Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Meisje met de parel) is an oil on canvas, 44.5 × 39 cm, painted by Johannes Vermeer around 1665; it is in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. 670).

The Mauritshuis stresses that it is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch seventeenth-century study of a type or character, here a girl in exotic dress with an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl. It is signed 'IVMeer' but not dated. It may be one of the two tronies 'painted in the Turkish fashion' listed in the inventory drawn up after Vermeer's death, and possibly a 'tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful' sold in Amsterdam in 1696. Who sat for it is unknown: suggestions have included Vermeer's eldest daughter Maria and Magdalena van Ruijven, daughter of his patron, but none is established. Over time it has been called Head of a Young Girl and Girl with a Turban; the present title became standard only in the 1990s.

Vermeer painted on a yellowish ground, using ochres, natural ultramarine, bone and charcoal black and lead white. The museum's 2018 research project, The Girl in the Spotlight, led by conservator Abbie Vandivere, examined the canvas in full view of visitors. It found tiny eyelashes invisible to the naked eye and showed that the now-dark background was once a green curtain whose glaze of indigo and weld has faded. The pearl itself is made of just two strokes of paint, with no contour and no hook.

In 1881 the painting was in poor condition when Arnoldus Andries des Tombe bought it at a sale in The Hague for two guilders thirty, on the advice of Victor de Stuers, who campaigned to keep Vermeer's works in the Netherlands. Des Tombe lent it to the Mauritshuis and left it to the museum by bequest, recorded in 1903. It was hidden during the Second World War and, after years of touring, has stayed in The Hague since 2014. It inspired Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel, the 2003 film and works by Banksy and others, and a CNN survey named it one of the world's most recognisable paintings.