A tronie is a Dutch painting of a single head or bust, made to show a type, a character or an expression rather than the likeness of a named person.
The best known is Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted around 1665 by Johannes Vermeer of Delft and kept in the Mauritshuis, a museum in The Hague.
In seventeenth century Dutch, tronie was an everyday word for a face, a head or a facial expression, and painters and collectors used it for this kind of picture too.
What set it apart from a portrait was who the picture was for. A portrait was ordered by its sitter, who paid to be recognized. A tronie was painted first and then sold to any buyer who liked the face.
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Vermeer's girl shows the difference clearly. A young woman probably posed for him, but the painting was never meant to say who she was, and no document records her name.
What he painted instead was a face in costume. Her turban is made of two pieces of cloth, a blue band wrapped around her head and a yellow length that hangs down behind it in heavy folds.
Dutch women did not wear such headdresses. To a Dutch buyer, the turban gave her an Oriental air, the look of someone from Turkey or the Middle East. The pearl at her ear is too large to be real, and she looks back over her shoulder at the viewer, her lips slightly parted.
By 1665, heads like this one had been on sale in the Netherlands for nearly forty years. The trade had started at the end of the 1620s in Leiden, a university town in Holland, with two young painters.
Rembrandt and Lievens in Leiden
Until then, a painted head was mostly a working tool…
What You'll Discover
The old man who posed for three painters.
Why a self-portrait title can mislead.
How a 1696 auction listed Vermeer's faces.
What the girl sold for in 1881.