Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, New York, Dutton, 2000; 242 pages, $21.95 hardcover. - Review - book review

Art in America, March, 2001 by Gary Schwartz

Since no letters to Vermeer are known, Greenaway wrote some himself. His right to do this in an opera libretto will be disputed by no one. Unfortunately, the conceit he devised to account for the writing of these letters is so foolish that it undermines the central premise of the opera. Vermeer is said to be away from home for two weeks, during which time three women write letters to him: his wife, his mother-in-law and the housekeeper who poses for his paintings. The reason given for his absence is the following. In May 1672, Vermeer was called to The Hague from Delft to give an opinion concerning 12 Italian paintings whose authenticity was doubted. He was one of more than 50 painters called upon to do the same, between the 12th and 23rd of the month. None of them would have required, or could have been given, more than an hour or two for the job. Greenaway, however, has decided that Vermeer was in The Hague on this piece of business from the 16th to the 28th of May, and that he was too far from home to return even for a weekend; therefore the letters, which constitute the entire libretto. In the program book, he writes, "Delft and The Hague are some forty kilometres apart"--a misstatement which should have been corrected by his Dutch collaborators. The distance is in fact 14 kilometers. Today's train ride from Delft to The Hague takes seven minutes; a coach in Vermeer's time might have taken 70 minutes and a barge two hours. If Vermeer had gotten up early in the morning on May 23, the day of his deposition, he could have been home again for lunch, and no one would have missed him. The more the opera insists on its historical verisimilitude (the program book contains texts by John Michael Montias on Vermeer and Anna Pavord on tulipomania), the more ridiculous it makes itself.

With all the differences between the novels and the opera, Greenaway too, like the novelists, reads 17th-century Holland in terms of the same central concerns: female domesticity and sexuality, representations of the everyday in art.

Why, I ask myself as a student of Dutch art in the 17th century, did these writers choose to locate their fictions in that remote world? Why Vermeer? Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posed the question to the novelists in an article of Sept. 8, 2000, and received the kind of answers one would expect:

"I think Vermeer provides a moment of calm and tranquility in an age that moves too fast," said Susan Vreeland, author of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," one of a growing genre of recently published Vermeer-inspired novels. "He gives us permission ... to be still a moment." ... Chevalier tells the story of 16-year-old Griet, Vermeer's poor maid and reluctant model. The girl becomes the genesis for one of the artist's most beloved works, often called the Dutch "Mona Lisa." Steeping herself in descriptions of 17th-century Dutch culture, Chevalier described the inner workings of Vermeer's home and a romance she imagined could have occurred between Griet and the painter. "I've always loved the picture [Girl with a Pearl Earring]," said Chevalier, who's had a print of it since she was young. "It's seemingly simple. It is just a girl looking at you. But I feel like she mirrors my mood. When I am sad she looks sad, when I am happy she looks happy. I wanted to explain that look on her face."