Episode #87: Art Fact and Fiction: Is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring a Maid in his Household? (S10E04)
In our tenth season, we’re going at art history with a skeptical eye and a myth-busting attitude to uncover the fictions and facts about some of our favorite artists. We’re starting our season today with this controversial subject: is the woman featured in Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring a maid from his household?
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Episode Credits:
Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Logo by Dave Rainey. Additional research and writing by Mary Manfredi.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Music by Storyblocks.
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Episode Transcript
In 2003, I was in graduate school at a university in the Midwest here in the U.S., and my art history program was small—I mean, tiny. There were three grad students, total, including myself, and we hung tight and close. Whenever anything remotely artsy arose in our environs, we were there—guiltily reading copies of The Da Vinci Code, going to all the student exhibitions on campus, and heading to our university town’s only indie theater to see whatever movie was out this week. And I have a distinct memory of one where a single scene made the three of us artsy grad students gasp out loud. The camera peers into a luminous, darkly furnished interior, all warm glow coming through heavy glass windows. This scenery. It was perfect. It was—is—an interior by Johannes Vermeer, the great Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in these gorgeous domestic interiors and other genre scenes and wasn’t terribly prolific, completed only around 50 or so paintings during his lifetime, only about 35 of which survive today. But by God, this movie brought us, in the 21st century, into Vermeer’s home, and if there was one thing that the film, Girl with a Pearl Earring, got right, it was this. So belated and ongoing kudos to the film’s cinematographer, Eduardo Serra.
But this movie, based on the popular historical novel of the same name by Tracey Chevalier from 1999, presents us with an incredible tale that interweaves the artist’s biography with that of a young maid named Griet, whom—we are led to believe—was the inspiration and model for Vermeer’s most beloved painting. But is this truly how this all went down?
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. In this season, season 10, in which we’re going to dig deep on some great art historical facts--and fictions. In this episode, we’re welcoming Johannes Vermeer to the stage for the very first time on our podcast. Does his elegant Girl with a Pearl Earring really portray a maid in his household? This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
Sometimes in art history, there can be this feeling a famous work of art has always been so famous-- it's something I've addressed in past episodes of the pod. As we've learned with the Mona Lisa, for example, that famous work of art was always a draw at the Louvre, but it really didn't explode into the iconic stratosphere until the early 20th century. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring had to wait until the end of the 20th century to reach its highest highs. In 1996, an exhibition arranged by the Mauritshuis in the Hague and traveled to the National Gallery in Washington brought together 21 of the 35 known extant Vermeers, a landmark show that introduced hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone to one of the most intriguing artists of the 17th century.
The story of Vermeer’s ups and downs in art history is a familiar one, especially when we're talking about diverse artists, but the ravages of time can attack a white male artist, too. In the centuries after Vermeer’s death in 1675, his works—the few that remained or have been identified to date—fell out of favor as tastes and styles changed, or they had been misattributed to other artists of the time, like Gabriel Metsu or Frans von Mieris the Elder, genre painters both. But in 1866, Theophile Thoré-Bürger, a French journalist and art critic, published a catalog of Vermeer’s work in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and this helped bring Vermeer’s works back to the limelight. Because when Thoré-Bürger's first noticed Vermeer’s works nearly half a century prior—upon viewing his gorgeous and famous work, View of Delft, also at the Mauritshuis, he didn’t recognize the artist’s name, and really, hardly anyone else did. But the publication of his catalogue—even with its many errors of attribution and dating, because Thoré-Bürger thought that Vermeer actually created more work than he really did—changed all of that. And Vermeer’s name would never be forgotten again.
One of the reasons that Vermeer was lost to history for so long is due to the relatively little that we know today about his biography. In fact, so few religious or civic documents remain from his hometown of Delft—where it appears that he spent his entire life—that Thoré-Bürger once called his subject “The Sphinx of Delft.” He was born in Delft sometime in 1632—we don’t have a record of his birth but he was baptized on Halloween, October 31, of that year, so chances are good that he was born that fall—probably September or October. His family was lower-middle class, with his father, Reijnier Janszoon, who was both an innkeeper and an art dealer after apprenticing as a silk worker in his youth. Fast forward twenty years to April 1653, and we know that Johannes, the family’s son, marries Catharina Bolnes, after converting to Catholicism, a choice made, apparently, with fervor and conviction and not just for the sake of his marriage. Catharina’s family was wealthier than his own, and it was lorded over by Catharina’s mother, the imposing Maria Thins, who—according to sources close to Vermeer’s family—wasn’t super tolerant of Johannes and Catharina’s marriage at the outset but warmed to the idea after Johannes’s conversion. Not terribly long after their marriage, the couple moves into Maria Thins’s large house in Oude Langendijk, the Catholic section of Delft, and it is there in that house that Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, and where he would produce all of his paintings too. It’s a good thing that the Oude Langendijk house was a sizeable one, because Catharina and Johannes had 10 or 11 surviving children, with Catharina bearing at least four who died before their own baptisms. Perhaps because of the large number of mouths to feed, and the fact that Johannes was a painter who worked slowly and deliberately, with much care—which we’ll talk about in a moment—when he died at age 42 or 43 in 1675, he left behind a critical amount of debt. Indeed, it seems like he had to lean into the good graces of his mother-in-law—and at least one or two devoted patrons--for financial stability for much of his adulthood, as in 1653, the year he married, he also registered to become a member of the Guild of St. Luke, the painters’ guild, but he was unable to pay the entry fee.
How Vermeer became a painter is a mystery still unsolved as of the writing of this episode. We don’t know where, and with whom, the artist trained, but we do know that he had to have some kind of training, because he could become a member of the painters’ guild without having completed a six-year apprenticeship, proof of which would have been required to allow Vermeer to join. But no records exist or have yet to come to light. Did Vermeer train there in Delft? Did he go to Amsterdam, which boasted an even livelier art scene, and learn there? We truly don’t know, though art historians have speculated several possibilities, and those six years are a significant gap in our timeline. Nonetheless, by the time he reaches his early 20s, he has confirmed himself as a so-called “master painter,” and even went on, in his later years, to be elected to the head of the Guild of St. Luke four times, as well as following in his father’s footsteps after the elder Vermeer’s death, as an innkeeper and an art dealer. Vermeer was widely respected but only modestly successful—and part of that, as I mentioned previously, was because he worked slowly, producing perhaps only 3 paintings a year. And looking at a work, like The Milkmaid, from around 1658 and now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, we can see why: his attention to every possible detail, from the crusts on the loaves in the breadbasket, to a forlorn nail driven high up on a wall, the cracks in the plaster and the slow stream of gray-white milk that the titular maid pours from a terracotta pitcher—is exquisite, precisely rendered. Much discussion over the past two decades has centered upon how, exactly, Vermeer managed to produce such spatially-accurate work, with the general consensus being that Vermeer may have used some kind of primitive camera obscura or sets of curved mirrors to achieve his outcomes—a theory known as the Hockney-Falco Thesis, after its two proponents, the artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco. And let me take this moment to say that if you haven’t seen the fantastic 2013 documentary, Tim’s Vermeer, then you fully have my permission to pause this podcast and go watch it immediately. I’ll wait!
Vermeer didn’t have an easy time of it toward the end of his life—and neither did the Netherlands as a whole, really. The Dutch were embroiled in a war with France—the Franco-Dutch War—from 1672 through 1678, and in that same period—1672 to 1674—also at war with England, in the so-called Third Anglo-Dutch War. The art market collapsed, and the Dutch economy was under severe pressure, leading to an incredible downturn that would take years to recover from. When Vermeer died in December 1675, his widow wrote to their creditors, petitioning for debt forgiveness. The letter survives today, and Catharina heartbreakingly describes her husband’s death, noting, quote, “...during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.” Unquote.
So, the life of Johannes Vermeer: not the happiest one, but also not the most detail-filled one, either. Which means that he is the perfect person around whom a novelist, like Tracy Chevalier, can arrange a narrative and fill in the gaps with a delectable and gripping tale. We’ll be getting into Girl with a Pearl Earring—and its book and film adaptations—next, right after this break from our sponsors, who help you support the show while getting some goodies for yourself. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
As with so, so much about Johannes Vermeer’s life, we don’t know an awful lot about the creation of the artist’s most beloved and iconic work, his Girl with a Pearl Earring. While he did sign the work, he didn’t date it, so historians have been left to their best guesses for the painting’s date—around 1665, they assume, because of its inclusion of the very thing that gives the painting its title—that pearl earring. Around that same period, the mid-1660s, Vermeer made multiple paintings with pearls in them, something that he may have done because not only did the semi-precious stone (stone, for lack of a better word, I suppose) indicate wealth and status, but the item allowed him to showcase his incredible skills. Looking closely at that pearl, we can see that it’s comprised of little than a few swipes of white and cream paint—nothing more, a jewel whose light and shadows are hinted at with just a few well-placed daubs of paint. It’s a marvel, and with that pearl alone being so delicate, so delicious, it’s no wonder that this painting has grown so popular over time, with it being deemed “the most beautiful painting in the Netherlands” by the Dutch themselves in a 2006, and that it is occasionally called “The Mona Lisa of the North.”
But, as we discussed in the first episode of this season, on the Mona Lisa, sometimes even the most iconic and fictionalized works are portraits of real individuals. Mona Lisa, we think, is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. If the Girl with a Pearl Earring is the “Mona Lisa of the North,” is she, then, also a portrait of a real person? That’s the question that novelist Tracy Chevalier attempts to answer in her fictionalized account of the painting’s origin and its subject matter—and please note, some spoilers for the book are about to follow. Girl with a Pearl Earring, published in 1999, follows the life of Griet, a young woman who enters the Vermeer household as a maid, where she isn’t treated all that wonderfully by Vermeer’s wife and some of their children—though Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins, comes off very sympathetic in this portrayal. Vermeer himself is nearly as mysterious as his real-life counterpart, appearing distant and obsessed with nothing but his work, a painter who eventually comes to understand Griet’s worth, from an artistic standpoint, after he notices her own creative bent—Griet noticing the colors of clouds as they pass above in the sky, Griet arranging vegetables by color, Griet removing an item from an arrangement for a still life to make the composition stronger, and so forth). In time, Griet becomes Vermeer’s ad hoc assistant and confidante, a job that, while intellectually stimulating for her, also comes in conflict with her “regular” job helping to manage the Vermeer household. And of course, Griet’s beauty is noted, not originally by Vermeer but by one of his wealthy clients, who becomes obsessed with Griet and eventually sexually assaults her. The patron wants a portrait of himself done with the maid at his side, like a trophy, but Vermeer demurs, offering instead to paint two separate pictures: one of the client with his family, and one of Griet. And thus, Girl with a Pearl Earring was born—a painting that required Griet to dress in a particular manner with those stunning pearl earrings, which, according to the tale, belonged to Vermeer’s wife. The painting of this scene is one of the standouts in the book—and in the movie adaptation— with Vermeer helping to pierce the maid’s virgin ears so that she can don the jewelry that makes the eventual painting so iconic. And though the relationship between Vermeer and Griet is mainly of master and servant, or even artist and assistant, there’s just enough of a frisson between them to suggest that one of them, at the very least, has some repressed romantic feelings for the other. Yet of course a relationship between them would never happen. When it’s discovered that Griet—a servant—wore these expensive jewels, the Vermeer household is thrown into chaos, and Vermeer’s wife fires Griet. It’s an unjust and sad end to Griet’s career there, especially because Vermeer himself comes across as a coward—unable to stand up to his wife to declare that it was under his urging that Griet wore those titular earrings.
There’s more to the tale, of course, but I’ve already spoiled it enough, suffice to say that it is a beautifully written—if restrained, like Vermeer’s painting style itself—narrative that fills out the story of a painting that is otherwise pretty mysterious in some ways. We don’t know who the woman is, if she was a real-live woman who modeled for Vermeer. And we don’t know the circumstances of its creation. And that’s what actually makes the book, and the movie, successful—that it fills in those gaps where we don’t have a lot of historical details. But that doesn’t mean that it is anything but a fictionalization. Take, for example, the wealthy client who assaults Griet—he’s based on a real person, Vermeer’s primary patron, a man named Pieter van Ruijvan, but Chevalier uses him as a villain to serve her plot, as a novelist is wont to do. No shade at all here—that’s what novelists do! She uses the very broad strokes of real historical figures like Vermeer, Catharina, and Maria Thins to build her story. But Griet, it seems, is an entirely fictional character, not built upon any particular person.
And so, truly, is the Girl in a Pearl Earring. Most historians believe that this work is an example of a popular format in the Netherlands in this period—a type of work known as a tronie. The term tronie extends from the Dutch word meaning “face,” and was often a painting use as an experimentation for types of facial expressions or elaborate costuming. Lots of artists in Flanders and Holland during the 17th century created tronies, and once you start looking for them in Northern Baroque art, you’ll see them everywhere—in the works of Frans Hals, Judith Leyster, Jan Lievens, and one of the masters of the tronie, a man who transformed his own appearance frequently to inspire his tronies: Rembrandt. While tronies were sometimes created to work out the details of expression or physiognomy, they also sometimes were used to play with interesting character types- like a beggar, a drunkard, a musician, and so forth. Take Rembrandt’s Self Portrait in Oriental Attire, a work from 1631 and now in the collection of the Petit Palais in Paris. Here, the young Rembrandt provides us with a full-length study of himself dressed in an exuberant plumed turban and fur stole, standing with his right arm cocked and his left draped over a walking stick. Essentially, he’s playing a role here, using himself as a guinea pig for characters that might have occupied one of his many Biblical paintings—as the term “Oriental” here mostly just referred to any number of distant lands that seemed unbelievably exotic and fantastical to the Dutch at this time, though ongoing skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire during this period may have brought Turkish attire and accessories to front of mind. It’s very probable that Vermeer was interested in all of this exoticizing, too—and that Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of his takes on this subject matter, a tronie of a young girl in exotic dress and bearing some priceless jewels. So this “Mona Lisa of the North” is less a real person, like Mona probably was, and more of an idea, or an ideal—even if someone literally sat down and modeled for Girl with a Pearl Earring, it’s still probably not meant to be a portrait of that woman, but the concept of a beautiful young woman from somewhere evocative. And it’s that sumptuous beauty that seems to be the purpose of Girl—a showcase for Vermeer’s talents at creating a gorgeous scene, an image that would keep his patron happy, perhaps, and encourage further commissions and patrons to come his way. It might not be as romantic or dramatic a tale as the one that Tracy Chevalier so deftly spins, nor that Colin Firth and Scarlett Johannson portray in the film adaptation, but the result is stunning, breathtaking after four and a half centuries.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. Huge thanks to Mary Manfredi for her awesome research and writing help with this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their new show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, hosted by Josh Dasal, and visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to “ArtCurious” to show your support. To find the donation links and for more details about our show, please visit our website: artcuriouspodcast.com. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram at artcuriouspod. And we have podcast merchandise! Check out the link to our TeePublic store in the show notes on this episode, or on our website.
Check back with us soon as we explore the facts, and the fictions, of the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history.
