Girl with a Pearl Earring was never meant to be a portrait.
Vermeer's most famous face isn't a picture of anyone in particular. It is a 'tronie', a Dutch study of a character in exotic costume. It sold in 1881 for about two guilders. And the famous pearl may not be a pearl at all: it has no hook to hang from.
Johannes Vermeer painted the small canvas, only about 44 by 39 centimetres, around 1665. It is signed but not dated. In 17th-century Dutch terms it is a tronie: a 'head', an imaginative study of a face or type, often in fancy dress, rather than a commissioned likeness. Here the girl wears a turban and what appears to be an unusually large pearl. It may be one of two tronies 'painted in the Turkish fashion' listed in Vermeer's estate after his death.
Its title has drifted. After it entered the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1902 it was known as Girl with a Turban; in English it was often simply Head of a Young Girl. The pearl only took over the name towards the end of the 20th century. Who the model was remains disputed; suggestions range from Vermeer's eldest daughter to the daughter of his main patron, but nobody knows.
Its fortunes have swung wildly. At an auction in The Hague in 1881, the collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe bought it, in poor condition, for two guilders plus a small premium. He left it to the Mauritshuis. Today it is among the most recognisable paintings in the world, helped by Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel and the 2003 film.
Science keeps revising it. A 2018 study found tiny eyelashes and traces of a green curtain behind her, suggesting Vermeer painted a real person in a real space, not an abstract face; the curtain's organic pigments have faded, leaving the dark background we see. The astrophysicist Vincent Icke has argued the earring looks more like polished tin than pearl, and conservators note the 'pearl' is a painted illusion with no outline and no hook.
Source: Wikipedia — Girl with a Pearl Earring · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
