I made a pilgrimage to see Vermeer's Girl with a Peal Earring at the Mauritshuis in Den Haag. I've been wanting to go for a long time, and today felt like the time. I am still not feeling quite up to snuff, so it was my big adventure for the day. I sat and looked at her for a good long while next to an elderly Dutchman who was watching her longingly.One thing I am learning on this trip is that art is not the same in reprints as it is in real life. In reprints, the girl looks a bit interesting, but in the real life portrait, she looks downright mysterious. She's intriguing, she's got a secret, she loves the painter, perhaps even respects him, but she knows some things he doesn't, and he knows it.
Not much is known about the painting, although there's a lot of speculation about it. I did read the novel of the same name a few years ago. I enjoyed it as a story, but no one really knows what happened.
That's something that keeps coming up in class, actually, how people's memories are notoriously unreliable, yet during research we expect people to remember things exactly. There's this interesting gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to perceive us, and between truth and reality. And what we remember about a certain event is not how others remember it at all. Anyway, I like Tracy Chevalier's interpretation of what might have happened, and I wish there were some others to think about as well. Any budding novelists out there? Get on this one.
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