END TERM PAPER WAYS OF READING

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. 
                   BY
            VERMEER



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. Unlike the Mona Lisa, however, Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch term for a character or type of person. A young woman might have sat for Vermeer, but the painting is not meant to portray her or any specific individual in the same way that Leonardo’s piece portrayed an existing person. Vermeer’s subject is a generic young woman in exotic dress, a study in facial expression and costume. The work attests to Vermeer’s technical expertise and interest in representing light. The soft modeling of the subject’s face reveals his mastery of using light rather than line to create form, while the reflection on her lips and on the earring show his concern for representing the effect of light on different surfaces.Although now a highly regarded artist, Vermeer was not well known outside of his native city of Delft during his lifetime or in the decades after. Historians credit the 19th-century French critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile-Thoré (under the pseudonym of William Bürger) for reassessing the artist’s work, which eventually led to Vermeer’s distinguished reputation. Even so, Girl with a Pearl Earring only became one of Vermeer’s more famous pieces around the turn of the 21st century, with the 1995 blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the publication of the best-selling novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier in 1999. The book fashioned the painting’s subject into a housemaid named Griet who works in Vermeer’s home and becomes his paint mixer. It was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 2003 starring Scarlett Johansson as the fictional Griet and Colin Firth as Vermeer.An observant and deliberate painter, Vermeer produced only 36 known works in his lifetime, while many of his contemporaries completed hundreds. Like his peers, he mostly depicted scenes of ordinary life, later called “genre” painting, often of women at daily tasks. Notable examples include Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657) and The Music Lesson (c. 1665). He occasionally signed his paintings. While Girl with a Pearl Earring bears “IVMeer,” it is undated. 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. 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 an exotic dress, an oriental turban, and an improbably large pearl earring.n 2014, Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke raised doubts about the material of the earring and argued 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 work is oil on canvas and is 44.5 cm (17.5 in) high and 39 cm (15 in) wide. It is signed "IVMeer" but not dated. It is estimated to have been painted around 1665.
After the most recent restoration of the painting in 1994, the subtle colour scheme and the intimacy of the girl's gaze toward the viewer have been greatly enhanced.during the restoration, it was discovered that the dark background, today somewhat mottled, was initially intended by the painter to be a deep enamel-like green. This effect was produced by applying a thin transparent layer of paint, called a glaze, over the present-day black background. However, the two organic pigments of the green glaze, indigo and weld, have faded.The ground is dense and yellowish in color 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 included removing the work from its frame for study with microscopes, X-ray equipment and a special scanner to learn more about the methods and materials used by Vermeer.
Specializing in genre painting—a type of art that employs scenes of everyday life as its subject—Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer is renowned for his depictions of contemporary Delft, a city in Holland where the artist was born, lived, and died. Specifically, he is known for his his depictions of domestic interiors and portraits of women, like the figure featured in Girl with a Pearl Earring.Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring around 1665. It is one of just 35 paintings attributed to the painter, who saw moderate success during his lifetime. Along with another genre painting (titled The Milkmaid), Girl with a Pearl Earring is Vermeer’s most well-known work of art. However, it did not attain international fame at its time of completion. That came about at the end of the 20th century, when it was featured in a special exhibition, Johannes Vermeer, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

While, on the surface, this depiction seems to have the classic characteristics of a portrait, it is actually known as a tronie. Popular during the Dutch Golden Age, a tronie is a painting of an individual intended as a study. Often, artists opted to portray these figures in “exotic” garments, as rendering opulent fabric allowed them to show off their advanced painting techniques. A true tronie, Girl with a Pearl Earring does not depict a specific person. Instead, it shows an anonymous girl dressed in opulent clothing who, “like a vision emanating from the darkness,” art historians Arthur K. Wheelock and Ben Broos explain in the vermeer catalogue, “belongs to no specific time or place.”Vermeer is known for his ability to create contours and forms using light rather than line. This distinctive approach to modeling is particularly evident in the figure’s face, which Vermeer rendered in planes of light and shadow. To achieve this aesthetic, Vermeer followed a meticulous four-step technique popular with 17th-century artists.First he would “invent,” or create an initial drawing on the canvas. Then, he crafted a monochromatic underpainting—a technique known as "dead colouring" Next, he added color. And, finally, in order to make the piece exceptionally luminous, he would apply a thin layer of glaze to certain parts of the painting. A recent restoration has revealed that he glazed two areas of Girl with a Pearl Earring: the blue section of her turban and the entire background  addition to the artist’s unique treatment of light, Girl with a Pearl Earring also illustrates his love of color—specially, ultramarine blue This paint is made out of pigment derived from lazurite, a mineral found in the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli.Vermeer often incorporated this expensive hue into his paintings, reserving it for portrayals of curtains, upholstery, and, in Girl with a Pearl Earring, clothing. While it’s most prominent in the band of her turban, it’s also evident in the shadows of the yellow fabric to appreciate Vermeer’s impressive brushwork, one only needs to look at one detail in Girl with a Pearl Earring: the earring itself. From a distance, this large piece of jewelry appears to be rendered in exquisite detail. Upon closer inspection, however, it is evident that it is composed of just a few simple strokes that astoundingly suggest the form and luster of a pearl.Today, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains one of the most famous paintings in the world. In addition to its fascinating context and appealing aesthetics, the piece is celebrated for the mystery that surrounds it.

“When you think about the Mona Lisa, she is also looking at us, but she isn’t engaging – she’s sitting back in the painting, self-contained,” Tracy Chevalier, the author of the New York Times bestselling historical novel, points out. “Whereas Girl with a Pearl Earring is right there – there is nothing between her and us. She has this magical quality of being incredibly open and yet mysterious at the same time – and that is what makes her so appealing.”