Cravate Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, 1665, is an oil on canvas painting of a young girl in three-quarter profile view gently turning her head and looking warmly at the viewer. The headpiece scarf wrapping and hanging from the subject's head is rendered in sunny, contrasting tones of warm yellows and cool blues, here an ultramarine tint or cornflower blue, a color scheme explored in many of the Dutch master's compositions. Her pearl earring glistens softly in white highlight at the center of the composition. The girl's enigmatic expression is timelessly frozen in anticipation of a smile, laughter, or asking a question of the viewer. Johannes (Jan) Vermeer (1632 - 1675) was a Dutch master painter of interior genre scenes whose works were rediscovered in the 19th century. In carefully constructed, geometric compositions drawn in meticulous linear perspective, Vermeer explored the effects of light and color across human figures, objects and textures in sunlit, domestic rooms, building upon the optical discoveries and 3D perspectival depth of Leonardo and the Renaissance. Both a painter and an art dealer, Vermeer slowly produced a few of his painstakingly executed, richly pigmented compositions per year, living entirely within his home city of Delft, eschewing the fame of his near contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt that he achieved finally in the modern era.