Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in around 1665, is not a portrait, but rather a “tronie” – a painting of an imaginary figure used by painters in the Dutch Golden Age to depict a certain type or character; in this case a girl in exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and a large pearl in her ear.
The identity of the girl remains a mystery, and scholars have long debated who she might be: a model or maid in Vermeer’s household? His daughter, Maria? An Idealised and purely imagined figure? A mystery model brought in especially? Maybe it doesn’t matter.
In the painting the girl is looking back over her shoulder, as though caught in a fleeting moment, with her lips slightly parted as if about to speak. Her expression is open to interpretation. Viewers often feel she's on the edge of revealing a secret.
According to the Mauritshuis in The Hague where the painting has been displayed since 1902, once you look at Girl with a Pearl Earring, you can't take your eyes off her. In a study commissioned by the museum in 2024, brain scientists found that looking at real paintings in the Mauritshuis produces an emotional response in the brain that is 10 times as strong as the response that looking at reproductions produces. Moreover, they found that the Girl stood out even more by trapping viewers in a what they called a “sustained attention loop”. You looks at her eyes, then at her mouth, then at the pearl, then at her mouth, eyes and pearl again. And you just keep looking!
The work has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments, including Tracy Chevalier's 1999 fictionalised historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring where Vermeer becomes close to a servant whom he uses as an assistant and has sit for him as a model while wearing his wife's earrings. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson.
In 2009 the Ethiopian American Awol Erizku recreated Vermeer's painting as a print, featuring a young black woman and replacing the pearl earring with bamboo earrings as a commentary on the lack of black figures in museums and galleries. His piece is titled Girl with a Bamboo Earring. And in 2014 the English street artist Banksy reproduced the painting as a mural in Bristol, incorporating an existing alarm box in place of the pearl earring and calling the artwork Girl with a Pierced Eardrum.
Then in October 2022 a climate activist representing the Just Stop Oil campaign attempted to glue his head to the glass protecting the painting and was covered in tomato soup by another protester. [Ed” That’s what I call a creative protest.]
Finally, and topically, in February 2023, the Mauritshuis launched a contest My Girl with a Pearl and called on people to reimagine a new, remastered version of the museum’s crown jewel. The Open Call @mygirlwithapearl was a colourful success as evidenced by the 3,482 “artists” from 3-94 years who participated. One of the five winning pictures was used to replace the original while it was on loan to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. That picture was created using Midjourney, an AI generative image program. The “artist-prompter” was Berlin-based artist Julian van Dieken. The museum’s choice was controversial, playing into the ethical debate surrounding the nature of art and the rightness or wrongness of derivative AI generated work resulting from the scraping of potentially copyrighted works to create datasets without seeking consent.
According to Elif Nadir, an independent art curator specialising in digital art at the Faculty of Art and Design in Izmir in this article for the House of Ethics website, the public uproar was less about these issues and more related to the painting’s “unique status and symbolism in Dutch culture” … “Its replacement, [albeit temporarily] by a random piece of computational art without historical dimension felt like an act of national betrayal.”
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References
wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_a_Pearl_Earring
nytimes.com/2022/10/27/arts/pearl-earring-vermeer-climate-activists.html
cnn.com/style/article/most-famous-paintings
instagram.com/mygirlwithapearl
houseofethics.lu/2023/04/24/the-ai-girl-with-a-pearl-earring-ethics-arts-or-the-art-of-ethics
mauritshuis.nl/meisje
theartnewspaper.com/2024/10/03/the-pearly-triangle-neurological-investigation-reveals-secret-of-vermeers-girl-with-a-pearl-earring
Images
1. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, circa1665
2. Johannes Vermeer, self portrait
3. Volunteer monitored for Mauritshuis brain study, 2024
4. The sustained attention loop
5. Scarlett Johansson in Girl with the Pearl Earring film, 2003
6. Girl with a Bamboo Earring print, Awol Erizku, 2009
7. The Pearl with a Girl Earing. Reg Lynch for REMO, 2024. Merchandise HERE.
8. Girl with a Pierced Eardrum (graffiti by Banksy), Hanover Place, Bristol, 2014
9. Just Stop Oil protest, 2022
10. Instagram @mygirlwithapearl screenshot
11. A Girl With Glowing Earrings, AI artist Julian van Dieken, 2023
