Girl in the spotlight

Occasionally, things work out well even if by pure accident. Serendipity, I think they call it.

In 1996, I was working for an American company, based in Baltimore, Maryland. A group of us travelled to the company headquarters, where we were met by a woman who remains a friend to this day. Let’s call her Peg, since that’s her name.

Peg had laid on a stretched limo to take us to Washington DC, which isn’t that far away, on a free day during our stay. That didn’t suit most of our party, who wanted to go shopping or, in one notable case, find the restaurant where ‘the waitresses serve you topless’.

In the end, Peg cancelled the limo and drove just two of us to DC herself. It was a brief trip and we couldn’t see much of the city. But we visited the National Gallery of Art where I was introduced for the first time to the work of the remarkable American painter Winslow Homer, but that’s not what I plan to talk about here today.

The other show we visited on that day was an exhibition of Vermeer paintings. It had previously been in London, but it was booked solid. So it was something of a surprise that we could just turn up in DC, buy tickets, and go in with minimal waiting time.

The work we did on that trip has left no trace in my memory, as it fades into the dusty history of business. But getting to that exhibitions has left an indelible mark on me. As well as providing me with a good friend.

Girl with a pearl earring

If I remember, I knew very little about Vermeer at the time, so it was staggering to visit an exhibition of 21 of his paintings, given that we only know of 35 in all. And, naturally, I was bowled over by Girl with a pearl earring, the painting which blows away most people who see it. Why, it’s even been turned into a novel by Tracy Chevalier from which a successful film was made. Starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, it’s not at all bad, by the way, in case you haven’t seen it.

The painting is extraordinary in many ways. Look at the earring – it really isn’t one, is it? The pearl is just a drop of white paint and there’s no hook attaching it to the ear. Again, small drops of light moisten the eyes and lips. The girl’s nose, too, isn’t separated from the cheek by anything – there’s no line. In fact, there isn’t a line anywhere in the painting. It’s all done by planes and, above all, by light, which is what Vermeer did best: play with light and use it to convey shape and mood.

There’s one thing about the painting, though, that has worried some people. There’s no background. That’s not Vermeer’s style. He would usually do extremely detailed paintings which filled the canvass with walls and windows, people, plants, again all working with light to produce the same haunting effect. Look at Woman holding a balance and you’ll see the complexity of the background, including more pearls shown just through drops of light, as well as the characteristic way he has the sunlight from the window play on the woman’s face.

Woman holding a balance

The background to Girl with a pearl earring is dark and without features. So is the painting by Vermeer at all? Or, to put it in other terms, just who was Colin Firth playing in the film?

It was a great pleasure to discover, therefore, that the Mauritshuis musem in Delft, Holland, Vermeer’s home town, which owns the painting, had just completed a project called Girl in the spotlight. Experts have used recent technology to take a closer look at the picture. Scanning techniques have allowed them to see lost details and even the way the building was built up.

They discovered that there was a background to the picture initially: a green curtain but, down the centuries, the pigment has faded to give us the featureless background we see today. And the project concludes:

Vermeer signed his artwork in the upper left-hand corner with IVMeer.

Good to know it’s by him. Not that I seriously doubted it. After all, how many artists have worked with pure light with such mastery? But it’s helpful to have it confirmed.

And it’s fun to be reminded of a great day, in fine company, in lovely surroundings nearly quarter of a century ago.