Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years

we've been filming the biggest exhibitions in the world

about some of the greatest artists and art in history.

Not only do we record these landmark shows,

we also secure privileged access

behind the scenes of the galleries and museums concerned.

Then we use the exhibition as a springboard

to take a broader look at these artists.

In this film we focus on something rather different.

In 2014 one of the most beautiful galleries in Europe,

the Mauritshuis, in The Hague, reopened after years of renovation.

It contains a staggering collection of Dutch art,

above all by the 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.

Famously, less than 40 paintings by Vermeer have survived

and they're the pride of any collection.

In the USA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington

and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

both have a handful each,

but the most famous, the most reproduced and the most mysterious

resides at the Mauritshuis.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

is surely one of the most popular paintings in the world today.

Yet so little is known about it, or so people have assumed.

A fresh look at the painting itself

and the glorious collection at the Mauritshuis

allows us to search for answers to the many questions that exist.

It's a wonderful detective story,

and a wonderful moment in the history of art.

(From E. V. LUCAS, English travel writer, 'A Wanderer in Holland')

"To me it is one of the most beautiful things in Holland.

"It is, however, in no sense Dutch:

the painting is Dutch only because it is the work of a Dutchman.

"No other Dutch painter could compass

such liquid clarity, such cool surfaces.

"Indeed, none of the others seem to have tried:

a different ideal was theirs.

"Apart, however, from the question of technique,

upon which I am not entitled to speak,

the picture has to me human interest beyond description.

"There is a winning charm in this simple Eastern face

that no words of mine can express."

"All that is hard in the Dutch nature

dissolves beneath her reluctant smile.

"She symbolises the fairest and sweetest things

in the Eleven Provinces.

"She makes Holland sacred ground."

(NARRATOR) During a two-year programme

of building, renovation and reconstruction,

the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring embarked on a global tour

with other treasures from the famous Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague.

She was the tour's poster girl

and attracted enormous crowds wherever she went.

Now she's returning home to a growing sense of excitement

as the Mauritshuis, one of Europe's leading art galleries,

reopens to the public once again.

But what is it about this 17th-century picture,

this mysterious Dutch girl painted by Johannes Vermeer,

that has projected her to such iconic status?

Who is this Mona Lisa of the north?

We've seen the Girl with a Pearl Earring all over the world recently,

starting in The Hague and going to Japan, the US, Italy,

and she's really captured everyone's imagination.

And the question I often got was, what makes her so special?

It was interesting to get this question in different countries

and you would see that really has a kind of universal appeal.

I think this comes down to a number of factors.

I wish I could give you one straight answer,

but let's start with the obvious: she's absolutely gorgeous.

She's a beautiful girl, something you really want to look at.

The composition is very clever.

You see a brightly coloured figure against a dark background,

which in a sense projects her into our space

and really invites us to engage with her.

That is of course only strengthened by her gesture,

the way she looks over her shoulder, her mouth slightly parted.

There's a little tiny fleck of paint on the corner of her lips

that indicates she's just saying something.

Her whole attitude is very much inviting,

it invites you to engage with her.

It's simplicity. Absolutely simple,

just the head, just the person,

no background, no reference to a place.

I think it's a timelessness that is really rooted

in the relationship between the artist and the subject.

It gives you this entry, a psychological entry if you like,

to the person without any sort of veils of materialism.

You feel very close physically to her when you look at the painting,

which I think is quite different from The Mona Lisa,

where I feel an extraordinary distance,

that massive amount of space emotionally and physically

between myself and the image of The Mona Lisa.

With Girl with a Pearl Earring,

she seems like somebody who you could afford to be familiar with

and I think she's very sexy actually.

She's not provocatively beautiful,

but there's something very, very attractive about her.

I think it's entirely in the way it's painted,

not in what she looks like.

I think what's most alluring about the painting

is that it's unresolved and unresolvable.

I've looked at it for many, many years

and I still don't know what's she's thinking.

I still don't know if it's a happy painting or a sad painting.

That seems such a basic thing to be able to unpack about a painting.

You ought to be able to know what you're looking at.

But actually, Vermeer has somehow managed to capture in her

a whole lot of contradictions.

(From EDWARD SNOW, art historian, "A Study of Vermeer", 1975)

"To meet this girl's gaze is to be implicated in its urgency.

"It is ME at whom she gazes, with real, unguarded human emotions

and an intensity

that demands something just as real and human in return.

"One grows complicit in the painting's own impossible desires.

"Her eyes sharpen the underlying mood

into something poignant and piercing,

and focus it on the artist, on the viewer,

with a mixture of reproach and regret.

"The act of looking is haunted here

by suggestions of violation and betrayal."

"Is it our life that makes her real?

"Is it her vibrancy of being that we lack and long for?"

It's her eyes,

the one pearl earring

and her lips.

And they have these white dots of paint

and it's like they've been anointed with paint

rather than softly focused

so they look extremely shiny.

But there's a wetness about it.

I think that one of the things that makes paintings of people great,

is if you can make the eyes and the lips look wet.

It's funny because everybody...

you know, the catchword is earring and pearl

and yet I think he's said,

"These lips, these eyes, they're like pearls, they shine,

and they're wet and of the water."

So it's all about the illusion

and that's also very smart of an artist like Johannes Vermeer,

who must have been a perfect observer of reality

because you have to understand reality to make an illusion of it.

And he somehow knew when you look at a pearl

it's all about the reflection.

That's all you have to paint, the reflection, and you've got a pearl.

Also when you look at her face, she has no eyebrows,

but you don't need them.

And for some reason the bow of her nose, it's not there,

it's all brushed out, but you don't notice.

When you look at her it's just beauty.

You don't think something is missing, not at all.

But also somehow he understood how the brain works,

that you can leave things out

and make it more perfect and more real by leaving it.

We think frequently of Dutch paintings...

and even my academic colleagues will write, you know,

"What is Vermeer's or Rembrandt's message in this picture,

what is he saying to the people of his time?"

For the most part they're not talking to the people of their time.

It's not a media experience, like a broadcast.

It's one picture for one individual

that sat in a private collection for a long time.

So much of what Vermeer does

is addressed to a voyeur who knows he is a voyeur.

The conundrum around the Girl with a Pearl Earring

is that Vermeer's model has never been identified

and there is no evidence to confirm who she is.

Could she be his daughter? His wife? A servant?

Or someone from the street? A neighbour perhaps?

Many debate this issue,

but the lack of evidence adds to her mystery and allure.

TRACY CHEVALIER: I was lying in bed one morning

and the painting was on the wall opposite the bed.

I looked at it, just sort of idly thinking about it,

and I suddenly thought

"I wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that?"

And it was the first time I had ever thought

about the girl's expression actually being to do with the painter.

Before, that had been disconnected somehow.

This time I realised, to myself anyway,

that this was not a portrait of a person,

it was more like a portrait of a relationship.

And everything she felt about him was right there in her face.

So I got up

and I went and got out the exhibition catalogue from the show

and read about the painting and more about Vermeer,

and I discovered that they have no idea who she is.

They don't know who any of the models in his paintings are.

They suspect that they are his - mostly women -

they are probably his wife and daughters,

cos he had a lot of daughters,

but they don't know.

I looked at it and I thought: "I want to write about this

and since they don't know, that's great,

because I can make up whatever I want."

The fame of Girl with a Pearl Earring is a modern phenomenon.

For 200 years no one even knew where the painting was.

In fact, even its painter, Johannes Vermeer,

was essentially forgotten too,

until a French art historian called Theophile Thore-Burger

wrote several articles about Vermeer

which led to his rediscovery in the middle of the 19th century.

In 1881, a dirt-encrusted painting of a girl

came up for auction in The Hague.

Only two experts suspected the picture was a Vermeer,

A. A. des Tombe and Victor de Stuers, an influential civil servant

who campaigned for Dutch art to remain in the Netherlands.

The two men were neighbours in The Hague

and decided to hatch a plan to acquire the painting.

Victor de Stuers and Des Tombe went together to the sale in The Hague

and they agreed not to bid against each other.

They went as friends.

Des Tombe was a collector.

Victor de Stuers had produced copious notes about his collection

and was also a patron of the arts,

and Victor de Stuers was involved in what is now called Heritage.

Des Tombe bought it for 2 guilders 30 cents.

It was very dirty.

Des Tombe had already decided, I think,

to give his collection when he died to the Mauritshuis, in his will.

They acquired it when he died.

Victor de Stuers never stopped drawing.

This I think is probably the earliest,

I would guess done at the sale,

because he's written underneath it "to Des Tombe".

And then there's another sketch in which the inscription says,

"Des Tombe bought it for 2 florins 30,

and lent it to the Mauritshuis", which is exactly what he did do.

All three drawings that we have

were drawn in the year it was bought.

The third one is a much more finished drawing

in which in the catalogue entry just says

"belongs to Des Tombe in The Hague"

and says that it's signed and attributed to Vermeer.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring may never have come to light

if the picture had not been recognised and restored.

It sometimes seems remarkable that any painting survives the centuries,

with exposure to changing conditions and different owners.

But many things can be learnt about a painting

and the original intentions of an artist

when highly skilled conservators use technology to examine a picture,

looking beyond what is visible to the naked eye

and analysing the material it is made of.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring

entered the collection at the end of the 19th century.

It wasn't until 1960 that it was then treated in the Mauritshuis.

When it was treated again in the 1990s

the natural resin varnish had really discoloured

to a point that it was no longer considered presentable.

The varnish was actually quite brown,

and the first thing that's done after examination of the painting

is actually to take an x-ray, to have a clearer indication

of the state of the painting or its condition.

It became immediately clear from the x-ray

that there are a multitude of tiny losses over the entire painting.

Fortunately they're mostly small in scale

and scattered over the surface,

not all located in one area, for instance in the face.

I think a lot of people have an idea

that paint is actually very stable and nothing much can happen to it

but in fact paint is pigments

bound in oil-binder in the case of traditional oil paintings,

applied on top of a ground layer, on top of a support.

That support can be canvas or it can be panel,

and of course temperature and relative humidity

affect the shrinkage and expansion of those layers individually

and over time can cause delaminations or tiny losses.

The picture has also been framed, often in many cases several times.

That could also have caused cracks in the painting.

So we're looking at these tiny damages and monitoring,

making sure that they're not increasing in size,

that there's no further damage to the painting.

Well, I think, as a conservator,

we're rarely tempted to make things more beautiful than they really are.

When the picture was treated in the '90s

there were details that were uncovered

that had been covered over by a previous restoration,

so you can say that a restoration can reveal

features of a painting that had been previously unknown.

For instance the little highlight on the lip

had been covered over by previous retouching.

This is a really important feature of the picture

because it actually makes her lips look more fresh and glistening.

That was a feature that was covered over.

And there was an extra highlight on the pearl earring

that, in fact, was an upturned paint flake.

So the process of restoring

brings the picture closer to what the artist intended.

The man who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring was born in Delft in 1632.

Johannes Vermeer was the son of a silk merchant

who also ran an inn and dealt in the sale of artworks.

Little is known about Vermeer's youth

until he asks to marry a Catholic girl, Catharina Bolnes, in 1653.

Her mother, Maria Thins, seems to have opposed the marriage

until Vermeer converted to Catholicism.

Vermeer and his young wife then moved in with Maria where they set up home.

Catharina would eventually give birth 15 times,

with 11 of those children surviving to adulthood.

Remarkably, Johannes also found time to be a painter.

I find Vermeer intriguing as a painter

because apart from the droplets of white paint

that bring shine to the very last touches of making the image,

I can't really work how the rest of the picture is made.

It's extremely clever,

and in modern language, it doesn't reveal its process.

If you look at a Rembrandt you can follow the brush strokes.

They get more complicated as they get into the face,

but around the clothing you can see

how he's matching gesture to folds of cloth

or wrinkledness to the way a brush is scrubbed around a cheek.

But with Vermeer I really cannot work out how he does it.

It looks like a kind of photographic emulsion to me,

that has been almost processed wet in a tray,

not put on as sticky stuff with a hairy brush.

So there's magic. It's just a celebration of skill.

I think he must have been a very clever man.

WALTER LIEDTKE: Vermeer has very thin layers

that he will blend together,

whites over blues or yellows

and different colour relationships he's trying out.

When you look under a microscope at a pearl,

you might see a pool of milky paint, maybe with a blue base behind that,

and then he'll drop just a pinhead

of brilliant white, lead white, on top of that

and it will look from a certain distance like pearls blurred

as if in a slightly out-of-focus camera -

which is realistic enough.

Our eye doesn't take in, with sharp focus, anybody.

But if we're looking at someone, we'll focus on a particular area,

and another area will be somewhat blurred.

Blurring in an illusionistic picture

actually makes it look more realistic I think.

But these things read from a distance as an optical experience,

so that many people say, "Oh, he must have had some sort of camera,"

or some other analogy,

some secret trick which describes reality in that way."

And he does in a way,

because he's been experimenting with different techniques

that render daylight.

And the colours, yellow and blue and then a touch of red in the lips...

Vermeer keeps doing the primaries over and over again,

red, blue, yellow, or slight mixtures of them

in very careful harmonic relationships.

So there's all these elements you could describe as composition,

which make this picture so easy to look at and so intriguing.

It's not known where Vermeer learned his craft or with whom he studied,

but some scholars think he may have been influenced by Rembrandt,

who lived in Amsterdam and was much older than him.

We do know that he became a respected citizen of Delft

and a prominent member of the Guild of St Luke,

and, like his father before, he valued and dealt in selling art.

He was not a prolific painter

and it is thought that he took a long time to complete a work.

His known output numbers around 36 pictures.

Vermeer lived his whole life in Delft,

which was an important centre of trade.

His close relationship with the city is captured

in what many believe to be one of the greatest cityscapes ever painted,

View of Delft.

The French writer Marcel Proust

thought it was the most beautiful painting he'd ever seen.

In his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, published in 1913,

he created a character, an art critic,

who is fatally overcome by Vermeer's genius.

(From PROUST, In Search of Lost Time, 1913)

"He was in front of that Vermeer which he remembered as dazzling,

more different than all that he had known,

but where, thanks to the critic's article,

he noticed for the first time small blue figures,

and he also noticed that the sand was pink

and, finally, the precious matter of that small patch of yellow wall."

"His dizzy spells increased.

"Like a child striving to grasp a yellow butterfly,

his glance would attach itself to that precious small patch of wall.

"'It's thus,' he thought, 'that I should have written.

My last books are too dry.

'They should have had several layers of colour,

should have rendered my phrase precious,

just like this small patch of yellow wall.'

"Nevertheless, the seriousness of his dizzy spells would not leave him."

"He repeated to himself, 'Little patch of yellow wall with a dormer.'"

"But now he let himself fall on a circular settee.

"He fell to the floor

where all the museum visitors and guards rushed to him."

"He was dead."

People have commented

on how the shadows in the water have been extended,

and actually in x-rays you see that they're extended.

They were in one place, then in another place

and other adjustments are made.

And through where the light is cast on a building,

Vermeer couldn't have recorded the pattern of light, shade, colour

and everything else in like an hour, which he would have had to,

given the lighting conditions outside, much less than that.

This is the product of artistic decisions over months,

so he's really pointing the viewer in certain directions.

Another fascinating thing which is almost never mentioned

is the clouds above the view of Delft.

They are deeply shaded on the underside.

I actually think he probably saw a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael

and lifted this idea.

He's looking at other landscapists.

And quite as the landscape recedes over the water back to the city,

you could get the same effect turning the picture upside down

and feel that sense of recession.

In other words, the clouds create a ceiling

that seems to be going into the picture, enhancing the depth also.

But look at all details,

especially a detail for instance with the boats in front.

I like all the different kinds of colours he used

just to suggest it has probably just rained so these boats are wet.

You see the reflection of the light

because the sun is coming through again.

This is really the mastery of the paint, and how do you do it?

It's all kinds of different colours, different brush strokes

and you believe him.

So when you see the painting -

when you enter the Vermeer room in the Mauritshuis

you would see this painting -

it's almost like a window, an extra window in the room.

Then you come close by, then of course you see it's a painting,

and if you get even more close by

you really do see the paint, you see the skin.

Vermeer seems to have been affluent enough to support his large family

until war broke out in 1672 and France invaded the Netherlands.

He had fewer clients, and still only in his 40s, he sank into debt.

By the age of 43 he was dead.

Vermeer's genius flourished

during a period that saw the Netherlands rise

to one of the world's first global empires.

The Dutch dominated the world's sea routes

and opened up new channels of trade, especially with the East.

Companies like the powerful and influential Dutch East India Company

generated huge amounts of wealth

impacting, in turn, the affluence of contemporary Dutch society.

It was estimated that five million paintings were produced

during a 75-year period known as the Dutch Golden Age.

It was against this background

that, in 1633, Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen

commissioned the building of the Mauritshuis

in a very prominent position next to the Binnenhof in The Hague,

the seat of the Dutch Parliament.

The building was designed in a classical style by Jacob van Campen

and was completed while Johan Maurits was away,

performing his duties as the Governor of Dutch Brazil.

On his return, he filled his house

with things he'd collected, from feathers to paintings.

After his death in 1679, the house passed to the Maes family,

who leased it to the Dutch government.

In 1704, a fire destroyed most of the interior of the building,

which was restored in an 18th-century style some years later.

The Mauritshuis was bought by the Dutch government in 1820

to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings and Curiosities

and officially became a museum in 1822.

Many paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, like Girl with a Pearl Earring,

mixed the exotic with the mysterious.

Trade with the East

meant that a vast array of sumptuous goods and foreign travellers

arrived in the Netherlands.

Everything from spices to textiles,

decorative objects and strange animals,

began to appear in Northern Europe through trade.

You also see a transition

from largely religious paintings done in earlier periods,

for example our painting by Rogier van der Weyden,

The Lamentation of Christ.

These sorts of paintings would have been done for devotional purposes,

for churches or for private devotion.

In the 17th century in the Northern Netherlands,

people are using paintings in a very different way.

They're not necessarily commissions for religious purposes,

but they're often more decorative. For example,

someone might want a beautiful Italianate landscape on their wall

which was a kind of vacation from the dreary Dutch climate.

It's a very different idea from something done for religious purpose

to something that had maybe a different function.

I think that's the miracle of the 17th century in the Netherlands.

There was just an influx of people coming to the Dutch Republic

from present-day Belgium because of the political situation there,

so many people fled to the northern Netherlands

and these were talented artists.

We already had talented artists in the country

so there was sort of a boom in painting.

And of course you can make paintings

but there have to be clients, customers for that.

The churches, for instance, were whitewashed.

There were no commissions any more for altarpieces,

so artists had to look for different commissions.

They thought, "Well, what do we need to make

in order to make a living?"

So they started making a lot of landscapes or still lives

and of course many portraits

of very proud Dutch burghers who wanted themselves portrayed.

This is something that is quite unique that you see.

They're almost painted as being a king or queen themselves.

This is really very remarkable

and very typical also for the situation in the Dutch Republic.

That is unique, I think, in Europe at the time.

It was a feature of Dutch and Flemish art of the time

to produce paintings that were immersive and told a story.

Vermeer was considered a master of composing simple scenes,

full of intrigue and mystery.

His serene compositions seem to suggest a more complex narrative.

Who are the central characters in his paintings?

We really don't know, which seems to be Vermeer's intention,

but he was not alone in conjuring up illusion.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring

is something that specialists now call a tronie

because that's what it's frequently described as in inventories.

This is T-R-O-N-I-E, and it is a now defunct Dutch word.

I'm told it's still used occasionally in police stations

for mug shots and so on.

It goes back to a now defunct French word, trone,

and this refers to simply a head or expression,

maybe suggesting a certain emotion.

It implies individuality but at the same time anonymity.

Tronies are frequently based on real people.

In the popular imagination that's a portrait,

and this picture has frequently been described as a kind of portrait.

Rembrandt was really important. I think without Rembrandt

Vermeer probably would not have painted his own tronies

because Rembrandt sort of popularised this theme of tronies.

So he painted soldiers and young girls or old women as types,

so these were never meant to be recognised as portraits.

Also if you made a portrait of someone,

someone had to pay you for that.

So he used models from the street,

he would dress them up,

or if he didn't have models he would dress himself up

and then copy what he saw in the mirror.

This dressing up is something that,

at least painters of the time, they liked to do.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring is wearing a silk scarf on her head

and a colossal pearl,

which probably couldn't have been a pearl at all

but a glass imitation.

Such things were made in Venice at the time.

And the turban vaguely suggests orientalism or the Middle East.

I think that if the Girl with a Pearl Earring

was to be described in an inventory at the time,

even though she does look like a Dutch face,

and the jacket itself is ordinary clothing,

she would probably be described something like "tronie a la Turk",

head in a Turkish fashion.

Artists of the 17th century excelled in telling a story

through the skilful rendering of a moment in time.

Most would agree that the master of this was Rembrandt,

an artist who had a great influence on painters of the day,

and we think also on Vermeer.

Rembrandt van Rijn is considered

one of the preeminent stars of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp was an early masterpiece.

It brilliantly displays his great ability to tell a story

through clever composition and the rendering of light,

a feature that would mark his career.

Rembrandt wanted to be a history painter

and tell stories in his work.

At only 25 he received a commission from the Guild of Surgeons

to paint the leading surgeon of the day, Dr Tulp.

It was a great honour for such a young artist,

but he did something different with his commission.

(From NINA SIEGAL: The Anatomy Lesson, 2014)

"Since there were so many men to include in this picture

I decided to start with a pyramidal shape,

as I have with my new composition of Christ's Descent from the Cross,

the one I'm working on for the stadtholder.

"There is a beautiful cohesion that comes from a pyramidal structure.

"If you've got the geometry right,

every point in the painting seems to relate to every other point.

"As the viewer, your eye is encouraged

to move back and forth between the elements

before settling directly into a single focus.

"You see different characters

and give each of them your visual attention

for as long as they interest you,

and then your eye moves along to the next character,

knowing that each one plays a role in the unfolding drama."

In this room we have a beautiful collection of Jan Steen paintings

and what's interesting is that we both have the largest Steen,

As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young,

and also the smallest painting, The Oyster Eater

When you look at paintings from the 17th century

the important thing you have to realise is,

they were painted to entertain, for enjoyment, to look at

and see how beautiful they are

or how funny the scene is which was depicted,

but often they also contain a message, they have a deeper meaning.

We have in Dutch expression "the household of Jan Steen"

where everything goes wrong.

The children run around and don't listen to the parents

and the parents are smoking and drinking,

giving a bad example to the young ones

and all of that you see in this painting.

And we see the older generation for instance Jan Steen himself.

It's a self-portrait -

he often included himself as a funny footnote to his scenes -

making a young boy smoke.

They're drinking,

and in the middle there's a child. It's his baptism.

The man on the left, the older man, is wearing a cap,

a hat that the young father would actually wear

at a party where the young child is baptised,

but he's much too old to be the father.

So that's also the world upside down that you see there.

Genre paintings are paintings which show scenes from everyday life

or are inspired by everyday life,

different from history paintings which are based on written stories.

These paintings are taken from everyday reality,

but they do not imitate everyday reality.

What painters did is add something to it, put a message in it

for people to understand when they look at a painting.

With genre painting one of the confusing things is,

for a lot of people when they look at such a painting,

they think it's a social document,

that it's exactly the way things were in the 17th century,

and that's true for parts of it.

There were tables like the one you see

at As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young,

and there were cans like you see in this painting.

People were eating fruit like that,

but not exactly,

because it's all representing something else

and it's idealised, there's something extra.

The fruit as it sits on the table is like a still life,

not the way people would normally eat it,

it's improved, made better.

With Jan Steen paintings, sometimes he's referred to

as like a director of a movie or of a play even,

with people overacting,

with strange faces and grimaces, strange laughing,

and also wearing clothes that just don't make any sense sometimes.

(From DONNA TARTT: "The Goldfinch")

"It was a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest:

a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground,

chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.

"'He was Rembrandt's pupil, Vermeer's teacher,' my mother said.

"'And this one little painting is really the missing link

between the two of them - the clear pure daylight;

you can see where Vermeer got his quality of light from.'

"I stepped back to get a better look.

"It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature,

with nothing sentimental about it;

and something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself -

its brightness, its alert watchful expression -

made me think of pictures I'd seen of my mother when she was small;

a dark-capped finch with steady eyes."

It's a very interesting comparison to Girl with a Pearl Earring

because here's this bird who is suddenly turning to the viewer

seen in profile but the head is turned,

a close view set against a plain background,

in that case a brilliant daylight plaster wall,

unlike the dark background in the Vermeer.

But there's a contrast of light and shadow

which is used to enhance the sense of an object in a shallow space.

It's frequently shallow when it's figural,

whether it's a bird or a person.

There's also in The Goldfinch these broad strokes

that blend together as feathers and volume and so on at a distance,

but create a sense of motion and light and atmosphere

playing over the form.

The Goldfinch is fast becoming an iconic painting

in the Mauritshuis collection,

and, like Girl with a Pearl Earring,

is inspiring not only works of fiction

but also great devotion amongst an eager public.

But what effect does this fame have on iconic masterpieces like these?

Does it change the way we understand and appreciate them?

Does it perhaps diminish them in any way?

It's very interesting when images become very well-known.

I would say it's images become well-known,

not paintings become well-known

because most people never see the real thing,

they just see the mechanical reproduction of that image

on various surfaces, which might range from the cover of a paperback

to a t-shirt, to a print on a wall, to an image on a mug.

I don't think it actually diminishes the painting in any way

but it does give a lot of people the illusion

that they've seen the picture and know the painting

because they are physical things

made out of stuff. They're not made out of printing ink

and they're not made through a camera.

They're made with brushes, with glues, with pigments

and like sculpture, they have a physical presence

that is at least half of their visual quality.

What it means is, something about that look, that person,

you know, you might say why are some starlets in modern times

so haunting to a generation, and other equally pretty people not?

It's something magical in their physiognomy,

the way they hold themselves, and also the way they're lit

by professionals and treated on camera.

Vermeer intended this picture

to be haunting visually and psychologically,

and we've taken his bait,

and, you know, that's part of being a great artist.

(From LUCAS: 'Vermeer of Delft')

"Did you ever see such ease as there is in this painting?

Such concealment of effort?

"It was no small thing in that day

for a Dutchman to lay his colours like this, so openly and lucidly.

"It is as though the paint

evoked life rather than counterfeited it:

as though the child had been waiting there behind the canvas

to emerge at the touch of the brush.

"No wonder so many now flock to worship her."

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