Girl with a Pearl Earring,oil painting on canvas (c. 1665) by Dutch artistJohannes Vermeer, one of his most well-known works. It depicts an imaginary young woman in exotic dress and a very largepearlearring. The work permanently resides in theMauritshuis museum inThe Hague.

An observant and deliberate painter, Vermeer produced only 36 known works in his lifetime, while many of his contemporaries completed hundreds. Like his peers, he mostly depicted scenes of ordinary life, later called “genre”painting, often of women at daily tasks. Notable examples includedGirl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657) andThe Music Lesson (c. 1665). He occasionally signed his paintings. WhileGirl with a Pearl Earring bears “IVMeer,” it is undated. Historians believe Vermeer painted the small piece (17.52 × 15.35 inches [44.5 × 39 cm]) around 1665, during the period in which he executed a group of paintings with a shared pearl motif.

Girl with a Pearl Earring represents a young woman in a dark shallow space, anintimate setting that draws the viewer’s attention exclusively on her. She wears a blue and goldturban, the titular pearl earring, and a gold jacket with a visible white collar beneath. Unlike many of Vermeer’s subjects, she is not concentrating on a daily chore and unaware of her viewer. Instead, caught in a fleeting moment, she turns her head over her shoulder, meeting the viewer’s gaze with her eyes wide and lips parted as if about to speak. Herenigmatic expression coupled with the mystery of her identity has led some to compare her to theequivocal subject inLeonardo da Vinci’sMona Lisa (c. 1503–19). Unlike theMona Lisa, however,Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait but atronie, a Dutch term for a character or type of person. A young woman might have sat for Vermeer, but the painting is not meant to portray her or any specific individual in the same way that Leonardo’s piece portrayed an existing person (likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant). Vermeer’s subject is a generic young woman in exotic dress, a study in facial expression and costume. The workattests to Vermeer’s technical expertise and interest in representing light. The soft modeling of the subject’s face reveals his mastery of using light rather than line to create form, while the reflection on her lips and on the earring show his concern for representing the effect of light on different surfaces.

Although now a highly regarded artist, Vermeer was not well known outside of his native city ofDelft during his lifetime or in the decades after. Historians credit the 19th-century French critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile-Thoré (under the pseudonym of William Bürger) for reassessing the artist’s work, which eventually led to Vermeer’s distinguished reputation. Even so,Girl with a Pearl Earring became one of Vermeer’s more famous pieces only around the turn of the 21st century, with the 1995 blockbuster exhibition at theNational Gallery of Art inWashington, D.C., and the publication of the best-selling novelGirl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier in 1999. The book fashioned the painting’s subject into a housemaid named Griet who works in Vermeer’s home and becomes his paint mixer. It was adapted into anOscar-nominatedfilm in 2003 starringScarlett Johansson as the fictional Griet andColin Firth as Vermeer.

As the Mauritshuis building underwent renovation in 2012,Girl with the Pearl Earring traveled to Japan,Italy, and theUnited States. It drew crowds in each location,attesting to its now firm place in audience regard. WhenGirl returned to the Netherlands in 2014, the Mauritshuis announced it would no longer lend out the painting, assuring visitors that the museum’s main attraction would always be in its home. It made an exception in 2023, however, for the blockbuster exhibition devoted to Vermeer at theRijksmuseum, Amsterdam, loaning the work for eight weeks.

In 2018 the Mauritshuis embarked on a two-year investigation of the artwork. Using modern imaging techniques to look at layers beneath the surface, researchers uncovered a green curtain behind the girl and confirmed that she has eyelashes, though they may be hard todiscern. Researchers also tested Vermeer’s materials, mapping the sources of his pigments. They discovered that he liberally used the costlyultramarine, a pigment derived from the semiprecious stonelapis lazuli, found only in what is now Afghanistan, for the headscarf. He also used a red pigment derived from an insect living in Mexico and South America for the woman’s lips.