The Girl with a Pearl Earring the mysterious masterpiece by Vermeer

Hi, welcome to Stories of Art. My name is Karel Huidekoper. Today let's have a look at this wonderful painting known as The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's actually one of my favorite paintings, which has a lot to do with the fact that it's in the Mauritshuis, which is a museum in The Hague, which is in the Netherlands, and that's the city where I grew up. And in this museum, which is kind of close to where I lived, it's where I fell in love with art. But whenever I would wander through that museum, I would always come back to say hi to this wonderful and enigmatic girl. And I think that that's one of the things that makes this painting so alluring, because it's really as if she responds to you, literally saying hi. She's standing there in her picture frame, and it's as if she's heard us come into the room, and that makes her turn around. She opens her mouth, maybe to say something, and she looks directly at us. And, of course, I'm not the first one to be charmed by her. The painting was discovered back in 1881, when it was sold at auction in The Hague, and two friends and connoisseurs of 17th century art were present at that auction, and they recognized that it was a very special painting. One of these men was called Victor de Steurs, who was a lawyer and politician and art historian, and he was very active in trying to build great collections of public art. He was there with his friend Arnold de Tombe, who was an ardent collector of art. Now, as I said, they both recognized it to be a very special painting, even though it was in terrible condition, and they decided to not bid against each other. But the story goes that Steurs made a deal with de Tombe. They decided that de Tombe could buy the painting, but only if he displayed it in the public area of his house. You see, part of his house he had opened up to the public so they could see his art collection. But they also apparently agreed that de Tombe would donate the painting to the Mauritshuis after he died. And he actually did that. In his will, he left 12 paintings to the museum, and this was one of them. By the way, their trick worked. There was no one else that bid against him at the auction, and that's why he bought it for two guilders plus a 30 cent markup for the auction house. Now, I'm sure you don't know what two guilders and 30 cents really means, but as far as I can tell, it would be around about 30 euros in today's money. Now, he died in 1902, so he owned the painting for 21 years. First he had it cleaned and restored, but I think he still kept it in his collection as an anonymous painting. And only a few years later someone started to claim that it was a Vermeer. This man was called Bredius, and he happened to be the director of the Mauritshuis. And he got to borrow it for several exhibitions, even before the museum inherited the painting. But when they finally gained possession of it and restored it more thoroughly, Bredius' opinion was vindicated when, in the upper left corner, they found the signature. It had been obscured from view because the background had darkened so much. And it really has. It's not just that there was a varnish that discolored or anything. In this case, the paint itself deteriorated. Which is strange, and very much uncharacteristic for the Vermeer. Because usually he used the finest paints. And in most of this painting, he did that as well. But when I say he used the finest paints, I mean that he made them. You had to make your own paints at the time. It just wasn't for sale in tubes or anything. But he would always use the finest materials to make his paints. And that meant that he tried to avoid using plant-based organic pigments. Because organic stuff, it breaks down over time. And people knew that. Which is why those pigments were often much cheaper. And in this case, he used two plant-based organic pigments for the background. Mixed up with some other stuff. But one of them is called Weld, which is a plant that provides a yellowish, slightly greenish pigment. And he used Indigo, which is blue. And both are usually used as dyes for clothing, for fabrics, that sort of thing. I mean, Indigo is still the stuff they use to dye jeans with today. And he used these two pigments in the background. And from that, we can deduce that originally the background was green. And much closer examination shows us that she stood in front of a green curtain. Much like this curtain that partially covers the girl reading a letter in front of an open window. But luckily for this painting, he did use the right pigments so it stayed green. But over the centuries, the curtain in the background of the girl with a pearl earring lost color and became so dark it's almost black. Now these are fairly recent discoveries. The fact that the paints in the background discolored so much is something that was only found out back in 1994, when a few paint samples were taken. And the curtain wasn't discovered until 2018. And it came as quite a bit of a surprise. The painting must have really looked very, very different when Vermeer still had it. And there was another discovery, which was made a bit longer ago in the 1920s, which was the discovery of the inventory made of Vermeer's estate a few months after he died. And in it, a number of paintings are listed, of which only a couple are by Vermeer himself. He had a large stock of paintings of other people because he was an art dealer most of the time, and probably only a part-time painter. But in that inventory, it lists Twee tronijnen geschilderd op zijn Turks, meaning two tronies painted in Turkish style. And the Turkish style in this probably refers to the turban she's wearing. This was not a fashion at the time. It was what was often referred to as an oriental look or a Turkish style. Which this clearly is. But the word tronie refers to a painting of a face that's not quite a portrait. Sometimes it's an idealized person, but more often it was a type or a character. And painters probably started making them as studies or exercises in painting. But often they proved popular with the public so they could sell them. This for instance is a typical tronie. It was made by Frans Hals and today it's also in the Mauritshuis. It's just a small picture of a boy laughing. It's not a particularly pretty boy, and we can assume it's not a portrait because it's not exactly a flattering look. And it was actually quite rare to find paintings of people laughing because it's a difficult expression to get right. And it's even more rare to see someone showing their teeth. Because you can see even in this one of a young boy that dental hygiene wasn't anywhere near the level that we are used to today. And of course sugar had become part of people's daily diet, so tooth decay was rampant even from a young age. Which makes it even more striking that we can see the open mouth of the girl in the pearl earring. Because there's no sign of decay at all. She's just a completely fresh-faced girl, which means she's probably idealized. And these tronies had become a pretty popular genre in painting. Rembrandt for instance made lots of them. Many of his self-portraits can be seen as studies and are perhaps meant in the same way. But these faces, this one of a laughing man, are not portraits of anyone as far as we know. Or this man in an oriental costume, which is clearly a tronie. Now of course not all of these tronies were of people in oriental costume, just some of them. And for years it was thought that girl with a pearl earring was a portrait, perhaps of a daughter, of whom Vermeer had quite a few. Or that it was a portrait that had a pendant, a second portrait that would face the other way. But that would be kind of odd, because it would be the only portrait we know of by Vermeer. And of course when that inventory was found, it mentions two tronies in Turkish style. It fit perfectly with this one. Of course that also means that there was another one, one that hasn't been found yet. So perhaps it's still somewhere out there. And this goes for several paintings by Vermeer that we have found mentions of in inventories, but we haven't found the matching painting. And obviously they could well have been lost, destroyed in a fire or whatever. But of course they still could turn up. Now in the 1920s and 30s popularity of Vermeer had skyrocketed. And let's face it, it hasn't really stopped yet. I mean, remember I told you that the man who bought the Girl with a Pearl Earring at auction paid 2 guilders and 30 cents for it? Well, when it entered the collection of the museum 21 years later, it was already valued at 40,000 guilders. And the prices for Vermeer kept going up very, very quickly. Which meant that people had started to search far and wide for new ones. And they found lots of them. Actually quite a few more than they were supposed to. In the 1920s and 30s the market was flooded with forgeries. And so many of them were offered for sale and sometimes people bought them for way too much money. This happened to private collectors of course, but also to museums. There's a famous incident in the Netherlands where a museum called Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam thought they had found a lost painting by Vermeer, this one, only to much later discover that it was a forgery by a man called Van Meegere. But I mention this because several other tronies surfaced in those years. People bought them and later often donated them to museums. And this happened particularly in the United States. Which means that the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. ended up with, I think, four, maybe five clear forgeries of Vermeer. Of course these were donations, often part of larger collections that were donated in one go, so it's not as if their specialists were duped or anything. But significantly, many of these forgeries were tronies that fit the description of the inventory of being in Turkish style. Now most of these are very obvious forgeries, that is with the benefit of hindsight, and so they have been relegated to the archives or the depots of the museums. But they have a peculiar side effect that all of these tronies that were acquired in 1920s and 30s are looked upon with added suspicion. For instance, there's this one known as the Girl in the Red Hat, which is owned by the National Gallery in Washington. It was bought by Andrew Mellon in 1925 and later he donated it to the museum. And that is actually one of the reasons why it's still not universally accepted as a real painting by Vermeer. Even though there have been recent studies that make it much more likely that this is a true Vermeer, there are still many experts that have their doubts. One of the reasons for these doubts, by the way, is that he used a material that he never used anywhere else, because this is the only painting made on an oak panel that has ever been attributed to Johannes Vermeer. But then again, he did experiment with different techniques and materials, for instance in this the Girl with the Pearl Earring, because as we've seen he used different pigments for the background than he usually did. I should of course also mention the title. It's not a title that Vermeer gave to the painting because that wasn't a thing at the time. It's the title that it got once it was first exhibited in the 1880s. It became a very popular painting pretty quickly and by 1908 the first poem had been written about it where it was called the Dutch Mona Lisa. But it was obviously known for being a girl wearing a very large pearl as an earring. Now perhaps this was because it hadn't been cleaned right, because when we look closely we can see it's not a pearl. If it had been it would have been very unusually large for a pearl. Now I know there are bigger pearls than this in the world but they are exceedingly rare and were insanely expensive and we can be absolutely sure that Vermeer did not have access to any of them. Of course he wouldn't have needed a very large pearl to paint one. He could have copied a small one and enlarged it or just made the whole thing up. It looks much more like a metal or glass orb, something like a marble for instance. So perhaps it was never intended to be a pearl but just a shiny ball on her ear because the painting simply seems to need that little bit of attention that it draws to that darker part of the painting. It makes it suddenly much more important. But if we zoom into it you can see something strange. There really hardly is a pearl at all. It's just two dabs of white paint. He didn't even draw a contour or anything and there's no attachment from these blots of white paint to her ear. It doesn't hang on anything but apparently that wasn't necessary. Recent research has also shown us that this is probably the last addition he made to the painting. The last detail he painted in. Because that's one of the things that he did so very well. At the last moment he would add little bits of light or highlights to his painting. These little dots of light on her lips for instance that make it look as though she's just wet her lips and that little sparkle in her eyes that make her so alive. Now it's still a strange painting within the work of Vermeer because most of his paintings give us a hint to his story but never so much as that it's a complete narrative. We we get to fantasize, make up our own stories around them. And in this case even though there's so very little to go on there is of course a famous book and subsequently there was a much more famous movie with the title The Girl with a Pearl Earring. Now the book was written by Tracy Chevalier and published in 1999 and the movie starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson was released in 2003. Now both book and movie are lovely. They tell a story that I'm not going to repeat here and now simply not to spoil anything but it has to be remembered that they are completely made up. Colin Firth plays Vermeer and it's a lovely performance. He made the man come alive but of course it's a fictional man because we know nothing about the actual character of the actual Vermeer. And we have no idea of any servants working in his household let alone the identity of this girl. Which really shouldn't keep you from watching this movie or reading the book. They are separate works of art but just don't think of them as historical. That of course is what they're not. So this girl we have no idea who she is and it may well be that she's not any particular person but she is one of the prettiest paintings that I know of and I love to visit her whenever I'm in The Hague. And if you ever plan to go there let me know. Maybe we can see her together. That is if you book me for a tour or whatever. Anyway thank you so much for watching and hopefully I will see you again soon.