Girl with a Pearl Earring
Nobody knows who she is, and she was never meant to be anyone. The pearl has no hook, the background was once a green curtain, and the painting once sold for almost nothing.
A young woman turns towards us over her left shoulder. Her lips are slightly parted, as if she has just been called and is about to answer. Light falls across her face from the left, catches the wet corner of her mouth and the white of her eye, and gathers in a single large pearl hanging at her ear. Behind her there is nothing at all, only darkness.
What you are looking at
This is a small oil painting on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, made around 1665. It is less than half a metre tall, smaller than most people expect when they first see it.
It is not a portrait in the usual sense. Dutch painters of the time made pictures called tronies: studies of a face, an expression or a type of character, often in exotic costume. Nobody commissioned this painting to remember a particular person, and nobody knows who the model was. That is part of why it feels so open. She is not a duchess or a merchant's wife looking out from her rank; she is simply someone, caught in a moment.
The turban is the boldest colour in the picture. Its blue is ultramarine, a pigment made by grinding lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone brought to Europe from Afghanistan. It cost more than almost any other paint, and Vermeer used it generously throughout his career. The yellow cloth falling from the turban and the ochre jacket set it off, so the whole figure glows against the dark.
The story
Vermeer lived and worked in Delft, a prosperous town in the Dutch Republic, from 1632 to 1675. He painted slowly and left only around three dozen pictures that historians accept as his. Most show quiet interiors: a woman reading a letter, pouring milk, weighing pearls. When he died he left his family in debt, and for nearly two centuries his name almost disappeared.
The painting's own history follows that fall and rise. In 1881 it was sold at an auction in The Hague for a tiny sum, a couple of guilders. The buyer, the collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe, left it to the Mauritshuis museum when he died, and it has belonged to the museum since 1903.
For much of that time it went by other names, such as Girl with a Turban. The title we use now became standard only in the twentieth century, and the picture's fame grew enormously after Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel, which imagined a story for the unknown girl, and the 2003 film based on it.
What most people don't know
In 2018 the Mauritshuis ran a research project, called Girl in the Spotlight, that examined the painting with modern scanning and imaging. It found traces of a green curtain in the background. The dark void we see today was once a folded drape, and its pigments have changed over time until it reads as black.
The same research found tiny eyelashes, invisible to the naked eye, and showed that the pearl is an illusion in the most literal sense. There is no hook connecting it to her ear. It is made of a few touches of paint: a bright highlight at the top and a soft reflection of her white collar underneath. Your eye supplies the rest.
Some scholars have argued that a real pearl that size would have been almost impossible to own, and that the earring might have been polished tin or glass.
We cannot know. Vermeer painted the light on it, not the object.
Why people love it
Part of the pull is her gaze. She looks straight at us, and her expression is impossible to pin down: surprise, expectation, the start of a word. Each viewer finishes the moment in their own way. Because she is no one in particular, she can be anyone, and that openness is what keeps people coming back.
The picture is also very simple. One figure, one light, one jewel, no setting at all. It reads instantly, even at the size of a phone screen, which has helped it spread far beyond the museum. People often call it the Mona Lisa of the North, and like the Mona Lisa it has become a shorthand for "famous painting".
It is everywhere in popular culture. Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, imagined her as a maid in Vermeer's household, and the 2003 film adaptation, with Scarlett Johansson as the girl and Colin Firth as Vermeer, made the image familiar to millions who had never been to The Hague. In 2014 the street artist Banksy painted a version in Bristol, Girl with a Pierced Eardrum, with a security alarm box standing in for the pearl. Parodies, recreations and costumes of the girl in her blue turban appear constantly online.
How to see it
The painting hangs in the Mauritshuis, a seventeenth-century town palace beside the Binnenhof in The Hague, the Netherlands, where it is usually on display. The museum is small and calm, so you can spend real time in front of the picture.
Stand close first. Look at how few strokes make the pearl, how the lips are just a soft edge of colour, how the light on the turban's folds is laid in with thick, separate touches. Then step back a few metres and watch it all resolve into a face that seems about to speak. Before you travel, check the museum's website, since works are occasionally moved or lent.
