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Girl with a Pearl Earring - A Book Review

© Tricia Dake

For quite some time, I have been fascinated by Dutch artists - by the austerity of their lives, the lack of flamboyance, the seriousness of their demeanor, and the tenacity of their existence in an environment perpetually at odds with the ever-encroaching sea. The art from the Netherlands often appears simple though it is not. Vermeer’s homey scenes convey a depth I find hard to turn away from. So naturally it was with great delight that I read the fictional story “Girl with a Pearl Earring” that addresses aspects of this great artist’s life.

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" By Tracy Chevalier, A Plume Book published by the Penguin Group, 1999.

Use the following link to view the painting: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/vermeer... For a larger view, when you get to the page, click on the painting itself.

The story centers on a girl who could have been the subject of a Vermeer painting. The story is not so much about Vermeer himself but more about his household and an imagined rivalry among the women – his wife, daughters, and servants - living there. In a household with only one male figure, is it not likely that the women living there would in some manner seek his approval?

In the course of reading this rather extraordinary novel, I learned a great deal about the life of a seventeenth century artist – the need for solitude, the devotion to art for its own sake, the necessity of paid commissions, and the toil of creating the colors needed to paint with. It never occurred to me that the artist himself, or an assistant, would need to actually grind out the colors from natural substances, even gems, to a fine dust and add linseed oil in order to achieve the vibrant colors found in paintings. Perhaps you’ll think me obtuse, but I never even considered how the paint was made. I love Chevalier’s description of the process of finely grinding “bones, white lead, madder, massicot.” Through the explanation made by her protagonist, we too “learn how to wash substances to rid them of impurities” – rinsing and re-rinsing colors “sometimes thirty times to get out the chalk and sand and gravel.” We learn that to achieve a pure blue paint, lapis lazuli was ground.

Tracy Chevalier as a writer has succeeded in showing the reader rather than merely telling. Though the story feels as if it is moving slowly due to the author’s keen attention to detail, upon taking a metaphorical step back, it becomes clear that a great deal goes on in this story in a remarkably short space of time and pages. It is a novel most difficult to set aside.

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