Girl with a Pearl Earring, one of his most well-known works of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer opens our series of blogs about Jewelry in Art. Oil pained on canvas in c.1665, it depicts an imaginary young woman in a shallow dark space wearing a blue and gold turban, a gold jacket with a visible white collar beneath and a very large pearl earring.
Her enigmatic expression, coupled with the mystery of her identity rivals to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa masterpiece. Called by many a “Mona Lisa of the North”, her popularity bits any of the works Vermeer ever created. Her iconic posture that inspired literature and films found not only on book’s and magazine’s covers but also T-shirts, cups, bags and even as a graffiti on Banksy’s wall with a security alarm posing as her pearl earring.
Surprisingly, Girl with a Pearl Earring wasn’t always so popular. Painted around 1665-1666, it ended up in his patron’s collection, consequently sold on by his son-in-law, and was lost for 200 years until a collector bought it for 2 guilders (less than 1 Eur), cleaned it and discovered it was a Vermeer’s work. In 1902, after the collector has died, Girl with a Pearl Earring was donated to the Mauritshuis in The Hague and hanging there ever since.
Unlike most of Vermeer’s subjects, she is not concentrating on a daily chore and unaware of her viewer. Instead, caught in a fleeting moment, she turns her head over her shoulder, meeting the viewer’s gaze with her eyes wide and lips parted as if about to speak. Vermeer creates such a mysterious and enigmatic face, but we don’t really know who is she or what she looks like.
First of all, unlike the Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch term for a character or type of person. Secondary, since her face turned partially away, her look is rather universal, and we can’t really tell its shape. We even cannot say if her nose is round, wide or snub as it blends into her check. The soft modelling of her face reveals Vermeer’s mastery of using light rather than line to create a form, while the reflection on her lips and on the earring show his concern for representing the effect of light on different surfaces.
As an attempt to make sense of the hidden narrative of Vermeer’s most renowned work, we can assume the secret is in the pearl earring delicately gleaming from the darkness, the most famous pearl earring known to man.
Images by Robert Waghorn, Mike Goad and Ellen26 from Pixabay
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