It’s a bit as if we had discovered that the lady with an ermine was actually clutching a weasel to her chest. It doesn’t change our lives, of course, but in the meantime, knowing that costume jewelery was already able to compete excellently with the authentic in the 1600s is already news. Yes, because the deception – venial, of course – lasted over four centuries. Because the model of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) protagonist of the painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” actually sports a glass jewel in the shape of a drop and not an authentic pearl.
The painting, today the artist’s most popular work, is exhibited in the large retrospective dedicated to Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, inaugurated last Friday 10 February and open until 4 June, which presents 28 out of 37 existing paintings by the Dutch master, and has been subjected to a number of studies. In the exhibition catalogue, the co-curator, Pieter Roelofs, explains that a pearl of this size would have been “astronomically expensive” for the time and no girl of the people could have worn it.
In the 17th century pearls came mainly from the strait between India and present-day Sri Lanka. In 1632 a Dutch jeweler paid £500 for a large pearl bought in London for a princess (that would be about £100,000 today), for a pearl probably much smaller than the one in Vermeer’s painting. According to Roelofs, «in Vermeer’s work we are dealing with imitations of glass beads, which in his time were mainly sold by Venetian glassblowers».
There has been speculation that the sitter may be Vermeer’s eldest daughter Maria, born in 1655 or 1656, but only about ten years old at the time (the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which owns the painting, dates it to 1665 and l current exhibition of the Rijksmuseum more vaguely to 1664-67).
The painting received its current title only relatively recently, following a decision by the Mauritshuis curator, Quentin Buvelot for the last Vermeer retrospective, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1995- 96. Until then it was often called “the painting” and always until then it was often called “the girl with the turban”. The book by the writer Tracy Chevalier «Girl with a pearl earring» (1999) and the subsequent film (2003) made the picture even more famous. Today it is undoubtedly the popular star of the Mauritshuis collection. Although the current Rijksmuseum retrospective runs until 4 June, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ is so important to the Mauritshuis that her return will come early, returning to The Hague in early April. The painting first reappeared in 1881, as the work of an anonymous artist, sold for two guilders (less than £1).