Original subtitles

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 symbolizes the fairest and sweetest things in the eleven provinces she

makes her way to the center of the city she makes her way to the center of the city

Holland sacred ground during a two-year program of building renovation and

reconstruction the painting girl with a pearl earring embarked on a global tour

with other treasures from the world-famous Mauritshuis Museum in The

Hague she was the tours 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 then going to Japan the US Italy

and she's really captured everyone's imagination and the question I often got

the question what makes her so special and these it was interesting to get

these and this question in various different countries and you would see

that they that she 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 and she's absolutely gorgeous she's a beautiful

girl and she is something you really want to look at the

composition is very clever you see a brightly colored 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 shoulders her her mouth is slightly parted she looks there's a

little tiny Fleck of paint on the corner of her lips that just indicates

she just is saying something her whole attitude is very much inviting it's an

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 extraordinary distance like massive amount of space emotionally

and physically between myself and the image of the Mona Lisa with the 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 and 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 she's thinking

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

seems like such a basic thing to be able to unpack about a painting you ought to

be able to know whether what you're looking at but actually Vermeer has

somehow managed to capture in her a whole lot of contradictions 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 with an intensity that demands something just as real

and human in return one grows complicit in the paintings 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 suggestive

questions 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 it's like they've been anointed with paint rather than

softly focused

so they look extremely shiny but there's a there's a wetness about it and I'd I'd I think that one of

the things that makes paintings of people look great is if you can make the eyes and the lips

look wet and it's funny because everybody you know the the catch word is earring and pearl and

yet I think what he's done is said these lips these eyes they're like pearls

and they shine and they're wet and off the water so it's it's all about illusion and that's also

very smart of an artist like Johannes Vermeer who must have been a perfect observer of reality

because first you have to understand reality to make an illusion of it of course and he somehow

knew when you look at a pearl it's all about the reflection and that's all you have to paint just

a reflection and then 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 of her nose

it's it's not there it's all like brushed out but she don't notice when

you look at her it's just beauty and you don't think something is missing and not

at all but also working I think with somehow he understood how the brain

works that you can leave things out and make it more perfect and more real by

by leaving it we think frequently of Dutch paintings and even at my academic

colleagues will write like 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 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 and so much of what

Vermeer does is addressed to a voyeur who knows he's a voyeur the conundrum

that revolves 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 neighbor

perhaps

many debate this issue but the lack of evidence adds to her mystery and allure

I was lying in bed one morning and the painting was on the wall opposite the bed and I looked

at it just sort of idling 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 but this time I I realized 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 catalog from the the the show and read about the painting

and more about Vermeer and I realized 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're

probably his wife and daughters because he had a lot of daughters and but they don't know and I

looked at it and I thought well 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 Tore 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 de Tom and Victor de Sturs an influential Civil servant who

campaigned for Dutch Art to remain in the Netherlands the two men were neighbors in

The Hague and decided to hatch a plan to acquire the painting

and

to a sale in The Hague and they agreed not to bid against each other, they went

as friends. Detain was a collector, Victor Justus had produced copious notes

about his collection and also a picture of the arts and Victor Justus was

totally involved in what is nowadays called heritage. Detain bought it for two

guilders 30 cents, it was very dirty and Detain had already at that point

decided I think to give his collection when he died to the Marais House which in

his will they acquired it when he died. Victor Justus never stopped drawing, this I

think is probably the earliest one I would guess done at the sale because

he's written in the 18th century.

It's written underneath it, to d'Etampes.

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

d'Etampes bought it for 2 florins 30

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

All three drawings that we have

were drawn in the same year that it was bought.

The third one is a much more finished drawing

in which it's, in the catalogue,

the entry just says,

belongs to MC d'Etampes in The Hague,

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

The girl with the 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 through the centuries,

with exposure to changing conditions

and different times.

But many things can be learned 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 the pearl earring ended the collection

at the end of the 19th century,

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

When it was treated again in the 19th century,

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 clear indication of the state of the painting

or its condition.

And it became immediately clear from the X-ray

that there are a multitude of tiny losses

over the entire painting.

But fortunately, they're mostly small in scale

and scattered over the surface

and not located in one particular area,

for instance, in the face.

I think a lot of people have an idea

that paint is actually, you know, very stable

and nothing much can happen to it.

But in fact, paint is pigments bound in an oil binder,

in the case of traditional oil paintings.

That's applied on top of a ground layer,

on top of a support.

Now, 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

to making sure that they're not increasing in size,

that there's no further damage

to the painting.

But I think as a conservator,

I think 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.

So there's a really important feature of the picture

because it actually makes her lips

look more fresh and glistening.

And 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

can actually bring 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 local Catholic girl

called Katharina Bollnes 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.

Katharina 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 out 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 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 or something.

But with Vermeer,

I really cannot work out how he does it.

And so it looks like a kind of photographic emulsion to me

that has been almost processed wet in a tray.

It hasn't been 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.

Vermeer has very thick,

thin layers that he will blend together,

whites over blues or yellows

and different color 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.

I mean, our eye doesn't take in with sharp focus anybody.

But if we're looking at someone,

we'll be focused 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 that many people say,

oh, he must have had some form 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 colors being 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 of these elements

that 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.

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 they're extended.

They were in one place, then they're 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, everything else

in, like, an hour,

which he would have to,

given the lighting conditions outside,

much less than that.

This is the product of artistic decisions over months, so...

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,

and they are deeply shaded on the underside.

I actually think he probably saw a painting

by Jakob van Roustael and lifted this idea,

but he's looking at other landscapists.

And quite as the landscape itself recedes over the water

and back to the city,

you could get the same effect

by 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

and enhancing the depth also.

But look at all the details,

and 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 did he do it?

It's all kinds of different colours,

different brushstrokes, and you believe it.

So when you see the painting,

when you would 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,

on 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-Ziegen

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 Kampen

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 Maas 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,

mix 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

that would have been done in earlier periods.

So think, for example,

about our painting by Roger van der Weyden,

The Lamentation of Christ.

These sorts of paintings would have been done

for devotional purposes,

for churches or 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.

So, for example, someone might have wanted

a beautiful Italianate landscape on their wall,

which was, as it were, a kind of vacation,

you know, from the dreary Dutch climate.

It's a very different idea

from something that was 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 anymore for altarpieces.

So artists had to look

for different commissions.

And they thought, well, what do we need to make

in order to make a living?

And so they started making a lot of landscapes

or still lifes and, of course,

many portraits of very proud Dutch burghers

who wanted themselves to be portrayed.

And this is something that is quite unique,

that you see, well, they're almost painted

as being a king or queen themselves.

So this is really very remarkable

and very typical, also, for me,

for the situation in the Dutch Republic.

That is unique, I think, in Europe of 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 always seemed 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 the 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 mugshots 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.

But it implies individuality,

but at the same time anonymity.

And tronies are frequently based on real people.

And 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 popularized this theme of tronies.

So he painted soldiers and young girls

or old women as types.

So these were never meant to be recognized as portraits.

And also, if you would make 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.

And this dressing up is something that,

well, at least painters of the time,

they liked to do that.

The girl with the 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 turbans vaguely suggests

Orientalism or the Middle East.

And I think if the girl with the pearl earring

were 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.

The 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.

And the anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicolas 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.

And he was only 25 when he received the 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.

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

I decided to start with a pyramidal shape,

as I have done 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.

I think that many people throughout the years

have tried to give voice to Rembrandt

and they've done it in many various ways.

It's impossible to really know

what Rembrandt spoke like or sounded like.

He only wrote a handful of written notes

and all of them said something like,

here's the painting that I've promised you

and you owe me the X amount of guilders for it.

So we can't hear him.

We can imagine what we hear

based on looking at his works of art,

which of course are also a form

of documentation of his life.

I thought that Rembrandt must have been

an incredibly erudite man

because of all the references

that he brings to his works

and all the things that he knew

about Italian painting

and everything about art history, really,

without having ever left Holland.

He had a good collection of books as well,

which wasn't necessarily common

for artisan painters of the day.

In this room we have a beautiful collection

of Jan Steen paintings

and what's interesting is that we both have

the largest painting by Jan Steen,

as the old saying so, Pipe the Young,

and also the smallest painting, The Oyster Eater.

When you look at paintings from the 17th century,

the important thing is you have to realise

they were painted to entertain,

for enjoyment, to look at them

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 the expression

the household of Jan Steen,

where everything goes wrong

and the children run around

and don't listen to the parents

and the parents are smoking and drinking,

giving the 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

and they're drinking

and in the middle there's the child,

it's his baptism,

and the man on the left, the older man,

is wearing a cap, a hat,

that the young father would actually wear

on the party where a 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 inspired by everyday life

and 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.

Which genre painting?

One of the confusing things

for a lot of people

when they look at such a painting

is that 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 S.C. Young's thing,

there were cans,

as you see in this painting.

People were eating fruit like that,

but not exactly,

because it's all representing something else

and it's idolised,

there's something extra.

The fruit as it is on a table

is like a still life,

so it's not like the way people would normally eat it,

it's improved, it's made better.

With the Jan Steen painting,

sometimes he's referred to as like

a director of a movie,

or of a play even,

with people overacting,

with strange faces, grimaces,

strange laughing,

and also wearing clothing

that just don't make any sense sometimes.

The wonder of Vermeer,

the reason that he looks so much like reality,

is, I think, two-sided and kind of contradictory.

One is his absolute absorption in visual experience.

And I think he saw a great number of pictures.

His father was an art dealer.

He probably travelled more than we knew.

I would think he'd gone to Amsterdam

and visited Rembrandt

or had seen Rembrandt's and other collections.

And he certainly knew personally

Carol Fabritzius,

who was perhaps Rembrandt's most brilliant pupil,

who moved to Delft in the late 1640s.

I think at least two tronies by Fabritzius

are listed in Vermeer's own inventory.

And we don't know if he saw the goldfinch, probably.

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 the girl with the pearl earring

because here's this bird

who is suddenly turning to the viewer.

Seen in profile, but the head is turned.

And a close view set against a plain background.

In that case, it's a brilliant daylight plaster wall,

unlike the dark background in the Vermeer.

But there's a contrast of light and shadow

which has been 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,

you know, which might range from the cover

of a paperback book 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 have seen the picture

and they know the painting,

because they are physical things

that are made out of stuff.

They're not made out of printing ink

and they're not made through, you know, through a camera.

They are made with brushes, with glues, with pigments.

And like sculpture, they have a physical presence

that is at least half of their visual quality.

And what it means is something about that look,

that person, I mean, you know,

you might say, why are some starlets in modern times

so haunting to a generation

and other equally pretty people not?

And 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.

So 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.

Did you ever see such ease

as there is in this painting?

Such concealment of effort?

It was no small thing as that day

for a Dutchman to lay his colors 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.