Nicknamed the "Mona Lisa of the North", this beautiful painting - one of the most famous Baroque portraits

When people talk about this painting, they immediately use the word "luminescent," mention how perfectly the pearl is painted, and go on to how the girl herself looks like a pearl. But that is how Vermeer painted. He is incapable of painting without luminescence and all his women look like pearls.

The subject

• the subject here is only a simple head of a girl looking over her shoulder at the viewer. No hint of a setting is provided, other than its atmospherically dark tone.

Intimacy

• The direct contact between subject and spectator, and the slightly parted position of the lips implies significant intimacy. The girl is wearing a simple brownish-yellow top, which contrasts strongly with her bright white collar. A further contrast is offered by her blue and yellow or turban (or chaperon) which gives the picture a distinctly exotic effect. Turbans were a relatively common accessory in Europe from the 15th century

The Meaning of the Girl with a Pearl Earring

• The most noticeable feature of this picture is the girl's enormous, tear-shaped pearl earring. This pearl earring, possibly along with the girl's turban, may unlock the meaning of the painting.

• It was then believed that women should protect their ears from unclean words, and that they should allow them to hear only chaste words.

There is no going back…….

• The girl with her luminous skin and her pearl earring is on the verge of discovering desire. She is beginning to soften and open, and she has not quite assimilated what is happening in her body and her imagination. Look again at the nearly absent breasts--she is very young, she is in the thrall of the kiss, and there is no going back from the previous moment.

A kiss is just a kiss or ….even more?

• The clue to this painting is in the mouth. Reproductions give an impression of a pink smudge. What you see in the original is that this girl has just been kissed, kissed long and firmly, so that her mouth is slightly swollen and blurred in definition. Vermeer has painted her in the instant after the kiss before

she has had time to move her lips or blink her eyes.

• The viewer is at risk of falling in love with the tenderness of her face. This painting is not about a face: it is not a portrait. It is about a young girl overwhelmed by feeling, a young girl in the fraction of an instant before her future happens.

• Oooops….sorry, this one

This Is How I see It…..