Nobody knows who the Girl with a Pearl Earring was. No document from her time names the young woman who posed for the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer around 1665.
Her name may never have mattered. Vermeer painted the picture as a tronie, a Dutch type of painting that shows an invented character, often a face in exotic dress, made for any buyer rather than ordered by the sitter.
A model probably posed for him in his studio in Delft, a town in the Netherlands, but nothing identifies her. Art historians have put forward his eldest daughter, or the daughter of his chief patron, a wealthy Delft collector.
The answer many people give is a maid called Griet, and she is pure fiction. The American-born writer Tracy Chevalier invented her for her 1999 novel, which imagines a servant in the painter's house sitting for the picture.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
What the novel imagined, scientists tried to read in the paint itself. Between February and March 2018 the Mauritshuis, the museum in The Hague that owns the picture, took it down for a close scientific examination, to learn how it had been made. The results came out in April 2020.
The team was led by Abbie Vandivere, the museum's paintings conservator, the specialist who studies and restores its pictures. Scanners and microscopes could not give the model a name. They showed instead that the canvas on the wall today has lost some of what Vermeer put there.
The eyelashes she lost
The first loss is on her face…
What You'll Discover
What the dark behind her once was.
What her blue headscarf is made of.
What her pearl really is.
What she sold for in 1881.