Book Review: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Griet is sixteen, and would ordinarily be living in her parents’ home for another few years, preparing for the day she would get married and join her husband’s family. But her father was blinded in an accident at his job as a tile painter, and it will be years yet before her brother graduates from his apprenticeship and starts earning money. So the guild has decided to help out by getting Griet a job as a maidservant.
As it happens, prominent guild member and portrait painter Johannes Vermeer is soon to add yet another child to his growing family, so they could use the help. And Griet has a talent that will make her especially valuable, a detail-oriented sense that will allow her to clean in the master’s studio without moving anything from the place he needs it to be. We and Vermeer first see this when she’s chopping vegetables for soup, showing a natural gift for color balance.
A maidservant’s work is hard, and Griet must learn to deal with the varied people in the household, from Vermeer’s mother in law, the matriarch of the clan, through Vermeer’s often cranky and often pregnant wife, through the children, one of whom is especially bratty, to the senior maidservant who sees Griet as a threat. But there are compensations, too. Griet gets to see the creative process of a master artist up close, observing the paintings as they slowly develop.
And more, once Vermeer realizes how acute Griet’s artistic sense is, he brings her closer into his world, allowing her to mix his paints and even asking her advice on the development of paintings!
But though Vermeer’s family is better off than Griet’s, he still needs to support them, and as such he needs wealthy patrons to buy his paintings. One of them, Van Ruijven, is a lecher that has already had his way with one of Vermeer’s previous models, and now he has set his eye on Griet. Griet has no interest in being a married man’s plaything, but Van Ruijven insists on having her one way or another.
Vermeer’s answer leads to the creation of the masterpiece known as “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
Relatively little is known about the personal details of Vermeer’s life, so there is plenty of room for fiction in this novel set in 1660s Holland. Griet and her circumstances are entirely made up, which is all to the better. She’s a fairly engaging viewpoint character whose circumstances are difficult but wastes little time with might have beens. (It’s hinted that in another time and place she would have been a skilled painter herself.)
I especially liked the recurring use of the compass rose in the Delft town square to show the different directions Griet’s life takes, including the moment she chooses her own future.
This is a quiet novel, with most of the focus being on the developing relationship between Griet and Vermeer. She develops a crush on him, but he’s self-absorbed enough not to notice, and his fixation on his work causes Vermeer to make some missteps dealing with his wife’s feelings. The development of the relationship between Griet and her future husband is more perfunctory.
It’s worth noting that since a fair amount of time is spent on Vermeer’s artistic process, the author goes with the idea that he used a “camera obscura” supplied by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to created some of the effects in his paintings.
This 1999 book was a best-seller, and there was a movie in 2003. Keeping in mind that the personal relationships and personalities in the story are almost entirely made up to serve the narrative, I recommend this book to those interested in life in Holland in the Seventeen Century, and those wanting books about the artistic process.
And here’s a trailer! (Ooh, Scarlett Johansen!)
