A gem or an accident of the brushstroke? The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.

7 min readDec 16, 2024

They don’t call Johannes Vermeer’s The Girl with the Pearl Earring as the Mona Lisa of the north for nothing. Just like Mona Lisa, we don’t who the fuck that girl is, where she’s from or whether she’s turning away from us or coming towards us. It is different than much of Vermeer’s work which depicts the daily life of the citizens of Delft — pouring milk to a saucer, practicing their music, writing letters. It is a tronie, a painting focusing on the subject’s expression instead of the action the subject is performing.

As such, it makes the painting all the more mysterious. But we’re reviewing the book here, not the painting. Chevalier’s novel is a fictional speculation of who the girl might be; in her story, it was a maid who came as a help to the Vermeer household and who ignited an innuendo with the painter. So let’s call it what it is: It is elevated Vermeer fan fiction. As you start to dig more into who Vermeer was, the ambiguities of his relationships, we get a sense that Chevalier had taken these ambiguities into a hyperbole to the story’s advantage, but not necessarily the painter’s reputation. Readers should be aware that they don’t mistake the historical fiction as factual history.

But this is not a critic of what Chevalier had done, it is a mere warning label. Chevalier wrote a concise and compelling read, a vivid world at the tail end of the Dutch golden age, and despite its speculations is still an educative and entertaining work. Well, it got me interested in the Dutch and Flemish masters and Vermeer’s techniques. You wouldn’t need to look at the real paintings to know how beautiful these paintings are. The Dutch masters are irrefutable experts in the play of light and shadow. The novel, I think, is trying to interplay the relationship of this light and shadow, but it may have muddled the canvas a little.

The unsuspecting maid cum Mona Lisa

Griet, with a blind father who could no longer work, must take a job as a maid with the well-known Vermeer. At the time Vermeer was a full time art dealer and part time painter, with four children and another on the way (in his life he would breed eleven offsprings). Griet was hired after Vermeer saw her arranging her chopped vegetables based on how the colours came together. She was hired as the second maid in the house.

The matriarch of the house is Maria Thins, the mother of the pregnant Catharina, Vermeer’s fecund wife. As Griet started to learn the ropes, she also has to grapple with the relationships with the matriarch, the wife, the children, the first maid Maertge and Vermeer himself. Out of all the children, she only has to worry about Cornelia, who has an evil streak. Griet quickly enjoyed the privileges in the house that not even Maertge or Vermeer’s wife was allowed to: entering the studio. Her task was to clean the studio but to leave things as they are exactly, the perceived messiness of things were an essential part of Vermeer’s compositions.

Griet becomes a collaborator in part, as Vermeer decided to share some of his techniques with her, including using the camera obscura to improve his light compositions, repainting and removing some items in the painting, and how he painstakingly creates paints from grinding bones to dust — a task which was eventually delegated to Griet. Her rapport with the painter grew to an uncomfortable innuendo, as Griet learned her own womanhood in a pivotal time of her adolescence. Paradise doesn’t last long however, as Griet caught the eyes of Vermeer’s sponsor, Van Ruijven who had a history of extramarital love affairs.

Van Ruijven wanted Griet to be in a painting, something that everybody but Van Ruijven was opposed to. There was not much choice to be had save to paint Griet clandestine. In the household, this was a secret shared only between the painter, the model and Maria Thins, who had every interest as Vermeer’s customer relationship manager. But the secret won’t last much longer as things like these don’t stay secrets for long. The venomous Cornelia and Vermeer’s jealous wife hang heavy on the edges of the frame. Both were ready to pounce.

The nature of the canvas

One thing not mentioned in the summary for brevity’s sake is Griet’s relationship with her family and Peter, the butcher primed to be her husband. In my version of the book, Vermeer’s famous painting is prominent as the cover image to the book’s sheath, but just inside, a couple of Dutch tiles were prominent within the book’s covers. Throughout the novel, there is a frequent juxtaposition between the upper class and lower classes, often embodied in the opposing surfaces of the hard tile and the more brittle canvas of the painter.

The canvas, worked on in a period of months would feed the family for some time. Some of these paintings were used literally to feed the family as the baker overlooked Vermeer’s debts, so that Vermeer could buy bread in credit for his family. But the paintings are merely vanity projects for the subjects. Van Ruijven, Vermeer’s early collector, would have his wife model with pearls and luxurious clothes. Would Van Ruijven know eventually what the monetary of these paintings be worth?

The tile is more humble, almost mass produced but each handmade meticulously. There is a difference in risk compared to grinding bones to produce paint, as Griet’s father lost his eyesight in the kiln in processing his tiles; and Griet’s brother who was punished in working in the furnace (also a low status job) after having carried on with his employer’s wife. But the humble tile, arguably, is more useful to daily life than a beautiful painting of a milkmaid.

The question of which profession is more honourable is up for discussion. The painting feeds intellectual and artistic emotions, a vessel for cathartic experience; the tile, pretty, but much more functional. One is built in illusion of riches: Vermeer was badly in debt; the other could only provide a humble living. This is the push and pull of the hedonistic Dionysian forces opposed to the structural harmony of the Apollonian forces, if we want to take it that far. We then must question that ugly question: what’s the purpose of art? The book raised the question without answering it.

For Griet, she’s stuck in the middle: somewhere between the canvas and the tile (or symbolically, the butcher’s cutting board), but it is imperative that she selects one or the other. Her attraction to Vermeer is the attraction to the arts, that inexplicable magnetism one is drawn into when one sees the striking colours of the canvas playing the trick of the eye. Yet, she made the sensible decision to marry the butcher, basking in the smell of blood and slaughter rather than the meshing of the bones of the artist’s paint. We can say that the humble tile comes up victorious.

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If you haven’t seen any of Vermeer’s paintings, look him up. It will set the tone of the book. His portraits of the day to day life in the low countries during the period is akin to Edward Hooper capturing the mood of the Americas caught in a great war. The pearl earring in the painting is fictional, as is possibly the girl in the painting. It may have been bred out of Vermeer’s imagination, a tronie. Vermeer wouldn’t have been able to afford such a grand earring.

At closer inspection, the earring is a mere dash of paint, with a bright spot to accentuate the light. It could have been a lackadaisical mistake by the painter, but an opportune one, which gives the whole meaning to the painting. Griet, in the novel, is this very embodiment of the pearl earring. She may have only existed in our minds as a brushstroke, but she is integral to the story. However, the closer we look at her, the more opaque she becomes.

A gem or an accident of the brushstroke? The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.

The unsuspecting maid cum Mona Lisa

The nature of the canvas

Further reading / watching

Written by Kit Teguh

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