Why Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait, and the pearl is not a pearl

Nobody is sitting for this picture. The Mauritshuis is explicit: it “is not a portrait, but a tronie — a painting of an imaginary figure”. A tronie was a study of a head representing a character or type, not an attempt at anyone’s likeness. Somebody probably did pose — the museum guesses a girl from Delft — but the point was never to record who she was.

And the pearl is almost certainly not a pearl. It is “too large to be real”, probably a glass imitation, possibly nothing but an invention. The museum’s own description is the giveaway: it consists of little more than two brushstrokes — a bright highlight at the upper left and the soft reflection of her collar underneath. There is no silver hook, because Vermeer never painted one.

What you are actually looking at

A young woman turning over her shoulder, head tilted slightly, a gleam in greyish-blue eyes, lips parted and wet. The turban is wound from two pieces of cloth, one blue and one yellow.

Seventeenth-century Dutch girls did not wear turbans. That is the whole trick: the headdress gives her an exotic air she would never have had in Delft, and contemporaries described pictures like this as a “tronie painted in the Turkish style” or “in the antique style”. Rembrandt had made the form popular in Dutch art around 1630, often using his own face under a strange cap or a helmet.

So she is a costume study, and the costume is the fiction.

How it was made

The 2018 technical examination The Girl in the Spotlight, led by the Mauritshuis conservator Abbie Vandivere and published in Heritage Science in 2020, answered questions the naked eye cannot. Vermeer worked back to front: the greenish background first, then the skin of her face, then the yellow jacket, the white collar, the headscarf, and last of all the “pearl”.

He also changed his mind while painting. The research found that the position of her ear, the top of the headscarf and the back of her neck were all moved. The pose we treat as inevitable was arrived at by adjustment.

The handling is deliberately unequal across the picture. Her face is modelled with gradual transitions and invisible brushstrokes; the clothing is far more schematic, enlivened by the small dots of light that are a Vermeer signature. The white collar is thick impasto; the turban is drier paint, and made with ultramarine, then a genuinely precious pigment. The study mapped his palette for the first time and found raw materials that had come from all over the world. It examined the surface with a 3D digital microscope at 140× magnification — about a micrometre per pixel.

This is also why the painting rewards a high-resolution look more than almost anything else in the collection: the face and the fabric are painted in two different languages, and at normal viewing distance you cannot see the join.

Reading. The museum offers a neat explanation for why she holds people: Vermeer painted without hard lines — sfumato, “smoky” — so details are simply missing. There is no earring hook. There is no clear edge where the nose becomes the cheek. Your brain supplies them without telling you, which means, in the Mauritshuis’s phrase, “we each have our own Girl”. Persuasive, and still a theory about perception rather than a fact about the paint.

She was a nobody until 1881

This is the part that surprises people who assume a masterpiece is always treated as one.

The painting was unknown to the public until 1881, when it came up at auction at the Venduhuis der Notarissen in The Hague. It was filthy and neglected. Two men noticed it: the cultural official Victor de Stuers and his neighbour, the collector A.A. des Tombe. They agreed not to bid against each other, and Des Tombe took it for two guilders and thirty cents.

Even the recognition story has two versions, and the museum prints both: either De Stuers spotted a Vermeer through the grime, or the picture was too dirty to judge and the attribution only became clear when cleaning revealed the signature — IVMeer, upper left, the IVM in ligature.

Des Tombe hung it at Parkstraat 26, where visitors could see it. In 1885 the future director of the Mauritshuis, Abraham Bredius, wrote that “Vermeer overshadows all the rest… that single gleam of light will alone hold your attention”.

When Des Tombe died on 16th December 1902, he turned out to have made a secret will leaving twelve paintings to the Mauritshuis. She was one of them.

What isn’t known

• Who she is. Not recorded, and by the nature of a tronie there may be no answer to find. The famous name — Griet — was invented by the novelist Tracy Chevalier in 1999.
• What the pearl actually was. Glass, varnished to a matte sheen, or pure invention. The museum offers both and settles neither.
• Which lot she was in 1696. The provenance runs through the Dissius sale in Amsterdam on 16th May 1696, where she is lot 38, 39 or 40 — 36 guilders, or 17, or 17. Nobody can say which.
• Whether the early provenance is hers at all. Every entry before 1881 in the museum’s own list carries a question mark.
• Why she is famous. The Mauritshuis will not pretend to know: “We don’t know why exactly. We do have some theories, but we can’t explain it entirely. And maybe we don’t really want to — a little mystery suits the Girl.”

That is a museum with the confidence to say it does not know, about the painting its entire building is known for. Which is the correct answer, and a better one than any of the stories told to fill the gap.

Own Girl with a Pearl Earring in 4K →
See the original at Mauritshuis →