We all know her face, even without having studied it: slightly turned to the left, her gaze turned towards the observer, the colorful turban on her head and a fleshy pearl hanging from her ear and her mouth open, something not common in Dutch paintings. This is an element that suggests that the young woman is about to speak to her audience, creating a sense of tension. The oil painting on canvas is “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, created around 1665 by Johannes Vermeer, one of the masters of the art of the Dutch Golden Age.
Described as “the Mona Lisa of the North” and preserved in The Hague at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, the work achieved worldwide fame also thanks to the bestseller of the same name by Tracy Chevalier and the 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson.
Vermeer’s contemporaries probably looked at this painting not as a portrait, but as a type of painting called a “tronie”, that is, a study of the head and shoulders of an imaginary person in exotic dress. His distinctive sign is the turban, which gives an oriental touch to the canvas.
The identity of the model has been questioned for years. “Although it is possible that someone posed for this painting, just as Rubens often painted figures that resembled his wife, it is not a specific person, but someone more generic, timeless and mysterious, perhaps a sibyl or a figure from the Bible,” Mauritshuis director Emilie Gordenker explained to the BBC. This sense of “fiction” is also supported by the theory according to which the pearl’s proportions are excessive, and that it could therefore more easily be a piece of costume jewellery.
There are many speculations about who this young woman was: some think she was the artist’s daughter, some his lover. Despite the attempts of art historians, to this day his identity is still unknown, also because the life of Vermeer himself is still little known. The Delft artist produced a limited number of works – around thirty paintings – and also left few biographical traces (however, we know that his wife bore him 15 children). Almost everything that is known can be deduced from his works: his mastery of rendering light, his specialization in painting women in stark domestic interiors, and his tendency not to give the viewer narrative details (unlike his Dutch contemporaries).
The work was not always so famous, also because after his death in 1675, the artist remained in obscurity for two centuries. And in fact the painting was auctioned in The Hague in 1881, in less than optimal conditions. It was acquired for a modest sum by a collector, Arnoldus des Tombe, who had understood its value, which is why he left it to the Mauritshuis museum in his will. Real fame came only with the great Vermeer exhibition inaugurated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1995: the girl was chosen as the image for the accompanying poster, and became a celebrity.
