Girl with a Pearl Earring
1672 was so difficult for Vermeer as well as the entire Dutch Republic. It led to a downturn in the art market. He borrowed large amounts of money and was even caught embezzling money from his mother-in-law.
However, Vermeer’s 1665 study of a young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern, almost as if it were a photograph. This gets into the debate over whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic device called a camera obscura to create the image. Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it has been speculated that she might have been Vermeer’s maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder, locking eyes with the viewer as if attempting to establish an intimate connection across the centuries.
Technically speaking, Girl isn’t a portrait, but rather an example of the Dutch genre called a tronie–a headshot meant more as a still life of facial features than as an attempt to capture a likeness.
