The Vermeer masterpiece The Girl With A Pearl Earring is on loan at the Frick, along with other Dutch art from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis. Daniel Gelernter explains why the painting still fascinates:
The composition is striking, but explains nothing: A bust-length portrait of a girl looking up at
you over her left shoulder against a dark background is the exact same thing you’ll see in Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman (ca. 1665-67) in the Met. But this is a great painting, and the one at the Met is not. This girl has an earring, of course—which is rather too much talked about. Suffice to say, it’s not a pearl; it’s probably a painted teardrop of glass. You can find the same earrings in at least five other Vermeers, including (most clearly) in the Frick’s very own Mistress and Maid (ca. 1666-67)…
In this Mauritshuis show, you’ll find pieces by contemporary inferior painters: the workmanlike Nicolaes Maes; the uninspiring Gerard ter Borch; and the fussy and generally awful Jan Steen. Of course, they didn’t have Vermeer’s technique. And, given a million years and the same exact subject matter (which they often had), they could not—and never did—approach Vermeer’s elegance in composition. Nor could they match the simple beauty of Vermeer’s palette. But the greatness of Girl with a Pearl Earring is elsewhere, beyond. In the final analysis, Vermeer is an artist, whereas Maes, ter Borch, and Steen are just photographers without cameras.
The art of the one-frame, super-short-story masterpiece by Vermeer—or by Velázquez, Homer, or Hopper—is truth. It was said of the great 1650 Velázquez portrait Juan de Pareja (ordinarily the greatest painting in our hemisphere) that it was truth itself. In the Frick exhibition, look at As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young (ca. 1665) by Jan Steen: There are 10 figures in that painting and not a single real, true human. Then look into the eyes of Vermeer’s girl. She has a mind; she thinks. There is a wish on the tip of her tongue. You wish that you could talk to her and you know that, if you could, she’d have something to say to you. That makes a great painting. I think it’s what people mean when they say something “really speaks to” them.
(Image of The Girl with A Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, 1665, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 