Girl with a Pearl Earring

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 included 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.

Girl with a Pearl Earring represents a young woman in a dark shallow space, an intimate setting that draws the viewer’s attention exclusively on 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 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. 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). 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 exotic dress, a study in facial expression and costume. 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 reflection on her lips and on the earring show his concern for representing the effect of light on different surfaces.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer)
Oil on canvas
44.5cm × 39cm
(1665?)
Lahey: Mauritshuis