Girl with a Pearl Earring Puzzle – 1000 pieces

Biographical information on Johannes Vermeer , born in Delft in 1632 and died at the age of just forty-three, is scarce and fragmentary.
The son of an innkeeper who occasionally also worked as a painting dealer, in 1653 the artist joined the Guild of Saint Luke , the painters’ guild of his hometown, rising to become its dean ten years later. Having come into contact with Rembrandt in Amsterdam, perhaps even just through printed reproductions, he was certainly admired.
Indeed, Vermeer drew from the Dutch tradition a taste for sharp, detailed painting. His favorite subjects were the interiors of popular or lower-middle-class homes, which he captured by creating unparalleled, rarefied atmospheres, pervaded by a caressing, evanescent light.

His characters are also influenced by an extraordinary study of light, often filtered through glass windows and curtains, in order to outline with vibrant intensity always clear and serene volumes.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer

Girl with a Pearl Earring is an oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated circa 1665.
Having gone by various names over the centuries, it became known by its current title towards the end of the 20th century following the earring worn by the girl portrayed here.
The painting is a tronie, a 17th-century Dutch description of a “head” that wasn’t intended to be a portrait. It depicts a European girl wearing an exotic dress, an oriental turban, and what was thought to be a very large pearl earring.

Girl with a Turban, a small canvas also known as Girl with a Pearl Earring, the artist provides us with one of the highest and most moving examples of his uncommon expressive abilities.
The portrayed girl, perhaps the master’s last born, is captured in a spontaneous and sudden movement that makes her meekly turn her head three-quarters towards the observer, almost as if she had been called at that very moment.

The light then lights up the turban with bright touches of yellow and light blue, while the soft opalescence of the pearl finds significant reflection in the lively and very natural sparkle of the eyes. The mouth, with thin but delicately fleshy lips, opens in a stupefied sketch of
smile, giving us one of the most intense and intimately true portraits of all seventeenth-century Dutch painting.