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 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 (see left). Vermeer, as well as many other European painters, had obviously enjoyed the chance of introducing an exotic note in their paintings which doubled as an opportunity 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 his interiors (contemporary painters rarely represented these precious imports lying on the ground) are of Turkish origin. They must have been appreciated for their evokative floral motifs and the large mass of warm red color which enlivened the otherwise geometrical and cold interiors.

However, we must not believe that anything called "Turkish" in contemporary accounts really came from that country. The term was loosely used to describe imported exotic objects which were the rage of the day. In the inventory (29 February, 1676) taken shortly after the artist's death we find listed among other things: "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." Walter Liedtke sees 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. Arnoldus Andries 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 newspaper 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)

Beatrice Cenci
attributed to Guido Reni
1599
64,5 x 49 cm
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Roma

While the thematic and compositional origins of some of Vermeer's works have proven easy to identify, other of his works pose more problems. And it is hardly out of the question that such an uncomplicated motif as the Girl with a Pearl Earring could have been devised independently.

Nonetheless, Vermeer scholars have proposed a wide variety of Dutch and foreign models including, traditionally, the Beatrice Cenci by the Italian painter Guido Reni.* While such a connection may appear far fetched, Vermeer certainly knew the Beatrice Cenci story which had captured Europe's collective imagination. He could have easily seen one of the many copies of Reni's original or engravings which circulated throughout Europe.

Beatrice, the daughter of the rich and powerful Francesco Cenci, suffered from her father's mistreatment. Violent and dissolute, he imprisoned Beatrice and her stepmother in the Castle of Petrella Salto, near Rieti. With the blessing of her stepmother and two brothers, all of whom shared her exasperation at his continued abuse, Beatrice murdered her father in 1598. She was apprehended and, after a trial that riveted the attention of the citizens of Rome, condemned to death at the order of Pope Clement VIII, who may have been motivated by the hope of confiscating the assets of the family. In the presence of an enormous crowd, Beatrice was decapitated in the Ponte Sant'Angelo in September of 1599, instantly becoming a symbol of innocence oppressed.

It has been hypothesized that the great Italian painter Caravaggio was present at the decapitation and was inspired to paint his Judith Cutting off the Head of Holofernes. The precise and realistic rendering of Caravaggio's scene, anatomically and physiologically correct to the minutest details, presupposes the artist's observation of a real decapitation.

The influential Vermeer writer Lawrence Gowing had proposed the influence of Jan Scorel's female portraits. The Scorel and Reni influences have been largely set aside in favor of somewhat less exotic connections with the Dutch painter Michiel Sweerts.

* While the Beatrice Cenci is traditionally attributed to Reni, its poor quality in comparison to other works of the master has led many critics to reject it as an autograph work. Instead, it could be by a painter in the immediate circle of Reni, possibly Elisabetta Sirani, who is known for rendering the master's models in abbreviated and reduced form.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings f-Minor, BWV 1056, Largo [1.89 MB]
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