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

Vermeer's women are in charge of their own lives. They are unattached but do not flaunt their independence; the way they read letters and receive male guests makes them seem open to approaches from the right men. If they have parents, the old folks have been parked out of sight. Perhaps most important of all: Vermeer ladies have no children to interfere with their elegant lives or disturb that magic silence broken only by the strains of a mandolin, a guitar, a clavecin.(6)

Who are these women? Did anyone in the Netherlands live lives like theirs? I cannot imagine who. Not even the richest burghers lived in such luxury. Dutch women had to make at least a show of adhering to standards of thrift, industriousness and piety to which none of Vermeer's ladies makes even the slightest curtsy. Moreover, women with that kind of money of their own were too good a catch to be left husbandless into their twenties. Once married, they bore children, ran busy households, conducted family business, served public charities. At court, where some women were as wealthy as Vermeer ladies, there was even more to be done. From morning to night, the wife of a prince of Orange was probably never alone in a room by herself or with one maid. The closest "reality" to which I can relate these images is that they look like the imaginings of a wealthy man about how his courtesan-mistress spends her time between his visits. Proust may have thought that what captivated Swann in Vermeer was a patch of yellow wall, but wasn't he more likely to have found in Vermeer's heroines an ideal fantasy about how Odette filled her days?(7)

The iconographic descent of Vermeer's ladies as traced by Blankert bears out this reading. He demonstrates that these women are representatives of a type known as the juffer or juffertje, a word that in ordinary language means only young lady, but which as an artistic motif implies a certain Holly Golightly quality. Blankert calls them images of "unattainable ambitions and dubious behavior." In most Dutch paintings of this kind, the juffers are in the company of jonkers or malle jonkers, madcap young men. Such subjects, he writes (with interspersed quotes from a treatise of 1661 by Cornelis de Bie), are "young people ... engaged in `foolishness and riotousness,' `gorging and a great deal of other craziness,' including `teasing and prancing,' bass and viol playing, gambling, courting, dancing, `guzzling.'" They "`swim in evil'" and live above their station, "`without rule, without moderation.'"(8)

Vermeer's jonker-less compositions are cool, stripped-down versions of such scenes. The action is less explicitly frivolous, leaving room for later viewers to read them in the more dignified ways that have become the norm. No such associations were to be expected from his original audience, who saw in paintings of juffers a morally questionable high life. Nothing in Vermeer would have belied those expectations. The replacement of riotousness with seeming respectability would not have reduced the suggestiveness of these images for them.