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''Girl with a Pearl Earring'' is a 1999
historical novel Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past events, but is fictional. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other ty ...
written by
Tracy Chevalier Tracy Rose Chevalier (born 19 October 1962) is an American-British novelist. She is best known for her second novel, '' Girl with a Pearl Earring'', which was adapted as a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. Personal backgr ...
. Set in 17th-century
Delft Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, ...
, Holland, the novel was inspired by
local Local may refer to: Geography and transportation * Local (train), a train serving local traffic demand * Local, Missouri, a community in the United States * Local government, a form of public administration, usually the lowest tier of administrat ...
painter
Johannes Vermeer Johannes Vermeer ( , , #Pronunciation of name, see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period Painting, painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class, middle-class life. ...
's '' Girl with a Pearl Earring''. Chevalier presents a fictional account of Vermeer, the model and the painting. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name and a 2008 play. In May 2020, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new dramatisation of the novel.


Background

Tracy Chevalier's inspiration for the novel was a poster of Johannes Vermeer's '' Girl with a Pearl Earring''. She had bought the poster as a nineteen-year-old and it hung wherever she lived for sixteen years. Chevalier noted that the "ambiguous look" on the girl's face left a lasting impression on her. She describes the girl's expression "to be a mass of contradictions: innocent yet experienced, joyous yet tearful, full of longing and yet full of loss." She began to think of "the story behind that look”, imagining it as directed at the painter. Chevalier's research included reading the history of the period, studying the paintings of Vermeer and his peers, and spending several days in Delft. Pregnant at the time of researching and writing, she finished the work in eight months because she had a "biological deadline".


Plot

Sixteen-year-old Griet has to leave her family home in
Delft Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, ...
in 1664 after her father is blinded in an accident. As a tile-painter, her father is a member of the artists’ guild, so employment is found for her as a maid in painter Johannes Vermeer's household. In the strictly stratified society of the time, this is a fall in status because of the bad reputation that maids have for stealing, spying and sleeping with their employers. A further complication is that the Vermeers belong to the grudgingly tolerated Catholic minority while Griet is a Protestant. At their home, she befriends the family's oldest daughter, Maertge, but is never on good terms with the spiteful Cornelia, a younger daughter who takes after her class-conscious mother, Catharina. Griet also finds it difficult to keep on the right side of Tanneke, the other house servant, who is moody and jealous. Griet lives for two years at her employers’ and is only allowed to visit her home on Sundays, where the family circle is breaking up. Her younger brother Frans is apprenticed outside and eventually her younger sister Agnes dies of the plague. But during the early months of her work at the Vermeers', Pieter, the son of the family butcher at the meat market, starts courting Griet. She has been strictly brought up and does not welcome this at first, but tolerates his interest because it is of advantage to her impoverished parents. Griet is increasingly fascinated by Vermeer's paintings. Vermeer discovers that Griet has an eye for art and secretly asks her to run errands and perform tasks for him, such as mixing and grinding colors for his paints and acting as a substitute model. This takes up much of her time, and Griet arouses the suspicions of Catharina, but Vermeer's mother-in-law,
Maria Thins Maria Thins (c. 1593 – 27 December 1680) was the mother-in-law of Johannes Vermeer and a member of the Gouda Thins family. Life Maria was born in Gouda. In 1622 she married Reynier Bolnes, a prominent and prosperous brickmaker. In 1635 the ma ...
, recognizes Griet's presence as a steadying and catalyzing force in Vermeer's career and connives at the domestic arrangements that allow her to devote more time to his service. However, Griet is warned by Vermeer's friend,
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek ( ; ; 24 October 1632 – 26 August 1723) was a Dutch microbiologist and microscopist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as " the ...
, not to get too close to the artist because he is more interested in painting than he is in people. Realizing that this is true, Griet remains cautious. Vermeer's wealthy but licentious patron,
Pieter van Ruijven Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven (1624 – August 7, 1674) is best known as Johannes Vermeer's patron for the better part of the artist's career. Van Ruijven was born in Delft, the son of a brewer and a Remonstrant. In 1653 he married Maria de Knui ...
, notices “the wide-eyed maid”, molests her when he can and pressures Vermeer to paint them together, as he had with an earlier maid that Van Ruijven had then made pregnant. Griet and Vermeer are therefore reluctant to fulfil this request and eventually Vermeer comes up with a compromise. Van Ruijven will be painted with members of his own family and Vermeer will paint a portrait of Griet by herself which is to be sold to Van Ruijven. For the painting, he forces her to pierce her ears and wear his wife's pearl earrings without her permission. Cornelia seizes the chance to let Catharina discover this and in the resulting scandal Vermeer remains silent and Griet is forced to leave. Ten years later, long after Griet has married Pieter and settled into life as a mother and butcher's wife, she is called back to the house following Vermeer's death. Griet assumes that Vermeer's widow wishes to settle the household's unpaid butcher’s bill. There Griet learns that Vermeer had asked for her painting to be hung in the room as he was dying. In addition, though the family is now poorer, Vermeer's will has included a request that Griet receive the pearl earrings that she wore when he painted her, which Van Leeuwenhoek forces Catharina to hand over. Griet realizes, however, that she could no more wear them as a butcher's wife than she could have as a maid. She therefore decides to pawn the earrings and pay the fifteen guilders owed to her husband from the price.


Reception

The novel was published in Britain in 1999 and a year later in the United States, where it became a ''New York Times'' bestseller. It was nominated for several fiction prizes, and won the
Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of July 7, 2020, the company operates 614 retail stores across all 50 U. ...
Discover Award in 2000 and the 2001
Alex Award The Alex Awards annually recognize "ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults ages 12 through 18". Essentially, the award is a listing by the American Library Association parallel to its annual Best Books for Young A ...
for books that have special appeal to young adults. In 2001 Plume released the U.S. paperback edition with an initial print-run of 120,000 copies; a year later the book had been reprinted 18 times with close to two million copies sold. In 2005
HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...
brought out a UK special edition with nine colour plates of Vermeer paintings, published in celebration of one million copies sold. ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' described the work as a "brainy novel whose passion is ideas"; ''
Atlantic Monthly ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'' praised Chevalier's effort "in creating the feel of a society with sharp divisions in status and creed”. However, ''
Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of B ...
'' noted details that “threaten to rob the narrative of its credibility. Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve a painting demands one stretch of the reader's imagination. And Vermeer's acknowledgment of his debt to her, revealed in the denouement, is a blatant nod to sentimentality”. Details were also called into question by the art historian Gary Schwarz, particularly the simplistic portrayal of the Catholic/Protestant division in a country where the differences between Protestants were equally important. As well as the high English-language sales, the novel’s popularity has seen it translated into most European languages and in Asia into Turkish, Georgian, Persian, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean.


Themes

Rather than writing a story of Vermeer having an illicit relationship with the household maid, Chevalier builds tension in the work with the depiction of their restraint. As ''
Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
'' magazine notes, Chevalier presents "an exquisitely controlled exercise that illustrates how temptation is restrained for the sake of art".Sheppard, R.Z
"A Portrait of Radiance"
Time. January 9, 2000. Retrieved November 13, 2010.
The restraint is also a function of the distanced style that Chevalier chose for her narrator, Griet. It has been noted that its aim is to replicate Vermeer's style of painting. It concentrates particularly on visual detail, both in the appearance of characters and of domestic surroundings, and their spatial placing in relation to each other. It is this cool approach that differentiates the book from the three other novels published in 1999 which also deal with 17th century Dutch painting.
Susan Vreeland Susan Joyce Vreeland (January 20, 1946 – August 23, 2017) was an American author. Several of her books deal with the relationship between art and fiction. ''The Passion of Artemisia'' is a fictionalised investigation of some aspects of the l ...
's ''Girl in Hyacinth Blue'' is a set of stories centred upon a supposedly lost painting by Vermeer; and Katharine Weber’s ''The Music Lesson'' deals with the stolen Vermeer painting of that title.
Deborah Moggach Deborah Moggach (née Hough; born 28 June 1948) is an English novelist and screenwriter. She has written nineteen novels, including '' The Ex-Wives'', ''Tulip Fever'' (made into the film of the same name), ''These Foolish Things'' (made into ...
's ''Tulip Fever'', on the other hand, is set in Amsterdam and also deals with the love between a painter and his subject. In addition, it too started from an attempt to decipher the enigmatic look of the sitter in a painting of the period. Another theme - that is demonstrated in the narration rather than commented on overtly - is how women of that time, in Lisa Fletcher's words, "did not own their bodies, but were the possessions first of their parents, then of their employers, and finally of their husbands. As the novel progresses, Griet becomes increasingly aware that she is 'for sale'".Fletcher, Sheffield Hallam University She is given no choice by her parents over whether or where she will work. Van Ruijven and other characters assume she is sexually available simply because she is an unchaperoned maid. And once Pieter becomes Griet's accepted suitor, her parents leave her alone to his physical advances, anticipating that the match will be to their benefit.


Historical materials

Apart from '' Girl with a Pearl Earring'' itself, in which Griet is the sitter, several more of Vermeer’s paintings feature in Chevalier's novel. At the very start, ''
View of Delft A photograph taken in 2019 from approximately the point where Vermeer painted the painting. ''View of Delft'' ( nl, Gezicht op Delft) is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer, painted ca. 1659–1661. The painting of the Dutch artist's hometown is ...
'' is recalled by Griet's father. When Griet enters the household, Vermeer is working on ''
Woman with a Pearl Necklace ''Woman with a Pearl Necklace'' by Johannes Vermeer is a Dutch Golden Age painting of about 1664. Painted in oils on canvas, Johannes Vermeer portrayed a young Dutch woman, most likely of upper-class descent, dressing herself with two yellow ribb ...
'' and Tanneke mentions soon after that she had been Vermeer's model for '' The Milkmaid''. His next subject is ''
Woman with a Water Jug ''Woman with a Water Jug'' (Dutch: ''Vrouw met waterkan''), also known as ''Young Woman with a Water Pitcher'', is a painting finished between 1660–1662 by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in the Baroque style. It is oil on canvas, 45.7cm x ...
'', for which the baker's daughter models. Griet describes the painting to her father and also witnesses its creation in closer detail now that she is helping in the studio. Van Ruijven's wife (Maria de Knuijt) later models for ''
A Lady Writing a Letter ''A Lady Writing a Letter'' (also known as ''A Lady Writing'') is an oil on canvas painting attributed to 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It is believed to have been completed by artist during his mature phase, in the mid-to-late 1660 ...
''. During this episode it is recalled that she had previously appeared in '' Woman with a Lute'' and that her husband had seduced the maid who sat for ''
The Girl with the Wine Glass ''The Girl with the Wine Glass'' (''Dame en twee heren'') is an oil on canvas painting by Johannes Vermeer, created ''c.'' 1659–1660, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, in Braunschweig. Painting materials The pigment analysis done by Herman ...
''. Van Ruijven himself, a sister and a daughter, figure in '' The Concert'', which is conceived of as a successor to ''
The Music Lesson ''The Music Lesson'', ''Woman Seated at a Virginal'' or ''A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman'' by Johannes Vermeer is a painting of a young female pupil receiving a music lesson from a man. The man's mouth is slightly agape giving the impr ...
''. A further painting, ''
The Procuress ''The Procuress'' may refer to: * ''The Procuress'' (Cranach) * ''The Procuress'' (Dirck van Baburen) * ''The Procuress'' (Vermeer) {{DEFAULTSORT:Procuress, The ...
'', is not Vermeer's painting of that title but a genre piece by
Dirck van Baburen Dirck Jaspersz. van Baburen (c. 1595 – 21 February 1624) was a Dutch painter and one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Biography Dirck van Baburen was probably born in Wijk bij Duurstede, but his family moved to Utrecht when he was still youn ...
that belongs to Maria Thins. This hangs on the wall to the right of ''The Concert''. Finally we hear from Vermeer's daughter Maertge that she has been painted, a reference to ''
Study of a Young Woman ''Study of a Young Woman'' (also known as ''Portrait of a Young Woman'', or ''Girl with a Veil'') is a painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, completed between 1665 and 1667, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The paint ...
''. These paintings that survive compensate for the lack of much real information available in the historical record about the main male characters. That has allowed Chevalier to integrate into her imaginary scenario some of the few facts that are known about Vermeer and so give her fiction the appearance of reality. But scarcity of evidence extends outside the Vermeer household as well. Although
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek ( ; ; 24 October 1632 – 26 August 1723) was a Dutch microbiologist and microscopist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as " the ...
is known to have acted as executor to Vermeer's will, there is no documentary proof of friendship between the two. Van Leeuwenhoek was certainly interested in optical devices and it has been speculated that Vermeer made use of a
camera obscura A camera obscura (; ) is a darkened room with a aperture, small hole or lens at one side through which an image is 3D projection, projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. ''Camera obscura'' can also refer to analogous constructions su ...
, but that is as far as the evidence goes. Again, there is a high level of probability that
Pieter van Ruijven Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven (1624 – August 7, 1674) is best known as Johannes Vermeer's patron for the better part of the artist's career. Van Ruijven was born in Delft, the son of a brewer and a Remonstrant. In 1653 he married Maria de Knui ...
was Vermeer's patron, since 21 of the artist’s paintings belonged to his estate, but no documentary evidence survives. And there is certainly not the slightest hint that he was the sexual predator that Chevalier portrays.”Pieter van Ruijven”
Essential Vermeer
/ref> Such considerations are important since, as Lisa Fletcher argues, historical novels "intervene in our view of the past" and influence our reaction to it in the present. Thus it was noted that the 2001 exhibition of “Vermeer and the Delft School” at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
in New York "attracted almost twice the number of visitors than the Vermeer exhibition held at the
National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
in Washington in 1996. For
Walter Liedtke Walter Arthur Liedtke, Jr. (August 28, 1945 – February 3, 2015) was an American art historian, writer and Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was known as one of the world's leading scholars of Dutch an ...
, the gallery's curator of European paintings, the success of he exhibitionwas due, at least in part, to Chevalier's novel."


See also

*
Girl with a Pearl Earring (film) ''Girl with a Pearl Earring'' is a 2003 drama film directed by Peter Webber from a screenplay by Olivia Hetreed, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Tracy Chevalier. Scarlett Johansson stars as Griet, a young 17th-century servant in t ...
*
Girl with a Pearl Earring (play) ''Girl with a Pearl Earring'' is a 2008 play. Adapted by David Joss Buckley from the 1999 novel of the same title by Tracy Chevalier, it premiered at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. It then received its London premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket ...


References


Bibliography

* Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring, HarperCollins paperback, London 2000 * Lisa Fletcher
Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring
Insight Publications 2012 * Lisa Fletcher

Sheffield Hallam University {{DEFAULTSORT:Girl with a Pearl Earring 1999 British novels Novels set in the Netherlands Novels about artists Cultural depictions of Johannes Vermeer HarperCollins books British novels adapted into films British novels adapted into plays Novels set in the Dutch Golden Age Works about Johannes Vermeer