Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

A face, not a portrait

She is not a known person. The picture is a tronie, the Dutch term for a study of a face or a character, often in costume, of the kind painters sold on the open market. Vermeer dresses her in an exotic turban of blue and yellow and a plain brownish-yellow jacket with a white collar, and turns her to look back over her shoulder, lips just parted, as if about to speak. The background now reads as almost black; research by the Mauritshuis in 2018 found that it was painted as a dark green curtain, whose colour has since broken down.

The pearl

The pearl is the least painted thing in the picture. It is made from a few touches: a thin, translucent grey for its body, a soft reflection of the white collar on its underside, and one bright highlight. There is no hook or loop to hang it from the ear, and it is improbably large for a real pearl. The blue of the turban is natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli, the most expensive pigment a painter of the day could buy, and Vermeer used it freely.

Where it hangs

It has been in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902, when it was bequeathed by the collector Arnoldus des Tombe, who had bought it at auction in 1881 for a few guilders. It measures 44.5 by 39 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Mauritshuis, The Hague · Wikidata Q185372 · Wikimedia Commons