Moça com Brinco de Pérola (Meisje Met de Parel / Girl with a Pearl Earring) - Johannes Vermeer

Moça com Brinco de Pérola (Meisje Met de Parel / Girl with a Pearl Earring) - Johannes Vermeer

Museu Mauritshuis, Haia, Holanda

OST - 46x40 - Circa 1665

Texto 1:

A young woman looks over her shoulder at us. She holds her head slightly to one side, there is a gleam in her greyish-blue eyes, and her lips are slightly parted and moist. On her head is a turban that she has wound from two pieces of material, one blue and one yellow, and she is adorned with a pearl earring. It is from this oversized jewel in the middle of the composition that the painting derives its title.

The painting provides a rich sample of every aspect of Vermeer’s virtuoso painting technique. The face is modelled very softly, not in great detail but with gradual transitions and invisible brushstrokes. The clothing is depicted more schematically and enlivened with small dots of paint suggesting reflected light – one of Vermeer’s trademark features. Even so, the artist has clearly indicated differences between materials – for instance between the white collar, painted in impasto, and the drier paint of the turban, for which he used the precious pigment ultramarine. But the most remarkable detail is the pearl. This consists of little more than two brushstrokes: a bright highlight at upper left and the soft reflection of the white collar on the underside.

Seventeenth-century Dutch girls did not wear turbans. With this accessory Vermeer has given the girl an Oriental air. Images like this were known in the seventeenth century as tronies. Tronies are not portraits: they were not made in order to produce the best possible likeness of an individual. Although there would probably be a sitter, the point of a tronie was mainly to make a study of a head representing a particular character or type. Rembrandt had popularised tronies in Dutch art around 1630. He made dozens of them, often using himself as the model, sometimes wearing a remarkable cap or a helmet.

The pearl is too large to be real. Perhaps the girl is wearing a pearl drop made of glass, which has been varnished to give it a matte sheen. Another possibility, of course, is that the pearl was a product of Vermeer’s imagination. Pearls – both real and imitation – were fashionable in the period from about 1650 to 1680. We often find them in paintings by Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch.

Girl with a Pearl Earring has been known to the general public only since 1881, when it was put up for auction at the Venduhuis der Notarissen in The Hague. On the viewing day it attracted the attention of the influential cultural official Victor de Stuers, who was there together with his friend and neighbour, the art collector A.A. des Tombe. Tradition has it that even though the painting had been badly neglected, De Stuers recognised it as a Vermeer. According to a different version of the story, the painting was too dirty to be properly appraised, and the painter’s identity only became clear later on, when the cleaning operation revealed his signature. Whatever the case may be, De Stuers and Des Tombe agreed not to bid against each other, and Des Tombe therefore acquired the painting for the negligible sum of two guilders plus thirty cents mark-up.

Des Tombe’s collection, which included works by contemporaries as well as old masters, was open to visitors at his home, at Parkstraat 26 in The Hague. The future director of the Mauritshuis, Abraham Bredius, was the first to extol the virtues of Girl with a Pearl Earring when he saw it at Parkstraat in 1885: ‘Vermeer overshadows all the rest; the girl’s head, so superbly modelled that one is almost inclined to forget one is looking at a painting, and that single gleam of light, will alone hold your attention’. When he died, on 16 December 1902, Des Tombe turned out to have made a secret will bequeathing twelve paintings to the Mauritshuis, including Girl with a Pearl Earring. Trecho de texto do Museu Mauritshuis.

Texto 2:

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Dutch: Meisje met de parel) is an oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated c. 1665. Going by various names over the centuries, it acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century. The work has been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902 and has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments.

Description:

The painting is a tronie, the Dutch 17th-century description of a "head" that was not meant to be a portrait. It depicts a European girl wearing "exotic dress", an "oriental turban", and what appears to be a very large pearl as an earring. The work is oil on canvas and is 44.5 cm (17.5 in) tall by 39 cm (15 in) wide. It is signed "IVMeer" but not dated. It is estimated to have been painted around 1665.

The most recent (1994) restoration of the painting brought out hidden subtleties in the colour scheme and deepened the intimacy of the girl's gaze towards the viewer. In 2014, Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke [nl] raised doubts about the material of the earring, arguing that it looks more like polished tin than pearl on the grounds of the specular reflection, the pear shape and the large size of the earring. The dark space around the figure, described as a uniform background with a dark green–brown colour in the early twentieth century, was interpreted as flat until research in 2018 indicated that Vermeer had modelled diagonal lines at the right side, suggesting folds in fabric, perhaps a curtain, by varying the amount of lead white in the semi-translucent green glaze applied over the black underlayer. Two organic pigments (indigo and weld) in that glaze have faded over time.

The identity of the subject is disputed. She may have been real or imagined, or she might represent a Sibyl or a biblical figure. Some authors, such as Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and Lawrence Weschler, believed her to be the artist's eldest daughter, Maria, though other art historians dismiss this speculation as an anachronism. Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon believes that the subject of the painting was Magdalena, the 12-year-old daughter of Vermeer's chief patron Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, who lived in a house called the Golden Eagle in the Old Town area of Delft. Her family were Remonstrants, for whom the biblical Mary Magdalene was an important figure, and the portrait with its biblical style of clothing could have been painted to commemorate Magdalena's baptism into the church.

Ownership and display:

On the advice of Victor de Stuers, who for years tried to prevent Vermeer's rare works from being sold to parties abroad, Arnoldus Andries des Tombe purchased the work at an auction in The Hague in 1881, for only two guilders plus thirty cents buyer's premium (equivalent to roughly €24 in 2015). At the time, it was in poor condition, with parts of the paint layer having become detached. Des Tombe had no heirs and by a bequest donated this and other paintings to the Mauritshuis in 1902. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the painting was kept hidden in a bombproof bunker located just below the Mauritshuis for two years, before removal to the St. Pietersberg caves near Maastricht until the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945.

The painting has since been widely exhibited about the world until 2014, when it returned to the Mauritshuis permanently for display in the collection. By that time, as a result of its promotion, a CNN survey named it one of the world's most recognizable paintings.

Painting technique:

The painting has been studied by the scientists of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage and the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) Amsterdam.

The ground is dense and yellowish in colour and is composed of chalk, lead white, ochre, and very little black. The dark background of the painting contains bone black, weld (luteolin, Reseda luteola), chalk, small amounts of red ochre, and indigo. The face and draperies were painted mainly using ochres, natural ultramarine, bone black, charcoal black, and lead white.

In February–March 2018, an international team of art experts spent two weeks studying the painting in a specially constructed glass workshop in the museum, open to observation by the public. The non-invasive research project involved the removal of the work from its frame for study with microscopes, and the use of X-ray and other scanning equipment to better understand the methods and materials used by Vermeer.

The project, named The Girl in the Spotlight, was headed by Abbie Vandivere, conservator at the Mauritshuis. Results were published by the Mauritshuis. A blog by Vandivere discusses the project at greater length.

Results included the presence of delicate eyelashes, a green curtain behind the head, changes made, and details of the pigments used and where they came from. The absence of eyebrows and the featureless background had led to speculation that Vermeer was painting an idealised or abstract face; the later discoveries showed that he was painting a real person in a real space. The pearl has been described as an illusion due to having "no contour and also no hook to hang it from the girl's ear". Trecho de texto da Wikipédia.

Nota do blog: Data 2017 / Crédito para Wikipédia.