Girl with a Pearl Earring

We tend to look at this as a portrait of a particular girl and wonder who she was. In the Dutch Republic of the 1660s, though, painters had a whole category for pictures like this one. They called it a tronie, a study of a head meant to capture a type or a mood rather than a real, named person. The exotic turban and the way she turns to catch us over her shoulder are the marks of that genre, not of a specific sitter. So we may never learn her name because there may not have been a name to record. Then there is the pearl. It is far too big to be a natural pearl of that era, and it is almost certainly a drop of polished glass or varnish, the kind of costume piece a painter kept in the studio. Vermeer suggests its whole roundness with only a couple of touches, a soft gleam along the bottom that picks up her white collar and one thick dab of light at the top. When the painting was cleaned in 1994, restorers found that a third supposed highlight was not paint Vermeer intended at all, just a small flake that had lifted from the surface over the centuries.