Meeting The Girl For The First Time

I fell in love with her long before I met her. I cannot tell you if it was from seeing her picture in a book, or my overall fascination with everything coming from the Dutch Golden Age, one of the richest periods in creative history. Or was it Tracy Chevalier’s masterfully crafted book, or the stunning performance of the Girl in the film? All I know is Johannes Vermeer’s painting of “The Girl With The Pearl Earring” became an obsession, something -- and someone -- I had to see for myself.

Fortunately for me, I have been able to travel to Holland several times on the cheap, due largely to my niece and nephew, who always open their home to us, saving us beau coups de bucks. They also are proud of their heritage and love only too well to play tourist along with their guests. Anything we want to see, they will do what they can to make it so.

On our first visit to Holland my mission was to see the Huygenshuis in Hofwijk, the summer home of Constantijn Huygens, arguably one of the most influential personalities pf the Seventeenth Century. His son, Christiaan Huygens, astronomer-scientist-mathematician-inventor, one of my all time heroes, spent his summers there. During that visit to Holland we also toured the fames Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, but “The Girl” hangs somewhere else.

On a later visit, we went to the museum where she lives. It is the Mauritshuis in Den Haag (the Hague), a beautiful Seventeenth Century three story mansion designed by Jacob van Campen, with its construction overseen by none other than Constantijn Huygens. The building now makes for an intimate museum, easily traversed in a few hours without rushing.

We walked from room to room, painting to painting, awed by the diversity of subjects and artists. We entered one large room and our eyes were immediately drawn to a painting on the wall opposite the door. The painting was not overly large, measuring about three by four feet, yet it dominated the wall. It was Vermeer’s “View of Delft.” Once again I was stunned by something I had witnessed before: even among several similar pieces, some stand out with a unique brilliance. Even before realizing it was a Vermeer, I recognized its status as a masterpiece just by looking at it.

But I wanted to see the Girl. I scanned the room, turning back toward the door through which I had entered. And there she was.

She hung in a space near the door that seemed to radiate with its own energy. A small platform rested in front of her so the viewer could step up for a close look. You could touch her -- she rested open and unprotected except for a museum guard positioned in the room. You could practically smell the paint, over three hundred fifty years old. I had never felt such intimacy with a work of art.

Vermeer is known for his sense of light playing against shadow, and for using a camera obscura to help capture the richness of detail his paintings convey. The camera obscura, an early precursor to photography, helped Vermeer create snapshots in oil of the life he knew and saw around him.

I was immediately struck by two things. The painting was small, at 17.5x15 inches much smaller than I had imagined. And yet it was larger than life. The Girl’s enigmatic expression reaches across three and a half centuries to beguile and haunt you with her simple beauty. Only the earring she wears shows any sign that she is an extraordinary person, which, socially, by all accounts available she clearly was not.

But to see her was to see someone as close to immortality as any of us will ever get.