Girl with a Pearl Earring | artble.com Girl with a Pearl Earring Girl with a Pearl Earring Girl with a Pearl Earring Date of Creation: Girl with a Pearl Earring Story / Theme Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring was originally titled Girl with a Turban and it wasn't until the second half of the twentieth century that the name was changed. Regarded as Vermeer's masterpiece, this canvas is often referred to as the Mona Lisa of the North or the Dutch Mona Lisa . The girl in this painting is believed to be Vermeer's eldest daughter, Maria, who was about twelve or thirteen-years-old at the time it was created. Her facial features appear in several of Vermeer's works but his various techniques on his subject make it difficult to compare the female faces in his paintings, as the woman are portrayed in different lighting conditions and poses. There is very little information about Vermeer and his paintings. Girl with a Pearl Earring is signed "IVMeer" but there is no date on this work. It remains unknown whether or not this canvas was commissioned and if so, by whom.

It's more likely that this image was a tronie, Dutch 17th-century description of a 'head' painting that was not intended as a portrait. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of over forty images of women created by Vermeer and thus it is obvious that he had a keen interest in women's socio-cultural roles. It could be argued that he valued their role in maintaining his idealist way of life by ensuring order within the household and raising children within Christian values. Therefore, women played a pivotal role in safeguarding tradition and moral values through the generations. Vermeer depicted his women in thought-provoking stillness and also as encouraging images that inspired homogeny. With this painting the viewer is captured by the subject and believes they have caught her attention and caused her to turn her head. This is a sensual painting with the girl gazing at the viewer with wide eyes and a parted mouth and there is an air of mystery surrounding her identity. In 1994 this canvas was restored which involved removing the yellowed varnish along with the retouches that had been made during previous restorations.

This resulted in the vivid colors originally used by Vermeer shining through and the intimacy of the girl's gaze was also greatly enhanced. Clothing: The turban being worn in Girl with a Pearl Earring was a popular prop at the time and its elaborate folds and rich materials were a great way of showing off the artists' skill. The turban also demonstrates the influence of other countries as various slaves came to the Netherlands and explorers would bring back new exotic artifacts and inventions. Girl with a Pearl Earring Inspirations for the Work Rembrandt Leiden Rembrandt was the artist responsible for popularizing the tronie in around 1630 and so it's likely that Vermeer drew inspiration from his works. It's believed that Vermeer painted at least two tronies and an inventory of his possessions created shortly after his death listed 'Two tronies painted in the Turkish manner'. Therefore it's possible that Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of these paintings. Girl with a Pearl Earring Analysis Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Johannes Vermeer Use of color: Vermeer's intense use of his signature ultramarine can be clearly seen in this work.

It is not only used in the top of the turban but also in the neck and end of the fabric hanging down the sitter's back. Vermeer uses his palette to the fullest and his skill in under painting creates an intense volume that has a three-dimensional effect. He uses a unique blend of creamier tones and pigments for the girl's skin so it has a sort of glowing effect in the light and contrasts with the background. Red and brown ochres are used to define shadows on the girl's skin to create depth and definition as the light source comes from the left frontal area. This also helps to accentuate the facial features and make them as realistic as possible. Vermeer uses the Dutch custom of a dark background which allowed the artists to create a three-dimensional effect of the highlighted subject. Dark backgrounds enabled the artist to be more flexible in their technique and gave them the freedom to play with various contrasts of lighting. Art historians have discovered that Vermeer used a green ochre tone as an undercoat in this painting which helped bring out the vibrant colors of the figure. Use of light: The use of the camera obscura in this work enhances the lighting in the room and helps define starker shadows in the foreground.

Vermeer used a sort of white-based lead undercoat for the subject which produced an intense shine in the finished result. The camera also dramatizes the reflective surfaces such as the pearl earring, the subject's eyes and lips in stark contrasts that intensify their gleam. Brush work: Vermeer uses many smooth brushstrokes in this work to create a clear-cut image defined by light and shadow. He also uses these fine strokes to characterize the clothing and skin texture. The strokes are linear and have strong definition. The undercoating for the girl's dress helps create depth and a realistic interpretation of the actual material. The final layer in the work is applied very thinly; this was possibly done to add movement as the light moves across the delicate material. The turban is accentuated with Vermeer's trademark highlights. The pearl is also distinct in that it consists of just two brushstrokes.

Girl with a Pearl Earring Related Paintings Smiling Girl Rogier van der Weyden, Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdress , 1445 Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Young Girl, 1460 Jan van Eyck, Man in a Turban, 1433 Girl with a Pearl Earring Locations Through Time - Notable Sales Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery The Hague Girl with a Pearl Earring was purchased by the art collector A. A. des Tombe at an auction in The Hague in 1881 for just two guilders and thirty cents. Although the painting was in bad condition and the signature was illegible it still attracted a great deal of interest. Upon his death in 1902 a will by A. A. des Tomes was discovered and in it he bequeathed twelve paintings to the Mauritshuis, including Girl with a Pearl Earring. Girl with a Pearl Earring Artist Woman Holding a Balance Johannes Vermeer Vermeer was a realist painter who focused on chiaroscuro and became a master of this technique.

He delighted in the technicalities of the camera obscura and was an avid fan of using various lens and glass contraptions to discover new forms of capturing light in various contexts. Although Vermeer held nothing original in his artistic interpretation and subject matter, he was extremely skilled in creating superb pieces of art. He didn't create many self portraits, focusing instead on objects taking the viewer to the image as he saw it. Vermeer does not create a specific narrative in his works like his contemporaries but rather concentrates on the moment itself and the rest of the story is created by the observer. At the time Girl with a Pearl Earring was created, Dutch girls did not generally wear turbans. This leads art historians to believe that Vermeer intended to produce a tronie rather than a portrait. A tronie was a study of a head designed to represent a particular figure type and the girl in this painting represents an exotic, Oriental female. It's thought that Vermeer painted two tronies, as these were listed in an inventory after his death. Girl with a Pearl Earring Art Period Dutch Baroque has become the most noted era in art and it was the most lavish style in the history of Europe's figurative arts.

Artists were able to freely choose their subject matter and how they wanted to express it and this resulted in artist excelling in creating new art styles and techniques. Baroque art came into play at a time when the foundations of capitalism were being laid by the world's growing economies and art was expanding in new and exciting directions. New national schools were opening across Europe but there was already a dominate style, spearheaded by great masters, such as Caravaggio , Poussin , Bernini and Rubens who provided inspiration for many emerging artists. Vermeer was an idealist who strived to bring out the beauty in the most mundane aspects of daily life and his unique skill made him a leader and revolutionary of the Baroque era. Girl with a Pearl Earring Bibliography To read more about Vermeer and his work please refer to the recommended reading list below. • Arasse, Daniel. Vermeer: Faith in Painting. Princeton University Press, 1996 • Binstock, Benjamin. Vermeer's Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice. Routledge, 2008 • Cant, Serena. Vermeer and His World: 1632-1675.

Quercus, 2009 • Liedtke, W. Vermeer and the Delft School (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Yale University Press, 2001 • Snow, E. A Study of Vermeer. University of California Press, 1994 • Steadman, Philip. Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces. Oxford Paperbacks; New Ed edition, 2002 Want a Printed Canvas or Replica? Girl With a Pearl Earring, oil on canvas, c. 1670, 46.5 cm by 40 cm Painting by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy of Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring has arrived at the Frick Collection in New York , drawing unprecedented crowds . We might therefore ask: Who was she? Several authors, ranging from Marcel Proust’s friend the journalist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer to New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler , have suggested she might be the artist’s eldest daughter, Maria.

Many Vermeer scholars dismiss that notion as a Romantic anachronism , a projection onto an earlier period of a modern view of art as a reflection of the artist’s circumstances. In the wake of this denial, Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl With a Pearl Earring provided an alternative, fictional answer: She was the family maid’s assistant, Griet (played by Scarlett Johansson in the film), who became Vermeer’s love interest. But the evidence suggests Vermeer’s daughter Maria was his likely model and a crucial part of his art. More provocatively, I believe that Maria Vermeer was also a gifted artist who painted roughly one-fifth of the works currently assigned to her father. Vermeer was the greatest of the Dutch genre painters, who took their subject matter from everyday life. Rembrandt had already used himself and other family members as models for historical roles, and such models were even more appropriate for genre scenes. Another factor was the rise of optical naturalism, including the aid of the camera obscura, a forerunner of the modern photographic camera pioneered by Carel Fabritius (also represented at the Frick), Rembrandt’s most gifted student and Vermeer’s primary influence.

But Vermeer did not simply “record” the world around him; rather, he carefully crafted poetic constructions based on what he observed. The more closely he relied on the life around him, the more compelling was his art. Allegory of Painting, or Art of Painting, oil on canvas, c. 1667, 120 cm by 100 cm Painting by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Advertisement Vermeer himself tells us this in his Art of Painting , his visual testament to his ambitions. The composition shows a painter seated at his easel from behind, dressed in an old-fashioned Netherlandish costume, painting a young girl adorned with laurel and holding a trumpet and book. The painter is often identified as Vermeer based on his comparable hair and costume in his Procuress of 1656. Get Slate in your inbox. Since 1949, the girl has been called Clio, the muse of history writing, following the conventional notion that history was the highest category of art. But the mature Vermeer did not paint history.

Scholars have also mistranslated documents in which Vermeer’s widow and mother-in-law described a painting “in which ‘Painting’ is being depicted [uytgebeeld, which also means performed as a role, or personified as a character on stage].” The girl personifies Painting [Pictura], holding attributes associated with Painting, while others are arrayed on the table before her. These include a blue and yellow “garment of changing color,” likely the same textile artfully wrapped around her head as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, who therefore might also personify Painting. In neither case does she take her job very seriously. In place of “high” historical or allegorical content, Vermeer characterizes Painting through his playful relation to his model as a particular individual that he knows intimately. As a painter of modern life, Vermeer’s greatness lies in the domestic, familial character of his art. It is the more conservative scholars who apply an anachronistic, premodern paradigm of art as illustrating an institutional (historical) message. Vermeer was instead a pioneer of the modern paradigm of art as expressing the artist’s unique circumstances, experiences, and sensibilities, a paradigm first articulated in texts from the Romantic period.

The same period witnessed the founding of the modern discipline of art history, which began to gather individual artists’ oeuvres, relevant facts about their lives, and diverse interpretations of their works, and first “discovered” Vermeer as an unrecognized genius. We continue to pursue these goals today. Surprisingly, given the number of monographs devoted to Vermeer’s relatively few paintings , no scholar put forward an account of his gradual painting-by-painting development before my 2009 book . Several authors identified the figures who appear repeatedly in his compositions as Vermeer, his wife, his gradually ageing eldest daughters Maria and Elisabeth (Lijsbeth), and even the family maid in Vermeer’s Milkmaid (the suggestion of the historian J.M. Montias and likely inspiration for Chevalier). But no one sought to address Vermeer’s use of family models in a systematic way, and some rejected the possibility altogether. Advertisement In his Art of Painting, Young Woman With a Pearl Necklace , and Girl With a Pearl Earring, scholars recognized the same beautiful young model who resembles Vermeer’s wife in earlier compositions.

Maria was born around 1654 and would have been 13, 15, and 16 if the paintings in question are dated 1667, 1669, and 1670, respectively. The plainer model in Vermeer’s Girl Writing, Girl With a Guitar, and Lacemaker, who resembles Vermeer in his dated self-portraits, would have been his second daughter, Lijsbeth. Another crucial dimension involves roughly a fifth of the paintings currently assigned to Vermeer—five in New York City alone—that were based on the same models, objects, and interiors and adapt or combine elements of Vermeer’s compositions but do not correspond to his level of technical mastery, characteristic approaches, or logical development. The failure to identify these “misfit” paintings, which possess their own divergent appeal, has precluded the recognition of Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development and vice versa. Dates now assigned to Vermeer's paintings are also often too early, because they are not based on a painting-by-painting account of his development, include the misfit paintings, and do not take into consideration his models and their approximate ages.

Earlier authors had questioned each of these misfits as possibly painted by a pupil or one of his children but did not pursue that possibility or the paintings as a group. Vermeer did not register any pupils, but his follower could have been one of his children, whom he did not need to register, most plausibly Maria. Two misfits, Mistress and Maid in the Frick Collection and Woman With a Lute , were also traded against a huge debt to a baker after the deaths of Vermeer and his patron, who bought Vermeer’s Lacemaker, his last painting. That is, the paintings were sold and possibly produced as forgeries to alleviate the family’s financial straits. Maria’s apprenticeship must therefore have been a family secret. Perhaps partly because of these circumstances, she does not appear to have pursued painting after her marriage and her father’s death. Girl With the Red Hat, oil on panel, c. 1672, 23.2 cm by 18.1 cm Painting by Maria Vermeer? Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Most intriguingly, two of the misfit paintings, Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat , have been associated with or even identified as self-portraits, and together with a third, Girl Interrupted , also in the Frick, appear to portray the same model as Girl With a Pearl Earring. Since the Frick paintings cannot travel, the present exhibition offers the only possibility of comparing the originals in proximity. Did Maria portray herself in these works? If so, despite her technical challenges, she surpassed her father in psychological intimacy. Girl With a Red Hat, which would portray her at about 18 around 1672, also offers an astounding virtuoso display, including what may be the most fascinating (albeit implausible) headgear in the history of art. Her precocious masterpiece, if that is what it is, further mirrors and thereby transforms our experience of her father’s earlier Girl With a Pearl Earring as not just a pretty face or even an image of Vermeer’s daughter, but a portrait—another portrait—of the artist as a young woman. These ideas, the subject of an all-day symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University last spring, are admittedly speculations.

Yet no one has previously sought to identify the models in these paintings in a systematic way, account for the misfit paintings, or explain Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development. These factors are inextricably linked in the ongoing process of understanding Vermeer’s work, including Girl With a Pearl Earring and might ultimately lead to the discovery of another unrecognized genius. Update, Oct. 30, 2013: Due to an editing error, captions for the three paintings in this piece featured the dates commonly believed to be the original dates of Vermeer’s work. We have updated the captions to reflect Binstock’s theory of their order. Benjamin Binstock is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art and art historical method. He is completing a book on young Rembrandt. Girl with a Pearl Earring: the Book, Film, and Vermeer's Painting by Emily-Jane Hills Orford Leave a Comment A simple, luminous beauty: a young girl wearing a turban on her head with a single pearl earring hanging from her earlobe, slightly off-centre of the canvas.

Why did the Dutch painter, Jan (also known as Johannes) Vermeer (1632-1675), choose a single pearl earring over rubies and sapphires? Why does the simplicity of his subject and his composition in addition to the luminosity of his use of light and colour still fascinate the viewer? These elements were enough to fascinate American author, Tracie Chevalier (b. 1962), who wrote an historical novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring in 2001, on this very subject. Her novel became the basis for the movie with the same title in 2003. While female beauty remains a hallmark of art throughout the centuries, the relationship between women and jewelry raises new questions; yet, Vermeer’s masterpiece promises much more than just the pearl earring. Vermeer’s painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, from the Royal Picture Gallery at the Mauritshuis, served as the subject for a novel and a movie with the same name. A Simple Subject Vermeer’s paintings were always small. Girl with a Pearl Earring measures only 46.5 by 40 cm. He used simple, commonplace subject matter.

At first glance, Girl with a Pearl Earring is merely an ordinary young girl in a turban, wearing a single pearl earring and looking out of the canvas at the viewer. Vermeer captured common people, mostly women, going about their everyday chores in his paintings much like the camera would capture a subject a few centuries later. A woman holding a water jug, a woman sleeping, a milkmaid, a woman reading, as biography.com points out, two of his trademarks are “his realistic renderings of figures and objects and his fascination with light.” Domesticity and everyday life became, in Vermeer’s paintings, a reflective thing of simple beauty. His works were realistic and popular to the local population of his hometown of Delft, Netherlands. “Thus,” as Artble points out, “he can be described as a painter of the people for the people.” The simple composition and the commonplace scenes in Vermeer’s paintings, become something quite extraordinary. “Vermeer,” as Helen Gardner writes Art Through the Ages, “in his lighting and composing of the scene, raises it to the level of some holy, sacramental act.” There is a beauty in the humble piety of Vermeer’s characters, the scenes and the composition.

Mirrors and the Master of Light and Colour Vermeer was a constant student of light. He made use of mirrors and he used the camera obscura, an ancestor of the modern camera. This device had a tiny pinhole which acted as a lens and projected an image upon a screen or a wall. Others used the camera obscura to copy an image directly from its projection. But that wasn’t Vermeer’s intent. He was a perfectionist, using the camera obscura to help him create the perfect compositional stability and arrangement. Using the limited colours available in Delft at the time, Vermeer was able to create an image of calm and serenity. According to Garner, his colour was “so true to the optical facts and so subtly modulated that it suggests Vermeer was far ahead of his time in colour science.” Vermeer’s masterful use of colour indicated the artist’s understanding of light and shadow, both which are not, as many earlier artists believed, devoid of colour. According to Gardner, experts suggest that Vermeer “perceived the phenomenon called by photographers disks of confusion.

These appear in out-of-focus films, and Vermeer could have seen them in images projected by the primitive lenses of the camera obscura.” Vermeer’s technique was to use the camera obscura and mirrors to capture the minutest of details in his subject, to highlight aspects of surfaces and objects with stark lighting conditions creating spectacular effects. The entire process allowed Vermeer more flexibility in creating moods and atmosphere in his paintings, giving an almost three-dimensional realism as well as some deep psychological experience with the model in this single captured moment. Brushwork and Line Drawing Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring in a cool, silvery palette. The composition itself is laid out to make the best use of the light and dark areas to compliment the composition. The ground colour is thick, a yellowish-white layer with lead white; he created the dark background and the deep shadows of the figure, using a mixture of black and earth pigments as well as some paler ochers. Arthur Wheelock’s exhibition catalogue “Johannes Vermeer” goes on to point out that “The shadow of her nose was underpainted with red lake while the highlights on her nose, right cheek and forehead have a thick, cream colored underpaint.

The turban was painted with varying shades of an ultramarine and lead-white mixture; wet-in-wet, over which a blue glaze was applied, except in the highlights. A thin, off-white scumble of paint over the brown shadow of the girl’s neck defines the pearl, and is painted more opaquely at the bottom where the pearl reflects the white collar. Small hairs from Vermeer’s brush are found in the half-tones of the flesh areas.” The Painter’s Palette Paint colours were hard to attain in the seventeenth-century and what colours were available provided a very limited range. The artist purchased the paint in a raw powder form from an apothecary and the artist would grind up and mix the powder with water. The powder was very expensive, so the painter had to use the paint frugally. The expense, however, did not seem to stop the cash-strapped artist in Vermeer. He insisted on using great quantities of ultramarine, which was very expensive. Ultramarine was very rare, being made from pigments of the crushed lapis lazuli, a semi-precious gem stone.

Vermeer didn’t just use ultramarine here and there in the painting; he used it as an undercoat, a primer in effect, underneath the entire painting. So why would an artist whose main income was his paintings, one who painted very few works in his entire life, insist on using one of the most expensive materials in his work? According to Artble, Vermeer used ultramarine to, “enhance the painting’s visual quality and surface which, he believed, resulted in his techniques being enhanced.” Every painter needs his/her palette: the kaleidoscope of colour possibilities that make the painting come to life. Chevalier captured this very well in her book and the movie tried to mimic the opening scene. The scene captures the young girl who became the model in Vermeer’s painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665-7), in her mother’s kitchen cutting up vegetables. Not an unusual task in itself, but the girl arranges the vegetables on a platter with the distinct colour coordination that a painter would use to mix paint on his palette. Vermeer was very particular about his colours. He wanted top-quality paint and mixed it in a very particular manner.

Both the book and movie highlight this, asking the reader or viewer to consider why colour plays such an important role to this artist? Neither the book nor movie provide an evident answer to this important question. Instead, the artist’s finished paintings offer the answer even there are very few, only 35 according to the Rijks Museum. Vermeer was a very particular painter, seeking ultimate perfection. If the colours weren’t right, he believed that the painting, was incomplete, and even inadequate. The Simple Girl and Luminous Pearl In the painting, novel and film, Girl with a Pearl Earring is a study in light and colour; one artist’s vision of the simplicity of life as represented in one simple jewel: the pearl. © Copyright 2014 Emily-Jane Hills Orford, All rights Reserved. Written For: Decoded Arts Girl With a Pearl Earring - The Artist The Artist Search for: Themes Search for: Themes Home » Art Collection » Oil Painting » Girl With a Pearl Earring Girl With a Pearl Earring Girl With a Pearl Earring is a painting produced around 1665 by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.

One of the most beautiful and the most famous tronies of the Dutch Golden Age, originally titled Girl with a Turban, and was inspiration for the historical novel of Tracy Chevalier. Painting is not classic portrait, but the common type of head and shoulders of a girl dressed in oriental style. The girl with the turban is shown in half profile and she is looking directly at the viewer. The painting is extremely sensual. Girl’s mouth is slightly open as she is about to say something. Dark background emphasizes the figure of girl. Identity of a model remains unknown, although it is believed that the person was close to the artist. Earring is too large to be real pearl, so it is probably made of other material. The painting is often referred as Dutch Mona Lisa / Mona Lisa of The North because of beautiful girl’s mysterious look and identity. The work can be viewed at Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands. Who Was the Girl With the Pearl Earring? | The Huffington Post Who Was the Girl With the Pearl Earring?

10/31/2013 08:38 am ET 140 One historian suggests she was actually the artist who painted a fifth of the works attributed to Vermeer—his daughter. By Benjamin Binstock Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring has arrived at the Frick Collection in New York , drawing unprecedented crowds. We might therefore ask: Who was she? Several authors, ranging from Marcel Proust’s friend the journalist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer to New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler , have suggested she might be the artist’s eldest daughter, Maria. Many Vermeer scholars dismiss that notion as a Romantic anachronism , a projection onto an earlier period of a modern view of art as a reflection of the artist’s circumstances. In the wake of this denial, Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl With a Pearl Earring provided an alternative, fictional answer: She was the family maid’s assistant, Griet (played by Scarlett Johansson in the film), who became Vermeer’s love interest. But the evidence suggests Vermeer’s daughter Maria was his likely model and a crucial part of his art.

More provocatively, I believe that Maria Vermeer was also a gifted artist who painted roughly one-fifth of the works currently assigned to her father. Vermeer was the greatest of the Dutch genre painters, who took their subject matter from everyday life. Rembrandt had already used himself and other family members as models for historical roles, and such models were even more appropriate for genre scenes. Another factor was the rise of optical naturalism, including the aid of the camera obscura, a forerunner of the modern photographic camera pioneered by Carel Fabritius (also represented at the Frick), Rembrandt’s most gifted student and Vermeer’s primary influence. But Vermeer did not simply “record” the world around him; rather, he carefully crafted poetic constructions based on what he observed. The more closely he relied on the life around him, the more compelling was his art. The Allegory of Painting, or The Art of Painting, oil on canvas, 1666. Allegory of Painting, or Art of Painting, oil on canvas, c. 1667, 120 cm by 100 cm Painting by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Vermeer himself tells us this in his Art of Painting , his visual testament to his ambitions. The composition shows a painter seated at his easel from behind, dressed in an old-fashioned Netherlandish costume, painting a young girl adorned with laurel and holding a trumpet and book. The painter is often identified as Vermeer based on his comparable hair and costume in his Procuress of 1656. Since 1949, the girl has been called Clio, the muse of history writing, following the conventional notion that history was the highest category of art. But the mature Vermeer did not paint history. Scholars have also mistranslated documents in which Vermeer’s widow and mother-in-law described a painting “in which ‘Painting’ is being depicted [uytgebeeld, which also means performed as a role, or personified as a character on stage].” The girl personifies Painting [Pictura], holding attributes associated with Painting, while others are arrayed on the table before her. These include a blue and yellow “garment of changing color,” likely the same textile artfully wrapped around her head as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, who therefore might also personify Painting.

In neither case does she take her job very seriously. In place of “high” historical or allegorical content, Vermeer characterizes Painting through his playful relation to his model as a particular individual that he knows intimately. As a painter of modern life, Vermeer’s greatness lies in the domestic, familial character of his art. It is the more conservative scholars who apply an anachronistic, premodern paradigm of art as illustrating an institutional (historical) message. Vermeer was instead a pioneer of the modern paradigm of art as expressing the artist’s unique circumstances, experiences, and sensibilities, a paradigm first articulated in texts from the Romantic period. The same period witnessed the founding of the modern discipline of art history, which began to gather individual artists’ oeuvres, relevant facts about their lives, and diverse interpretations of their works, and first “discovered” Vermeer as an unrecognized genius. We continue to pursue these goals today. Surprisingly, given the number of monographs devoted to Vermeer’s relatively few paintings, no scholar put forward an account of his gradual painting-by-painting development before my 2009 book .

Several authors identified the figures who appear repeatedly in his compositions as Vermeer, his wife, his gradually ageing eldest daughters Maria and Elisabeth (Lijsbeth), and even the family maid in Vermeer’s Milkmaid (the suggestion of the historian J.M. Montias and likely inspiration for Chevalier). But no one sought to address Vermeer’s use of family models in a systematic way, and some rejected the possibility altogether. In his Art of Painting, Young Woman With a Pearl Necklace , and Girl With a Pearl Earring, scholars recognized the same beautiful young model who resembles Vermeer’s wife in earlier compositions. Maria was born around 1654 and would have been 13, 15, and 16 if the paintings in question are dated 1667, 1669, and 1670, respectively. The plainer model in Vermeer’s Girl Writing, Girl With a Guitar, and Lacemaker, who resembles Vermeer in his dated self-portraits, would have been his second daughter, Lijsbeth.

Another crucial dimension involves roughly a fifth of the paintings currently assigned to Vermeer—five in New York City alone—that were based on the same models, objects, and interiors and adapt or combine elements of Vermeer’s compositions but do not correspond to his level of technical mastery, characteristic approaches, or logical development. The failure to identify these “misfit” paintings, which possess their own divergent appeal, has precluded the recognition of Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development and vice versa. Dates now assigned to Vermeer's paintings are also often too early, because they are not based on a painting-by-painting account of his development, include the misfit paintings, and do not take into consideration his models and their approximate ages. Earlier authors had questioned each of these misfits as possibly painted by a pupil or one of his children but did not pursue that possibility or the paintings as a group. Vermeer did not register any pupils, but his follower could have been one of his children, whom he did not need to register, most plausibly Maria.

Two misfits, Mistress and Maid in the Frick Collection and Woman With a Lute , were also traded against a huge debt to a baker after the deaths of Vermeer and his patron, who bought Vermeer’s Lacemaker, his last painting. That is, the paintings were sold and possibly produced as forgeries to alleviate the family’s financial straits. Maria’s apprenticeship must therefore have been a family secret. Perhaps partly because of these circumstances, she does not appear to have pursued painting after her marriage and her father’s death. Most intriguingly, two of the misfit paintings, Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat , have been associated with or even identified as self-portraits, and together with a third, Girl Interrupted, also in the Frick, appear to portray the same model as Girl With a Pearl Earring. Since the Frick paintings cannot travel, the present exhibition offers the only possibility of comparing the originals in proximity. Did Maria portray herself in these works? If so, despite her technical challenges, she surpassed her father in psychological intimacy.

Girl With a Red Hat, which would portray her at about 18 around 1672, also offers an astounding virtuoso display, including what may be the most fascinating (albeit implausible) headgear in the history of art. Her precocious masterpiece, if that is what it is, further mirrors and thereby transforms our experience of her father’s earlier Girl With a Pearl Earring as not just a pretty face or even an image of Vermeer’s daughter, but a portrait—another portrait—of the artist as a young woman. These ideas, the subject of an all-day symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University last spring, are admittedly speculations. Yet no one has previously sought to identify the models in these paintings in a systematic way, account for the misfit paintings, or explain Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development. These factors are inextricably linked in the ongoing process of understanding Vermeer’s work, including Girl With a Pearl Earring and might ultimately lead to the discovery of another unrecognized genius. Update, Oct.

30, 2013: Due to an editing error, captions for the three paintings in this piece featured the dates commonly believed to be the original dates of Vermeer’s work. We have updated the captions to reflect Binstock’s theory of their order. Benjamin Binstock is a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art and art historical method. He is completing a book on young Rembrandt. See the original article on Slate . Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer Facts & History 17.5 in × 15 in 44.5 cm × 39 cm The Girl with a Pearl Earring by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is one his major masterpieces. The focal point of the painting is the reflective pearl earring. The painting was first called Girl with a Turban but was renamed in the second part of the twentieth century. Some believe the real focal point of the painting is the way the girls’ eyes interact with the person viewing the painting. Vermeer had never have identified any sitter posing for any of his portraits and that includes the young woman who posed for the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting.

Some art critics have stated that the girl may have been one of Vermeer’s daughters named Maria. Maria would be approximately 12 or 13 years old at the time Vermeer created his masterpiece, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Several of Vermeer’s paintings have similar facial features to the Girl with a Pearl Earring, but due to the different poses and lighting in the various paintings comparisons are difficult to establish. Girl with a Pearl Earring is located in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. Some have called this painting the Mona Lisa of the North and some have called it the Dutch Mona Lisa. The signature on the painting is signed “IVMeer” and it is does not have a date on it. This painting is the best-loved painting by Vermeer possibly because of the way the girl is looking over her shoulder, which draws the attention from the viewer, giving a feeling her head turns to see the viewer. The women in Vermeer’s paintings were usually depicted in a deep thought-provoking poses that speaks to the uniformity in his subjects. The light effects and the highlights on the turban on the girls’ head are a trademark that belongs to Vermeer.

The pearl is made up of no more than two brushstrokes, with the girl gazing with uninhibited, wide eyes, making her appear lost in thought. Girl with a Pearl Earring was painted as oil on canvas that measured 17.5 inches by 15 inches. The dark background of the painting helped to create a three-dimensional feeling to the subject of the painting. This was a Dutch custom used by Vermeer in his some of his paintings. The use of green ochre tone was used by Vermeer as an undercoating in the painting that made colors of the figure more vibrant. His skill with under painting created this three-dimensional look and the girl’s skin contrasts with the background, creating a glowing effect. Vermeer’s use of light was dramatized by the white-based undercoat that intensified the reflective surfaces of the pearl earring as well as the eyes and lips of the girl in the painting. The girl’s dress is enhanced by the use of the undercoating that gives a realistic impression of the actual material in the painting. A thin final layer on the painting adds movement to the work as light moves across the painting.

6 responses to “Girl with a Pearl Earring” Alina Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, Posters and Prints at Art.com > shop > Collections > Fine Art Collections > Masterpiece > Vermeer Masterpieces > Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer (28 Items) SWITCH TO VISUAL MODE What's this?You are browsing art in Classic Mode. To try our new experience where you can expore categories visually and discover art using advanced color searching, switch to Visual Mode. Girl with a Pearl Ear...

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DConfigID:0,APNum:10212160,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:11,Source:'GalleryPage'} Girl with a Pearl Earring {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:29018,Title:'Girl with a Pearl Earring',PODConfigID:0,APNum:8092193,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:22,Source:'GalleryPage'} Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Art Print Poster Mounted Print {ImageUrl:' Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Art Print Poster',PODConfigID:0,APNum:9589552,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:22,Source:'GalleryPage'} Girl with Pearl Earring {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:29018,Title:'Girl with Pearl Earring',PODConfigID:0,APNum:14600320,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:22,Source:'GalleryPage'} Girl with a Pearl Earring Frame It {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:290

18,Title:'Girl with a Pearl Earring',PODConfigID:0,APNum:10220237,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:11,Source:'GalleryPage'} A Young Lady Seated at a Virginal circa 1670 & Girl with a Pearl Earring circa 1665-6 Set Starting from $79.99 From $79.99 Add to Cart Frame It {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:29018,Title:'A Young Lady Seated at a Virginal circa 1670 &amp;amp;amp; Girl with a Pearl Earring circa 1665-6 Set',PODConfigID:0,APNum:12674487,AvailableInOtherSizes:'true',ItemDisplayTypeID:225,Source:'GalleryPage'} Girl with a Pearl Earring (detail) {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:29018,Title:'Girl with a Pearl Earring (detail)',PODConfigID:0,APNum:10188993,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',

ItemDisplayTypeID:11,Source:'GalleryPage'} Girl with a Pearl Earring Frame It {ImageUrl:' Vermeer',ArtistId:29018,Title:'Girl with a Pearl Earring',PODConfigID:0,APNum:10645107,AvailableInOtherSizes:'false',ItemDisplayTypeID:11,Source:'GalleryPage'} Ship TimeShip time indicates the typical number of business days it takes for your item(s) to leave our facilities but does not include transit time from our facilities to the final destination.Orders that contain multiple items with different ship times will be shipped out based on the item with the longest ship time.Please note: Ship time is determined based on the method of payment chosen.This item cannot be framed Add to Cart 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' art review - SFGate 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' art review ART REVIEW Masterly precision captures time itself to engage viewers By Kenneth Baker , San Francisco Chronicle Updated 11:23 pm, Wednesday, January 23, 2013 Photo: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshui Image 1of/6 "Girl With a Pearl Earring" (c.

1665) by Johannes Vermeer "Girl With a Pearl Earring" (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer Photo: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshui Image 2 of 6 "Still Life With a Roemer and Watch" (1629) by Willem Heda "Still Life With a Roemer and Watch" (1629) by Willem Heda Photo: Unknown Image 3 of 6 "A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard" (c. 1658-1660), oil on canvas by Pieter de Hooch. "A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard" (c. 1658-1660), oil on canvas by Pieter de Hooch. Photo: Unknown View of Haarlem With Bleaching Grounds" (c. 1670-1675) by Jacob van Ruisdael View of Haarlem With Bleaching Grounds" (c.

1670-1675) by Jacob van Ruisdael Photo: Unknown Image 5 of 6 "Still Life with Five Apricots" (1704) Oil on canvas by Adriaen Coorte 11.75" x 9.25" Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague, Anonymous gift, 2006 "Still Life with Five Apricots" (1704) Oil on canvas by Adriaen Coorte 11.75" x 9.25" Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague, Anonymous gift, 2006 Photo: Unknown Image 6 of 6 "Portrait of an Elderly Man" (1667) by Rembrandt van Rijn can be seen as a kind of self-portrait. "Portrait of an Elderly Man" (1667) by Rembrandt van Rijn can be seen as a kind of self-portrait.

Photo: Unknown 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' art review 1 / 6 Back to Gallery The heavily anticipated "Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis," which opens Saturday at the de Young Museum , does not disappoint. It will remind visitors how great artworks can unstring our sense of time. For instance, Johannes Vermeer 's mid-17th century "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - the signature work of the show and of its lender, the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague - inspired a best-selling novel and a Hollywood movie in recent years. Yet despite the painting's age, despite the heavy case work that secures it at the de Young, we and "The Girl" seem to inhabit a common time in a way that its mere physical survival cannot explain. In some respect, we and Vermeer (1632-1675) apparently share a vision - of humankind, of painting's fulfillment as an art, of their peculiar co-evolution.

Many items in the de Young exhibition - still lifes by Willem Heda , Adriaen Coorte and Rachel Ruysch, a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael , a genre picture by Gerard Ter Borch - hint at the thought of realist painting as the precursor, even the progenitor, of photography, one of the defining technologies of our age. The inner light and descriptive precision of various paintings also seem to forecast the 19th century "luminist" landscapes and trompe l'oeil paintings that many commentators justly view as anchoring a distinctly American vision. Golden Age The Netherlands in Europe's 17th century so-called Golden Age had a secular government, shadowed by religious tensions, a growing mercantile middle class and an art market that foreshadowed those we like to think of as peculiarly modern. The Dutch patrons who commissioned and collected the paintings in the exhibition prized their artifice over their factuality. Art's power to reorder time and transcend it, in contrast to life's inevitable transience, is a theme that resurfaces throughout the show.

We see it most movingly perhaps in Rembrandt's late "Portrait of an Elderly Man" (1667), which some may see as an oblique self-portrait. The exhibition design contrives its own echoes of the transience of life by placing "Elderly Man" nearby a youthful "Portrait of Rembrandt With a Gorget" (1629 or later), once regarded as an autograph work, now judged a gifted, but unidentified, pupil's copy. In the second room of the exhibition, its walls a Mars violet like those of the first, two still lifes by Pieter Claesz, made three years apart, are hung juxtaposed and set up a kind of before-and-after interchange. The dark 1627 picture shows a candle burning down in a shiny brass candle holder, its flame reflected in a half-full glass goblet. Books sit in the background and at the front edge of the table, an open almanac with spectacles resting on it.

The almost palpable warmth of the candle, the rhyming of its light with the books' and almanac's promise of guidance, and the pince-nez's promise of sight leading to insight all make a viewer feel included. The intimations of mortality and futile striving in this picture turn positively trouncing in the 1630 one. Here a human skull and femur surmount books whose pages look tattered with age and use. The smoke of an expired candle curls above a tipped-over glass, while a watch and its key give time tangible presence. The viewer's vantage point almost feels posthumous. Giving life Both paintings offered Claesz numerous opportunities to show his skills at giving life to an image, and the experience of seeing it. But the aspect of time reordered by art emerges also in an ostensibly realistic picture such as Rachel Ruysch's "Vase of Flowers" (1700), in which flowers of different seasons appear to have blossomed in concert, making the great bouquet an arrangement in time and imagination.

Because 17th century collectors of these pictures understood their rhetoric without explanation, as well as the iconography of a "history painting" such as Rembrandt's "Susanna" (1636), artists of the time felt no need to title their works. The titles attached to them come mainly from descriptions in records of property or sales. So "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - the painting - might have had in Vermeer's mind none of the sort of romance that we attach to it. Perhaps the unidentifiability of the young woman who sat for it is its most truthful aspect. In any case, her presence - like the exhibition as a whole - remains electric. Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis: Opens Saturday. Through June 2. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600. . GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING by Johannes Vermeer Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Vermeer: The Complete Works, New York, 1997) c.

1665-1667 Walter Liedtke Vermeer: The Complete Paintings, New York, 2008) The fine, plain-weave linen support, which has been lined, has a threadcount of 14.7 x 14.3 per cm 2. Only fragments of the original tacking edges survive. The composition was laid in with light and dark areas. The ground is a thick, yellowish-white layer containing lead white; chalk, and possibly umber. The dark background and the deeper shadows of the girl's face, turban, and bodice were established with a mixture of black and earth pigments and further modeled with a paler, ocher color. The shadow of her nose was underpainted with red lake while the highlights on her nose, right cheek and forehead have a thick, cream colored underpaint. The turban was painted with varying shades of an ultramarine and lead-white mixture; wet-in-wet, over which a blue glaze was applied, except in the highlights.

A thin, off-white scumble of paint over the brown shadow of the girl's neck defines the pearl, and is painted more opaquely at the bottom where the pearl reflects the white collar. Small hairs from Vermeer's brush are found in the half-tones of the flesh areas. * Johannes Vermeer (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art and Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis - Washington and The Hague, 1995, edited by Arthur Wheelock) literature 25,5 x 19 cm. National Gallery, London The appearance of the young girl's turban within the context of Vermeer's seemingly quintessential Dutch oeuvre should not come as a complete surprise. Other objects of "Turkish" origin may be associated with the painter. Some of the carpets which appear as table coverings—contemporary painters rarely represented these precious imports lying on the ground—are of Turkish origin. They must have been appreciated for their evocative floral motifs and the large mass of warm red color which enlivened the otherwise geometrical and cold interiors. However, we must not believe that anything called "Turkish" in contemporary accounts really came from that country.

The term was loosely used to describe exotic imported objects which were much in vogue. In the inventory (29 February, 1676) taken shortly after the artist's death we find listed among other things: "a Turkish mantle of the aforesaid Sr. Vermeer," "a pair of Turkish trousers" and "a black Turkish mantle" all in the "great hallway" of his house. Some scholars have suggested that the two tronies in "Turkish dress" found in the kitchen could possibly have been by Vermeer's hand. Vermeer's women are often associated with the pearls eleven of them wear, so much that his oeuvre has become synonymous with the pearl. In 1908, Jan Veth articulated a widespread sentiment while observing the Girl with a Pearl Earring: "More than with any other VERMEER one could say that it looks as if it were blended from the dust of crushed pearls." In the 17th century, pearls were an important status symbol. A careful consideration of the Girl with a Pearl Earring gives rise to the question of how far the painting is to be taken as a portrait. P. T. A.

Swillens, who compiled the first exhaustive study of the artist's life and work in 1950, believed that one of the most important characteristics of a 17th-century portrait was its likeness. And although we can no longer judge of this anymore, the face would not be called a beauty in an aesthetic sense. Swillens writes that Vermeer made no attempt to idealize her. Contemporary scholars are not in agreement on the subject. According to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. the painting is an "idealized study" which reveals Vermeer's "classical tendencies." Not a single sitter in Vermeer's extant paintings has ever been identified, including the young girl in the Girl with a Pearl Earring. Various critics believe that she may have been Vermeer's first daughter, Maria, who would have been about 12 or 13 years old in 1665-1667, the dates that specialists have assigned to the painting. However, this painting was certainly not a portrait in the 17th-century sense of the term, but rather a tronie. In any case, she resembles the model in Vermeer's Art of Painting (see above).

The Girl with a Pearl Earring reemerged in the Netherlands 300 years after it left the artist's studio. Shortly after it was sold for next to nothing. The history of the acquisition of the Vermeer has by now become legendary. In 1881 Arnoldus Andries des Tombe purchased Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring at a sale at the Venduhuis der Notarissen in the Nobelstraat in The Hague for 2 guilders with a 30 cent premium. Unfortunately, the invoice, which was given to the Mauritshuis in 1944, has disappeared without a trace. Thanks to a notice in the former daily newspaper Het Vaderland of 3 March 1903, in which the bequest was made public (pasted in the Mauritshuis' cuttings album), we know that Victor de Stuers had recognized the painting as a work by Vermeer. De Stuers was Des Tombe's neighbor—his collection in his residence at 24 Parkstraat was also open to all interested parties—and the two gentlemen had gone together to the auction preview. Des Tombe and De Stuers agreed not to bid against each other.

After its acquisition, the badly neglected canvas was sent to Antwerp, where it was "restored" by the painter Van der Haeghen. In the Des Tombe family, however, the story was that Des Tombe and his friend De Stuers had seen a painting that "seemed rather beautiful but was too dirty to evaluate properly." In this version, it was only after the picture had been cleaned that the signature became visible, making clear the identity of the painter. After Des Tombe's death on 16 December 1902 (his wife had died the year before and their marriage had remained childless) it turned out that he had secretly bequeathed 12 paintings to the Mauritshuis, including Vermeer's famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. (from Quentin Buvelot, "COLLECTING HISTORY: ON DES TOMBE, DONOR OF VERMEER'S GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING" in the Mauritshuis Bulletin, volume 17, no. 1, March 2004) The signature of the Girl with a Pearl Earring is located on the upper left corner.

It was painted with a lighter toned pigment over the dark background but it is so faint that many spectators do not notice it and it is usually not visible in reproductions. Vermeer used light toned signatures in other paintings as well. The style too, is comparable to other signatures by the artist. Although the pigments of the signature cannot be analyzed due to the abraded paint layer, the Mauritshuis, where the painting is permanently housed, has always maintained that it is authentic. Beatrice Cenci 129 x 93 cm. Grand Ducal Collection, Vaduz, Liechtenstein As art historian Robert Baldwin pointed out that there existed a "tradition of comparing beautiful women to jewels. In court culture, the beautiful woman took on a jewel-like preciousness and radiance which worked, ultimately, to represent an inner beauty beyond material splendor. (This is how jewels had long worked in Christian representations of the sacred, their richness and luminosity pointing to a celestial beauty.).

In European court poetry, the lady was either described as jewel-like or said to surpass the beauty of all jewels." However, "Vermeer also went beyond a suspect material beauty by avoiding the extensive use of jewels seen in courtly portraits and representations of artists like Van Dyck and Mignard and by restricting himself to the simpler pearl, avoiding rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. More importantly, Vermeer painted everything with a cool, silvery palette and layered, translucent oil glazes, dissolving all material reality with a pearl-like luminosity. Visualised this way, Vermeer's beautiful women, ornamented with pearls, took on the familiar, pearl-like beauty of contemporary love lyrics where outer loveliness dissolved into an inner radiance." Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Cunera van der Cock Frans van Mieris the Elder c. 1657-8 16 x 13.3 cm. National Gallery, London Although this portrait by fijnschilder (fine painter) Frans van Mieris has been linked with the Girl with a Pearl Earring, few works document so well how fundamentally diverse were the artistic means and goals so divergent from those of his contemporaries.

It is true that Vermeer did share with the fijnschilders a common reservoir of motifs but it would be hard to enlist him as a true believer in their exasperated search of detail. Nor had the fijnschilders ever displayed the detached interest in the activities of light or the intricacies of pictorial design which are hallmarks of Vermeer's art. As detailed as Vermeer's works may appear to the relaxed eye of the 21st-century viewer, the broadness of his painting technique contrasts with the microscopic rendering of detail which was the principal calling card of this school. His modeling is so generalized that the fabric of the girl's yellow garment has never been satisfactorily identified. Instead, the individual hairs of the fur trim in Van Mieris' picture (see detail below) have been rendered one by one to assure recognition. While such rendering induces the viewer to draw as close as possible to admire the work detail by detail, the Vermeer's more essential approach suggests the viewer to step back and relate to the image as a whole. Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Cunera van der Cock (detail) 16 x 13.3 cm.

National Gallery, London The fijnschilder mode had reached such extremes because pupils were forever trying to outdo their masters in producing the most convincing illusion of surface textures. Curiously, the fijnschilder school evolved in the very years when the Dutch art market had begun to contract due to a downturn in the nation's economic conditions and subsequnetially exasperated by the war with France. The once bustling art market was not only flooded with low-priced paintings by living artists but with works of previous generations which slowly worked their way back into the market as their original purchasers passed away. Instead of devising new tactics to abbreviate production time and beat competition, the fijnschilder took the opposite approach and invested unprecedented time and energy on each work, which, moreover, were usually very small. In fact, they targeted the tastes and pockets of the uppermost burgers whose wealth had not been adversely effected by the economic crisis but, on the contrary, had prospered as never before. Thus, it may not be unreasonable that the essential "simplicity" and sobriety of Vermeer's technique might not have been fully appreciated admist the dominant fijnschilder tastes of the day.

While it is true that Vermeer's art was recognized among elite connoisseurs, he had gained neither the international reputation nor the prices of his competitors. Given its present iconic status, it may come as a surprise that the Girl with a Pearl Earring was uncovered only in 1881 after 200 years of neglect. While it is true that Vermeer's name had been largely forgotten by mainstream art history, some of his flagship works had held their own in important European art collections even if a few had been attributed to other painters to augment their value. In the 17th century, a work of art work was seen through different eyes than today. First of all, the Girl with a Pearl Earring was not seen as a portrait but a tronie, a sort of characteristic bust-length figure whose power to capture the purchaser's eye, rather than the sitter's personal identity, was the artist's main concern. Tronies were made for the open market and sold in great numbers at low prices. As odd as it may seem, a painting's worth was often determined not only by its beauty or by its author's reputation.

The hierarchical importance of subject matter was held in great consideration and a tronie such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring was definitely on the lower rungs of the ladder, not too distant from landscape and the lowest of all categories, still life. This mind set may be reflected in the relatively low price the Girl with a Pearl Earring may have fetched in the 1696 Amsterdam auction of 21 Vermeer paintings. Some scholars conjecture that it corresponds to "a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful" sold at 46 guilders, a trifle if compared to the equally-sized Milkmaid or the Woman Holding a Balance which earned 175 and 155 guilders respectively. However, is not out of the question that it was another tronie sold in the same auction for only 17 guilders. Johan Larson, a Hague/London sculptor was known to have had another Vermeer tronie valued at only 10 guilders. In deference to the category, a Rembrandt tronie was sold for a mere 7 guilders in the same sale as the two Vermeer's.

The Young Mother Johannes Vermeer Paintings Art - Girl with a Pearl Earring b. October 1632, d. December 1675 Dutch genre painter Full name is Johannes Vermeer van Delft, is known as Vermeer, Johannes Vermeer, Vermeer Johannes, Jan Vermeer, Vermeer Jan, Johannes Jan Vermeer. Lived and worked in Delft, created some of the most exquisite paintings in Western art such as Kitchen Maid, Girl with a Pearl Earring. Vermeer paintings are rare. Of the 35 or 36 paintings generally attributed to him, most portray figures in interiors. All Vermeer the art of painting is admired for the sensitivity with which he rendered effects of light and color and for the poetic quality of his images. Little is known for certain about Vermeer biography and career. The painter was born in 1632, the son of a silk worker with a taste for buying and selling art. Vermeer artist himself was also active in the art trade. He lived and worked in Delft all his life. Not much is known about his apprenticeship as an artist either.

His teacher may have been Leonaert Bramer, a Delft artist who was a witness at his marriage in 1653, or the painter Carel Fabritius of Delft. In 1653 he enrolled at the local artists guild. The earliest signed and dated Vermeer painting, The Procuress (1656; Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), is thematically related to a Dirck van Baburen painting that he owned and that appears in the background of two of Vermeer paintings. Another possible influence was that of Hendrick Terbrugghen, whose style anticipated the light color tonalities of later Vermeer art of painting. - free biography are here, as well as Johannes Vermeer The Milkmaid , Girl With a Pearl Earring . During the late 1650s, artist Vermeer along with his colleague Pieter de Hooch , began to place a new emphasis on depicting figures within carefully composed interior spaces. Other Dutch painters, including Gerard Ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu, painted similar scenes, but they were less concerned with the articulation of the space than with the description of the figures and their actions.

In early Johannes Vermeer paintings such as The Milkmaid (c.1658; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the artist struck a delicate balance between the compositional and figural elements, and he achieved highly sensuous surface effects by applying paint thickly and modeling his forms with firm strokes. Later Johannes Vermeer turned to thinner combinations of glazes to obtain the subtler and more transparent surfaces displayed in art of painting Vermeer such as Woman with a Water Jug (c.1664/5; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). A keen sensitivity to the effects of light and color and an interest in defining precise spatial relationships probably encouraged Vermeer Johannes to experiment with the camera obscura, an optical device that could project the image of sunlit objects placed before it with extraordinary realism. Biography: Although the painter may have sought to depict the camera's effects in his View of Delft (c.1660; Mauritshuis, The Hague), it is unlikely that Vermeer Jan would have traced such an image, as some commentators have charged.

Moralizing references occur in several of paintings by Johannes Vermeer, although they tend to be obscured by the paintings' vibrant realism and their general lack of narrative elements. In his Love Letter (c.1670; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), a late painting in which the spatial environment becomes more complex and the figures appear more doll-like than in earlier Johannes Vermeer painting, the artist includes on the back wall a work of a boat at sea. Because this art was based on a contemporary emblem warning of the perils of love, it was clearly intended to add significance to the figures in the room. After his death Vermeer painter was overlooked by all but the most discriminating collectors and art historians for more than 200 years. Few paintings Vermeer were attributed to other artists. Only after 1866, when the French critic W. Thore-Burger "rediscovered" him, did paintings by Vermeer become widely known and his works heralded as genuine Vermeers. - Toperfect Art supplies Dutch paintings and Vermeer biography, supplies handmade art copies of The Kitchen Maid , Girl With a Pearl Earring in art museum quality.

Barely 35 paintings of Vermeer are known to have been painted by him. Early Vermeer art - mainly history pieces - reveal the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggists. In later Johannes Vermeer paintings, however, Jan van Delft produced meticulously constructed interiors with just one or two figures - usually women. These are intimate genre paintings in which the principal figure is invariably engaged in some everyday activity: one is reading a letter, another is fastening a collar about her neck, yet another is pouring out milk. Often the light enters Vermeer paintings from a window. Jan Vermeer was a master at depicting the way light illuminates objects and in the rendering of materials. The Rijksmuseum has three domestic portraits by the painter and one street scene: the world-famous Little Street. List of Famous Vermeer paintings Toperfect supply oil painting masterpiece reproductions of the old master, you are welcome to send us your own picture to copy. Specially for individual customers and collectors, you're suggested to own a Museum Collection by famous artists for such oil painting classic. No Copyright Infringement of Toperfect's script!

Question: The painting "the Girl with the Pearl Earring" is by which artist?
Answer: VERMEER