Girl with a Pearl Earring

History

It is not a portrait but a tronie, a Dutch study of a face, a costume or an expression, and no one knows who the girl was. Vermeer painted her turban in costly ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli, and the pearl with a few strokes of white. In 1881 it sold at an auction in The Hague for two guilders and thirty cents. The buyer, Arnoldus Andries des Tombe, left it to the Mauritshuis when he died in 1902. A study in 2018 found fine eyelashes and a green curtain behind her, now faded into the dark.