Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring, oil painting on canvas (c. 1665) by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, depicting an imaginary young woman wearing a turban and an improbably large pearl earring. The work’s striking simplicity, luminous handling of light, and the sitter’s direct, enigmatic gaze have made it one of Vermeer’s most recognizable paintings. It permanently resides in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

The artist

An observant and deliberate painter, Vermeer produced only 36 known works in his lifetime, while many of his contemporaries completed hundreds. Like his peers, he mostly depicted scenes of ordinary life, later called “genre” painting, often of women at daily tasks. Notable examples include Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657) and The Music Lesson (c. 1665). He occasionally signed his paintings. While Girl with a Pearl Earring bears “IVMeer,” it is undated. Historians believe Vermeer painted the small piece (17.52 × 15.35 inches [44.5 × 39 cm]) around 1665, during the period in which he executed a group of paintings with a shared pearl motif.

The artwork

Girl with a Pearl Earring represents a young woman in a dark shallow space, an intimate setting that draws the viewer’s attention to her. She wears a blue and gold turban, the titular pearl earring, and a gold jacket with a visible white collar beneath. Unlike many of Vermeer’s subjects, she is neither concentrating on a daily chore nor unaware of her viewer. Instead, she is caught in a fleeting moment, turning her head over her shoulder and meeting the viewer’s gaze with her eyes wide and lips parted as if about to speak. Her enigmatic expression coupled with the mystery of her identity has led some to compare her to the equivocal subject in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19).

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Unlike the Mona Lisa, however, Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch term for a character or type of person. A young woman might have sat for Vermeer, but the painting is not meant to portray her or any specific individual in the same way that Leonardo’s piece portrayed an existing person (likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant). Vermeer’s subject is a generic young woman in a costume, a study in facial expression and dress. The work attests to Vermeer’s technical expertise and interest in representing light. The soft modeling of the subject’s face reveals his mastery of using light rather than line to create form, while the reflections on her lips and on the earring show his concern for representing the effect of light on different surfaces.

Rise in popularity

Although now a highly regarded artist, Vermeer was not well known outside of his native city of Delft during his lifetime or in the decades after. Historians credit the 19th-century French critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile-Thoré (under the pseudonym of William Bürger) for reassessing the artist’s work, which eventually led to Vermeer’s distinguished reputation. Even so, Girl with a Pearl Earring became one of Vermeer’s more famous pieces only around the turn of the 21st century, with the 1995 exhibition devoted to the artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the publication of the best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier in 1999. The book fashioned the painting’s subject into a housemaid named Griet who works in Vermeer’s home and becomes his paint mixer. It was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 2003 starring Scarlett Johansson as the fictional Griet and Colin Firth as Vermeer.

In the 21st century

As the Mauritshuis building underwent renovation in 2012, Girl with a Pearl Earring traveled to Japan, Italy, and the United States. It drew crowds in each location, attesting to its now firm place in audience regard. Since Girl returned to the Netherlands in 2014, the Mauritshuis has rarely lent out the painting, though the piece was part of the blockbuster exhibition devoted to Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in 2023.

In 2018 the Mauritshuis embarked on a two-year investigation of the artwork. Using modern imaging techniques to look at layers beneath the surface, researchers uncovered a green curtain behind the girl and confirmed that she has eyelashes, though they may be hard to discern. Researchers also tested Vermeer’s materials, mapping the sources of his pigments. They discovered that he liberally used the costly ultramarine, a pigment derived from the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli, which was then found primarily in what is now Afghanistan, for the headscarf. He also used a red pigment derived from an insect living in Mexico and South America for the woman’s lips.

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