On an unknown day in October, Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft.
He would have turned 387 this month.
It doesn’t matter who the young woman is. It doesn’t matter that Dutch people in the 1600s didn’t wear turbans. It doesn’t matter that the blue hue in the turban is the precious pigment lapis lazuli. It doesn’t matter that a lousy fictional movie about it was made.
Making up a story about this painting defeats its entire purpose. Why do you need a story?
What matters is your visceral, immediate experience. The absence of a background or context only magnifies it.
Is she going to ask me something? What will I say to her?
There’s no wallpaper pattern to escape to. No flowing hair, no ornate dress to draw your eyes away.
I’m utterly disarmed by this painting every time I look at it. I feel myself inhale a little to get ready to answer her.
It doesn’t have that almost-real, creepy feeling to it. No. It’s so real that it scares me a little bit. A big part of it is three little white dots, two on her irises, and one on the corner of her mouth.
Here it is without these three dots:
Vermeer’s “Girl With A Pearl Earring” minus three white dots
And with them:
Vermeer’s “Girl With A Pearl Earring” without alteration
Look at the difference that makes! It’s essence-piercing, sort of like looking at a total eclipse of the Sun, and I can’t really explain it. It drills down into what it means to be human.
Never mind that the pearl itself, or the silver ball, or whatever it is, is rendered with just two blops of paint:
The “pearl”
It doesn’t even have edges! But it still comes off like an ornament on Christmas Eve. Did it take Vermeer a long time to plan those two blops? Or did he just eyeball it and put them down, brighter at the top and more shadowed at the bottom, giving the impression of a silver sphere lit from the front and reflecting the white collar below?
I said that the lapis lazuli of the turban didn’t matter, but I think its blueness does. It means you have the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, against that dark background. No need to distract us with any deviations from that.
Remind you of another Dutch painter?
a classic pattern of Piet Mondrian
Those primary colors just seem to center your brain waves somehow:
“Child Study” by Stan Miller
Vermeer kind of did that again in his painting of Delft, though I suppose Delft is Delft:
“View of Delft” by Johannes Vermeer
“Girl With A Pearl Earring” is sometimes called the “Mona Lisa of the North”. One thing I think it has over the Mona Lisa, though, is its immediacy. The Mona Lisa looks medieval, yellowed, a relic from another age to be memorialized, not directly related to. Vermeer’s subject, though, could have been painted yesterday rather than in 1665, and no one would have batted an eye.
That said, Vermeer does owe a little bit to the Mona Lisa, or maybe gives a hat tip to it. Da Vinci’s painting used an exaggerated shadow on the outside corner of the eye that’s facing more toward us, and so does Vermeer:
The Mona Lisa’s eyes have exaggerated shading at their outside corners
“Girl With A Pearl Earring” does, too
That doesn’t really show up in portraiture as much as I would have thought:
the eyes don’t have it
One other way to throw some cold water on this painting to show the value of the sublety of the expression: What if the subject just had a big grin instead? Well, somebody went and used FaceApp to answer that:
I swear the girl on the right was in my calculus class.
It’s very hard to pick a single favorite painting, but Johannes Vermeer makes a really, really good case to me here. That’s a f$@*ing great painting. He completed it at age 32, and he only lived to age 43.
You have more fans now than ever
I’ve got other paintings of all sorts that I really like, but instead of me blabbing on about them, I’d rather see and hear about yours...