl's nose on the left-hand side. The bridge of the nose is given precisely the color and tone of the adjacent cheek. The lines of the right side of her nose and nostril are lost in shadow as well. Moreover, the blue section of the turban has been reduced to two essential tones of ultramarine blue, one lighter and one darker.
These and other characteristics have lead more than one scholar to believe that Vermeer had created the Girl with a Pearl Earring with the aid of camera obscura, a sort of precursor of the modern photographic camera. The imperfect lens of the period camera tends to eliminate line and reduce the tonal range of lights and darks.

The yellow garment worn by the young girl is unique in Vermeer's oeuvre and is, from a technical point of view, probably one of the painter's most generalized renderings. The broad vigorous brushstrokes suggest rather than clearly define the heavy folds of what would appear to be a cape or a loose-fitting garment of rustic cut made of course fabric. In 1950, P. T. A. Swillens suggestively accounted for the young girl's dress in the following manner: "The blue-yellow head covering of the portrait in The Hague and the yellow cape round the shoulders are not usual wear for those times. It is a special dress, which suits children and which children delight in, just because it is unusual and different and attractive in co lour. Just with such a fancy-dress children betray that they are still childish."

Prior to the 1994 restoration, the painting was not in good condition from a aesthetic point of view. The old protective varnish had yellowed considerably and had to be removed with solvent using cotton swabs. The old layer of varnish can be seen in the left-hand side of the image above. Moreover, some areas of the face which appeared discolored were in fact earlier degraded retouches of paint that had flaked off. The old retouches were removed and then restored to integrate them with the present lighter tone of the painting. Vermeer most likely employed a badger brush, a kind of opened thin flat brush with soft bristles, to blend imperceptibly the lighter tone of the flesh tones with the darker areas of the deep shadows to the right.
Boy in a Turban
Michiel Sweerts
1656-58
87 x 74 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Vermeer, as well as many other European painters, had obviously enjoyed introducing an exotic note in his paintings and welcomed the possibility to show off his technical prowess. However, the type of turban worn by Vermeer's young girl is so unusual that no reasonable comparison has been found in the context of European painting. In the 17th century, a Dutch girl would not have been easily seen wearing a turban. Critics now believe that Vermeer drew his inspiration from art rather than life, specifically from Michael Sweerts' A Boy Wearing a Turban and Holding a Nosegay, an excellent example of the Dutch tronie tradition.
Sweert's painting dates c. 1655-1656 or about ten years before the Girl with a Pearl Earring was presumably painted. The out-of-the-ordinary garb, the black background (typical of Sweerts) and the curious turban coupled with the distinctive blue light/yellow color scheme may have indeed struck Vermeer's imagination.
It is possible that the piece of fabric used as a makeshift turban, whatever its proper use may have been, appears in other pictures by Vermeer. Its material and the light yellow color with a blue border color seem to be comparable to the one seen draping from the still-life in The Art of Painting and the Love Letter.

The young girl's tear drop pearl hangs freely and motionless, "caught within a pool of recessive space." Its form and substance are essentially defined by the thick white fleck of impasto which registers the same beams of light which rake across the girl's face and turban and by the soft reflection that has gather up some of the light cast off by the intensely light band of the white collar below. The ovoid shape conveys the "experience of weight and volume," qualities which are less appreciable in a spherical formed pearl. It is likely that a pearl of such dimension and form did not exist and that the artist had either represented an artificial one or that he deliberately exaggerated its dimensions, no feat for a painter of notable technical proficiency.
In the 1994 restoration of the painting, the reflection under the pearl contained a small, bright highlight which was not a part of the original painting. This reflection was a flake of paint (see detail left) colored by surrounded light toned filler which had stuck to the spot during an earlier restoration. Once the flake was removed, the pearl regained its original softness.

The background of the Girl with a Pearl Earring does not appear as it did when Vermeer painted it some 340 years ago. Recent analysis demonstrates that the artist had painted a transparent "glaze" of green paint over the dark underpainting. Originally, the background must have appeared a smooth, glossy, hard and deep translucent green. This tone set against the warm flesh tone probably produced a more vibrant optical effect than the one which can be observed today. The green glaze was composed of three pigments (see left): indigo (a natural die from the indigo plant) and weld (a natural die from the yellow flowers of the woud plant widely used to die clothes in Vermeer's day).
Dark backgrounds were widely used in portraiture to enhance the three-dimensional effect of the figure. In fragment 232 of his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci had noted that a dark background makes an object appear lighter and vice versa.
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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.
(from Quentin Buvelot, "COLLECTING HISTORY: ON DES TOMBE, DONOR OF VERMEER'S GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING" in the Mauritshuis Bulletin, volume 17, no. 1, March 2004)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.



