The most famous girl in the world

Every world-famous artwork has one thing in common: it is extremely well made. This is true of our Girl too. Just look at the light that Vermeer painted. It falls softly on the girl’s face, making her eyes sparkle and the pearl earring gleam. Or at the vivid colours in front of the dark background: the fresh blue of her headdress, the greeny-yellow of her jacket and the red of her lips.

Vermeer painted the girl without any hard lines. We call this technique sfumato, the Italian word for smoky or blurred. This means that all kinds of details are missing, such as the hook for the earring – Vermeer did not paint that at all. And where does her nose turn into her cheek? So you can see more than Vermeer actually painted: your brain fills in the details so subtly that you don’t even notice it happening. But this also means that everyone sees something different and that we each have our own Girl.

Rather than a portrait, Vermeer painted an idealised girl’s face. A girl from Delft probably posed as the model, but Vermeer painted her wearing a headdress that wouldn’t have been worn by Dutch women at that time. This made the painting even more fascinating to look at. Vermeer turned his model into a kind of supermodel.

Paintings like this were called ‘tronies’ in the 17th century. This work was then described a ‘tronie painted in the Turkish style’ or a ‘tronie in the antique style’.

The fun of an anonymous girl like this is that you, the viewer, can decide who she is. What’s her background? What does she do? What does she worry about? What are her dreams? You can fill it all in for yourself. The best-known story about this girl is by Tracy Chevalier. She wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring and named the girl Griet. The book was turned into a film starring Scarlett Johansson.


February 6 - June 4, 2023

In February 2023, our world-famous and most beloved masterpiece, Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, was on loan to the Rijksmuseum for eight weeks for the Johannes Vermeer exhibition. Yet the spirit of the Girl never left the Vermeer room....

For 5 months creatives all over the world had the chance to be displayed in a digital frame in the Girl’s original spot in the Vermeer room. A very desirable spot where hundreds of people a day admired your versions of our Girl.

The presentation My Girl with a Pearl shows that the Girl is recognizable in everything and everyone. In a son or daughter, in buttons, an iron or just a few swipes of a brush.