The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

What do you see here? I see a jumbled yin and yang symbol, maybe an abstract take on the inside of a twister. It really just looks like white squiggles though. This piece is called The Girl with a Pearl Earring created by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in the year 1665. It has since captivated the world and left everyone asking, who is she? Is she coming or going? What is her relationship to us? Or should I say the person she's looking at? How did Vermeer manage to create something so enchanting? Known as the Mona Lisa of the North, The Girl speaks to us in unique ways. Wait, did she say something? She looked like she was about to say something. No, probably not since this is a three and a half century old painting and not an actual girl. But why does it feel kind of wrong to refer to this as a painting instead of a person? Like she needs to be an immortalized being forever staring at us from inside her little gold box. So let's talk about her then, shall we? She wears a yellow jacket, which wasn't out of the ordinary for a Dutch girl to wear in the 1600s. On the other hand, her striking headscarf would have been very exotic, as if she's dressed up to look like a girl from the East. Vermeer created the blue part of it with a pigment known as ultramarine, formed from the semi-precious stone from Afghanistan known as lapis lazuli, which at the time would have been more expensive than gold. And Vermeer used a lot of it. It remains a mystery as to how he was able to get his hands on so much of it. But why would Vermeer make a portrait of a Dutch girl and dress her in exotic attire? The thing is, we actually don't know much about Vermeer. We don't even know for sure what he looked like, but a lot of people think this is probably him. The only painting he created that shows his face. And what we do know is that this isn't even really a portrait. It's actually called a tronie. A tronie is a study of a face or a head that depicts a character rather than a recognizable person. Just in case you ever need to know that for trivia or something. They're meant to show an idealized and sometimes overly expressive character and were a popular genre in 17th century Dutch art. She wears an impressively large pearl. So large that many researchers believe it was actually fake. Since Vermeer wouldn't have been able to afford a pearl of that size, it's more likely to have been tin or glass with a varnish to make it look like a pearl. In the 17th century, pearls were very difficult to acquire and for that reason were a symbol of wealth. And Vermeer must have had a bit of an obsession with pearls because he painted them over and over again. But this pearl stands out from the rest not only because of its size, but also because it's actually all an illusion. It doesn't even have a hook to hang it from her ear and Vermeer created it using only a few strokes of white paint. The bottom stroke of paint reflects her white collar, while the thicker paint on the top is meant to reflect the light source from above. This is a perfect example of why Vermeer is nicknamed the master of light. And while we're on the subject of light, can we just talk about the way Vermeer depicts the girl's skin? I'm no beauty guru, but isn't this called glass skin? No? Okay. The way he transitions from the brightest parts of her face to the shadowy parts is just, wow. The girl's grayish green eyes twinkle with puzzling amusement. For a long time, experts thought that Vermeer painted the girl with no eyelashes or eyebrows. But a few years ago, in-depth research took place that showed she actually does have eyelashes. Her lips are slightly parted, making us wonder if she's about to say something. The red pigment Vermeer used for her lips was derived from an insect that lived on the prickly pear cactus in Mexico or South America. Her lips appear slightly moist at the edges shown by two little dots of white paint. And for those of you who can't stand the word moist, I apologize for saying moist, moist. And if we specifically look at her nose, we see that the edge seamlessly blends into her right cheek. The dark grayish black background adds to the ethereal nature of this piece. We also now know that the background used to be a dark green, but the pigments have faded over time, creating the black hole appearance it has today. Vermeer's signature floats in the top left corner, almost invisible to the naked eye. If we go to the top right corner, it looks basically the same as everywhere else, right? Yes, but it actually isn't the same. Researchers recently discovered diagonal lines in this area, also invisible to the naked eye. These lines were part of a dark green curtain Vermeer painted behind the girl that we can no longer see. This is also why the right side of the painting is a slightly different color than the left. It would be very on-brand for Vermeer to include a curtain in this piece. After all, his paintings have a fly-on-the-wall kind of feel to them, as if we're peeking in on a scene, on the lives of other people that maybe we shouldn't be. This feeling of separation between us and the subjects is enhanced with the use of a curtain, usually placed in front of the people in Vermeer's paintings. What's different about the curtain in The Girl with the Pearl Earring is that it's behind her. This makes the painting feel so much more intimate than the others. Not only is she looking directly at us, there's nothing between her and us, or should I say, her and Vermeer. The relationship between the girl and Vermeer is exactly what was explored in a novel written by Tracy Chevalier in 1999, later turned into a 2003 movie starring Scarlett Johansson. Tracy fell in love with this painting. Can we blame her? So much so that she decided to create her own story about who the girl might be. Vermeer fathered 11 children with his wife, Katerina. They lived with his mother-in-law, but somehow he was able to carve out a room in the hectic house to use for his studio. Because of this, Tracy Chevalier concluded that the girl was likely someone who was in the house a lot, someone who had access to Vermeer's studio, a servant perhaps. I'm pretty sure she interpreted the look on the girl's face as some relational tension between the two. Conversely, some think that the girl may have been Vermeer's daughter. I adore Vermeer's paintings. Every time I look at one, a feeling of calm rushes over me, shortly followed by a feeling of reluctance. Like I don't dare speak for fear I'll interrupt this beautiful moment in time I feel so fortunate to witness. But how was Vermeer able to capture these still, quiet moments living in such a chaotic environment and manage to make them look so real, almost photographic? Though we may never truly understand his mastery, some have speculated that he had a bit of help using an instrument called a camera obscura. Camera obscura is Latin for dark room. You can think of it as the ancestor of the modern day camera. The instrument filters a scene through a small lens, which then gets projected onto the artist's canvas. The artist would then be able to reference it or even trace it. Some believe this is how Vermeer managed to achieve such photographic realism. The idea that Vermeer used this instrument was first posed by American artist Joseph Pinnell in 1891, specifically because of Vermeer's piece Officer and Laughing Girl. He noticed that the piece had perspective and scale that was eerily similar to that of a photograph. Artist David Hockney brought up this idea again around the He pointed out that Vermeer's neighbor, Mr. Leeuwenhoek, also the executor of his will, made telescopes and lenses for a living, so it probably would have been easier for Vermeer to get his hands on such a device. Hockney also points out a clue that optics were used in Vermeer's masterpiece, The Milkmaid, because the basket in the background is in focus, while the one in the foreground is out of focus. If Vermeer or any other artist of his day used such a tool, they likely would have avoided talking about it. Painting was the way he supported his wife and 11 children, after all. He wouldn't have wanted someone to find out, copy him, and threaten his livelihood. If Vermeer used a camera obscura or the aid of another optical instrument to create his beloved masterpieces, would that make him any less of an artistic master? Would it make the girl with a pearl earring any less stunning? I can understand why one might think this, but in my opinion, I think it just makes him more resourceful. Let me know what you think. So, we don't know if Vermeer used a camera obscura to create this piece. We don't know much of anything about Vermeer. We have no idea who this girl is. All of these unanswered questions have left me feeling frustrated. I got pretty annoyed. I wanted to know more about Vermeer. Did he have a personal relationship with the girl, as the inspired novel and movie suggests, or was it just his daughter? How did he create these beautiful photographic scenes that make us pause even today? For heaven's sake, why is this the only portrait of him and we don't even know if it's a real portrait? It's nice that he's smiling, but what the heck? Above all, I wanted to know who this girl was. What was her story? But, if I'm honest with myself, this might be the real reason I can't look away from her. Throughout researching this painting, I would catch myself time and time again staring at her for extended periods of time, just completely entranced. Is she happy or sad? Is she interested or uninterested? Is she getting ready to say something or waiting for the person she's looking at to say something? Or, is it none of these things? At a time when we have so much information available to us, there's something sort of refreshing about all of the mystery surrounding this piece. So, when you look into her eyes, she's whoever you want her to be. She could be you, your neighbor, your friend, even your cat.