What an incredible painting.
I love it’s beauty, the technique, the dramatic style, the lighting, the I-saw-her-on-the-street-for-a-moment-and-then-she-was-gone pose, the strange costume, the tiny glop of bright pink by the lips, but I’ve always had a problem with the title. It’s called Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The what earring?
The earring looks silver to me, not made of pearl. That is our mystery. My working hypothesis was that it was listed by an attorney or other functionary in an estate two hundred years or more ago, and it had to be given a name. That person identified it as Girl with a Pearl Earring , erringly, finished up his slap-dash inventory, and then got back to the office in time for lunch. Because it was the first official indication of a name for the piece, it stuck.
Before we start on the quest for an answer to our mystery, let’s go over some essential background.
A Little Background
Johannes Vermeer left no diaries or other writings. There was very little contemporary writing about him, and he died poor. Worse than poor, actually, he died in great debt. His wife had to trade a couple of his paintings to the local baker to pay the bill.
Vermeer was born in Delft, the Netherlands, in 1632, twenty-two years after the death of the Italian master Caravaggio. Both of them were magicians with the use of light in painting, though Caravaggio’s canvases were much darker. In my mind, Caravaggio was the painter of darkness, and Vermeer, the painter of light. He was painting about the same time as Rembrandt, who died in 1669. Vermeer died six years later in 1675.
His father was an art dealer and innkeeper. Vermeer took up both trades and also painted. He only produced about 33 pieces that critics agree are attributable to him. There are many possible reasons for this relatively low output, including his short life span, the incredible detail in each painting, the high cost of the paint he liked to use, his large family of 11 children, and the demands of running an inn and selling art while painting on the side. Moreover, Vermeer was lost in obscurity for 200 years, which means his paintings were more likely to be painted over, thrown away or used as kindling.
It is believed that Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring around 1665 as a “tronie,” which is a character study rather than a portrait. The work was purchased for two guilders in 1881 (about $27 today). After that purchaser died, the painting went to the Mauritshuis, a museum in the Hague. It was cleaned and restored in 1915, again in 1960 and, most importantly for our purposes, in 1994.
Now Back to Our Mystery
The first indication of a mystery is what we can see with our eyes: Look for what seems out of place. The earring looks silver colored and reflective, as if it was made of metal or painted with metallic paint. Also, if it is a pearl, it’s the largest I’ve ever encountered. Let’s take a look at what we can see by enhancing the object. You can find an incredible close-up of Vermeer’s canvas here:
And here:
As you can see, the earring looks metallic. This is as close as we can get to what Vermeer intended, using our modern technologies. Before 1994, we saw something completely different. That’s the story of this painting’s restoration, and it is part of our mystery.
Painting Conservation/Restoration
You cannot simply dust a Mona Lisa. Oh sure, that works for a century or two, but eventually our atmosphere will corrupt the painting. That’s when the experts come in to fix these works of art.
The results can be stunning.
On the right, you can see the results of restoration work. My favorite is on the far right. That’s Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The picture of their faces is spellbinding, but the accumulation of grime over centuries turned a blue sky brown. Also, the art restorers were able to give Adam back his penis, which the Counter-Reformation had removed (by painting over it).
Although the 1994 restoration of Girl with Pearl Earring did not reveal hidden genitalia, it did provide a revelation—a clue to our mystery. Here we have the before and after pictures:
The difference between the before and after pictures is the difference between gold and silver! The pearl for many years looked very un-silver-like. That makes it easier to believe that a person doing a quickie estate or auction inventory might think it was a pearl. What did the earring look like as it shifted slowly, over the centuries, from silver- to gold-colored? The art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle helps us out with a clue about how and why art treasures were named:
Because 17th century collectors of these pictures understood their rhetoric without explanation, as well as the iconography of a "history painting" such as Rembrandt's "Susanna" (1636), artists of the time felt no need to title their works. The titles attached to them come mainly from descriptions in records of property or sales. So "Girl With a Pearl Earring" - the painting - might have had in Vermeer's mind none of the sort of romance that we attach to it.
(emphasis added). Aha! From that quote we can discern that (1) Vermeer, himself, did not name the painting, and that (2) painting names frequently came from “descriptions in records of property or sales.” We are making some progress on our mystery, no? But what about the size of that enormous pearl?
Do Pearls Even Get That Big?
A question that I pursued was the remarkable size of the object in the painting. Could a natural pearl grow to such a size? Yes. It could.
There is a specimen called the Pearl of Lao Tzu that measures almost 9½ inches in diameter and weighs about 14 pounds. That’s a big fucking pearl! The happy lady is holding it in her hands.
It is worth a fortune, but it is ugly and might be difficult to wear on the ear. But pearls can be cut up and polished, right?
Giant pearls found in nature are very rare. So, could they have been grown or cultivated to a size that matches the one in Vemeer’s painting?
Research indicates that the first documented success at culturing pearls occurred back in 1761, about ninety-six years after Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring. The first official patent for the process was issued in 1916, but successful commercial applications came at least a year after that.
As you can see, this is a dead end. The object in the painting could not be a cultured pearl. It was either an enormous natural pearl, it was cut from an even larger natural pearl, or it is something else entirely.
Is It Costume Jewelry Made to Look Like a Faux-Pearl?
I can see using a very hard plaster of paris to shape a pearl-like object into costume jewelry. That even sounds like something I might try to do. Moreover, the middle class in the Netherlands in the 1600s would be an unlikely place to find an extraordinarily large gem-quality pearl. A better possibility would be ceramics, especially porcelain. There’s this about porcelain antique jewelry:
Porcelain is a ceramic material which has specific properties - such as hardness, heat resistance, translucancy and toughness - that makes it very suitable for tableware and jewelry. In jewelry the porcelain pieces were/are painted and glazed and set in brooches, earrings and necklaces.
When you think of antique porcelain jewelry, you generally think of painted oval cameos, but the material was also used to make round- or oval- or teardrop-shaped jewelry. In my mind, this is a possibility, and it is more probable than a natural pearl. But what about that reflective surface on the earring?
The Camera Obscura Angle
Many people believe that Vermeer painted with the assistance of a device called a camera obscura. And possibly mirrors. There is no smoking gun proof of this—the inventory made of his possessions when he died showed no such device—but there is evidence to support the theory. Vermeer was acquainted with one of the great (and one of the few) lens-makers of the time, and his paintings, arguably, show signs of the use of such devices.
It is important to our mystery because of how a camera obscura shows light, and what we see on the earring in Vermeer’s picture is the reflection of light. Here’s a bit about the camera obscura:
The theory has a lot of adherents, and it would explain why the object in the painting looks almost, but not completely, unlike a pearl earring:
Supporters of these theories have pointed to evidence in some of Vermeer's paintings, such as the often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings, which they argue are the result of the primitive lens of a camera obscura producing halation.
Vermeer Knew How to Paint Pearls
Vermeer was very good with realism. Some think too good. They believe he used the camera obscura to show light. But he certainly knew how to paint a pearl when he wanted to. The following is detail from the painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace:
Notice that the pearl necklace looks like a string of pearls. The light reflected looks like light reflected from natural pearls, which aren’t as smooth-surfaced or regular as our cultured pearls. The color is the color of pearls. The earring looks different from the pearl necklace, but similar to the earring in Girl with a Pearl Earring. In still other works, Vermeer painted how he thought pearls should look. I have enlarged the detail on the right from Woman Reading a Letter. These pearls are lying on a table in front of the lady while she reads her letter. They again look like pearls and not silver.
On the other hand—or ear—Vermeer appeared to use this silver-colored set of earrings on multiple occasions, perhaps because they were family jewels and were available as props. The earring above and in the detail below look, to me, like the pair worn by the young lady in Girl with a Pearl Earring.
There are other examples of what appear to be the same earrings, such as Woman with a Lute.
Vermeer showed a variation in the jewelry he painted, with necklace strands that look like beads sitting next to a set that look as if it is made of pearls, or at least faux-pearls. For example, on the right is detail from Woman Holding a Balance. The two strands popping out of the jewelry box appear to be gold links and bluish-colored baubles. The strand lying on the table closest to the viewer looks like pearls.
But, just as we think we’ve solved our mystery, Vermeer throws us a curve ball. In the painting called A Lady Writing, there is an obvious strand of pearls on the table in front of her, and she is wearing two earrings. One looks like it could be pearl; the other looks like a different earring in the shadow. Here is detail from that painting:
This is a close-up of the detail above, which shows, in my eyes, what may be two different earrings, even accounting for the shadow:
Can light and shadow change a twin set of earrings this dramatically? I suppose so. I just don’t think so. The object on the left looks much more like a pearl (or even glass or ceramic) to me than the earring worn in Girl with a Pearl Earring, while the one on the right seems like black pearl or a silver bauble in extraordinary shadow. And, then, there’s the reality that natural pearls don’t grow to the same color or size. Even if you had one monstrous natural pearl, how likely would it be that you had found two, and that they matched? Maybe if you were the Queen of England. That is something to think about.
The Most Likely Candidate: Some Kind of Metal
I originally based my opinion on the evidence of my eyes. Then, while researching this question, I ran across an article in a Dutch Science magazine that seems supportive of my opinion. A Dutch Astrophysicist, who also likes to paint, took a close look at Girl with a Pearl Earring and concluded that the girl is “wearing no pearl.” From the November 2014 issue of New Scientist (and translated from the Dutch):
… But this glittering jewel is really a pearl? Vincent Icke, professor of theoretical astronomy at Leiden University, thinks not.
Art and science are two worlds between which many people do not immediately see a link. Still, it may be worth having a scientific, eg physics, looking eye to an artwork. This is evident from a closer inspection of the pearl at the ear of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring . Based on a number of observations Icke comes to a surprising conclusion: the girl that we have here before us is a girl with no pearl.
A large part of the doubt, is caused by reflections which are visible in the oorjuweel. An actual bead consists of thin layers of calcite which scatter light of different wavelengths and break said Icke. This creates the famous soft white, pearly sheen. Instead, we see a bright reflection of light in the top left corner of the 'pearl' and at the bottom to see a reflection of the white collar. In addition, the dark parts of the jewelry give no white dusk, but they seem to the girl's skin and the space to mirror behind her.
Professor Icke believes that the earring is made of “silver or maybe polished pewter.” The famous gallery that houses Girl with a Pearl Earring seems to, more or less, back the Professor’s theory. This is from the Mauritshuis website:
In the December issue of popular science magazine New Scientist, Icke, a professor of Theoretical Astronomy at the University of Leiden, states that the pearl on the ear of the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, could not have been a real pearl. The way in which a pearl would reflect the light does not match the reflection of the light in the painting, says Icke.
The article by Vincent Icke confirms what we at the Mauritshuis have been thinking and writing about Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring for some time now.... At the museum, the caption for the painting also mentions the unrealistic size of the pearl. Vincent Icke reaches the same conclusion, but through a very different understanding and research. The Mauritshuis has taken note of his findings with great interest….
The Mauritshuis has written previously about the jewel in the ear of Vermeer's girl, saying it was not a true pearl. Indeed, just like the turban, the "pearl" was no daily outfit for Dutch girls in the seventeenth century. Quentin Buvelot (Mauritshuis chief curator) described the painting … in the catalogue for an exhibition on highlights of the Mauritshuis in Bologna earlier this year. They then wrote: " ... The pearl on the girl's ear is remarkably large. Whereas most pearls nowadays come from farms, in the seventeenth century, they were natural ones. Pearls were formed in oyster-like sea mussels. Large pearls were rare and ended up in the hands of the richest people on the planet. In the seventeenth century, cheaper glass pearls, usually from Venice, were also quite common. They were made from glass, which was lacquered to give it a matt finish. Maybe the girl is wearing such a handcrafted 'pearl'."
Conclusion
Looks like that stupid Dutch Astrophysicist scooped us by almost exactly a year and a half! Seriously, though, I was not going to run light refraction tests to distinguish between pearls and silver, so I’m not sad. I think he’s right.
It is also nice to get confirmation that I wasn’t seeing things.
Of course, there are still other possibilities, however slight, including natural pearl, ceramics (especially porcelain), glass and some unknown material painted with a metallic paint.
Although I may not agree with the name Girl with a Pearl Earring, I do agree with other names given to this treasure, including The Dutch Mona Lisa and The Mona Lisa of the North.
Mystery solved.