Girl With a Pearl Earring.
Johannes Vermeer
£25.00
About
Girl with a Pearl Earring, (c. 1665) by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, one of his
most well-known works. It depicts an imaginary young woman in exotic dress and a very large pearl
earring. The work permanently resides in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.
Historians
believe Vermeer painted the small piece (17.52 × 15.35 inches [44.5 × 39 cm]) around 1665, during
the period in which he executed a group of paintings with a shared pearl motif
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).
