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 symbolises the fairest and sweetest things in the eleven provinces.

She makes 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 Maritzhaus Museum in The Hague.

She was the tour's poster girl and attracted enormous crowds wherever she went.

Now, she is returning home to a growing sense of excitement as the Maritzhaus, 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?

Writing in another place some years ago, I ventured to call the Maritzhaus picture of a girl's head one of the most beautiful things in Holland.

I retract that statement now.

And instead, I say, quite calmly, that it is the most beautiful thing in Holland.

And to me, it is in many ways not only the most beautiful thing in Holland, but the most satisfying and exquisite product of brush and colour that I have anywhere seen.

The painting of the lower lip is as much a miracle to me as a Darwin tulip.

We've seen the girl with the 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 it was interesting to get this question in various different countries.

And you would see 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's 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 shoulders,

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 invites you to engage with her.

It's simplicity. And 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 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 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?

The painting is marked by this series of specular highlights.

And by that I mean very, very shiny points on shiny things.

And 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.

And 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 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.

And the pearl in 17th and 16th and 15th centuries was a symbol of virtue and faithfulness.

And with Dutch painting, symbolism is extremely important.

And so having a painting that isn't a portrait in the conventional sense that we know who the person is, etc.

It is a painting of a virtuous or faithful person.

And perhaps Vermeer may have painted it as a symbolic painting rather than a painting of a person.

So 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 a 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 nose, it's not there.

It's all like brushed out.

But you don't notice.

When you look at her, it's just beauty.

And you don't think something is missing.

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 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 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

and is fascinated by what the picture does to him psychologically.

I'm holding this thing in my hand.

I can't put it down.

And yet I know it's a work of art.

It's a brilliant invention by another person.

And isn't that fascinating?

And in our world of media bombardment, it's hard to realize how powerful a picture like this could be in its own day.

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 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.

But this time 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 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.

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.

I tied the blue cloth over my forehead with the yellow piece wound round and round, covering the crown of my head.

I tucked the end into a fold at the side of my head, adjusted folds here and there, smoothed the blue cloth round my head and stepped back into the studio.

He was looking at a book and did not notice as I slipped into my chair.

I arranged myself as I had been sitting before.

As I turned my head to look over my left shoulder, he glanced up.

At the same time, the end of the yellow cloth came loose and fell over my shoulder.

Oh, I breathed, afraid that the cloth would fall from my head and reveal all my hair.

But it held.

Only the end of the yellow cloth dangled free.

My hair remained hidden.

Yes, he said then.

That is it, Greet.

Yes.

It has often been thought that it is a portrait, either of one of his daughters or someone who worked in his house.

But it could be completely imaginary.

It could very well be.

And this is something we don't know.

And the only thing we know is that it never was meant to be a portrait.

Unfortunately, we have no documentation.

So, you know, this is all my interpretation, but it could very well be the case.

It's the illusion, maybe.

Maybe that's the main thing.

Maybe he could do it all by heart.

But it's the illusion of having a real person in front of you.

And it's all those very minor details that convince you that it's real.

That are meant to convince you that this person is real.

And that's exactly the highlights, the small dots of paint that suggest a reflection of light.

The way he does the eyes.

The way he does the lips, the mouth of the girl.

And also the reflections on the pearl.

And that's all the information that you get together which convinces you as a viewer that it's a real person that you see in front of you.

And that's exactly what Vermeer wants to do.

To convince you of the reality of this beautiful girl.

I think my big worry about Vermeer is that there'll be somebody who determines.

They get a letter saying, thank you, Mr. Vermeer, for the painting of my daughter, signed the baker.

You know, I just don't want that to happen because I really like her retaining her mystery.

And I think if we could put a name to her, that might take away from it a little bit.

History is a matter of plausible reconstructions frequently.

And just imagine how little we know about other people's lives today, let alone people in the past.

If Vermeer went to Amsterdam, even if he went to Italy, he didn't use MasterCard and check into a hotel.

So there's no paper trail.

And, you know, so much is deduced from the pictures themselves.

And that makes a painting like this all the more mysterious and appealing.

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 Théophile Torré-Bourger 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 of Vermeer, A. A. De Tombe, and Victor de Sturz,

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 Sturz and De Tombe went together to a sale in The Hague, and they agreed not to bid against each other.

They went as friends.

De Tombe was a collector.

Victor de Sturz had produced copious notes about his collection, and also a patron of the arts.

And Victor de Sturz was totally involved in what is nowadays called heritage.

Victor de Sturz bought it for two guilders, 30 cents.

It was very dirty.

And De Tombe had already, at that point, decided, I think, to give his collection when he died to the Maritz House,

which, in his will, they acquired it when he died.

Victor de Sturz never stopped drawing.

This, I think, is probably the earliest one.

I would guess, done at the sale, because he's written underneath it,

to De Tombe.

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

De Tombe bought it for two Florins, 30, and lent it to the Maritz House,

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 M.C. de Tombe in The Hague.

And it says it's signed and it is 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 through the centuries,

with exposure to changing conditions and different owners.

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.

Well, the girl with pearl earring ended the collection at the end of the 19th century,

and it wasn't until 1960 that it was then, that it was treated in the Maritz House.

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 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.

And paint, in fact, is a very sort of dynamic system.

Well, of course, what we see in the X-ray, all the tacks that attach the canvas to the stretcher come out very clearly.

They absorb X-rays.

It's very notable that you can actually see the fragmentary nature of the edges of the painting.

And of course, this is, these black areas are where the paint is actually missing.

So that's what we call paint losses.

But it's fortunate that most of those losses are rather small.

Well, 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 other pearl earring that, in fact, was an upturned paint flake.

So the process of restoring can actually bring 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 local Catholic girl called Caterina Bolnes in 1653.

Her mother, Maria Tins, 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.

Caterina 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 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.

Most people feel he had one particular patron in Delft who bought about half of what he produced.

And the idea of being a patron sponsoring an artist was a kind of upper middle class or patrician parallel to princely patrons that preceded them.

They cost some five or six hundred guilders a piece at a time that a skilled cabinet maker, for example, a craftsman, skilled laborer would earn that in a year.

So this is serious disposable income, what would sound like something like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars today.

Although, of course, they're worth so much more now.

At Delft, I saw the painter Vermeer, who had none of his works.

But we saw one at the house of a baker who paid six hundred guilders for it.

Although, it is only a single figure, which I would have thought he had paid too much for, even at sixty guilders.

The End

Vermeer lived his whole life in Delft,

which was an important center 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 color.

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, color, 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 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 Jacob van Raustel 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 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 details, and especially a detail for instance with the boats in front.

I like all the different kinds of colors he used.

Just to suggest it has probably just rain, 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 colors, different brush strokes, 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.

You are almost inclined to feel it.

Because when you look at the brick buildings, and for instance the two city gates that were there in the 17th century, Vermeer altered their place a little bit.

But actually also what he did with the look and feel of these buildings.

This is something he suggests these buildings are there, of course, because we are looking at, of course, a flat canvas.

But the texture is so lively.

There are so many details in just these two gates.

I think that's really impressive.

And if you know a little bit about the history of Delft, because Vermeer painted his cityscape in the early 1660s.

Estimated around 1661.

That's only a few years after a major disaster hit the city.

The gunpowder explosion.

Which killed a lot of people living in Delft.

Including Carl Fabritius who painted the goldfinch.

That was actually made in 1654.

So before this major explosion.

And nothing of that is to be seen in this cityscape.

This is about peace.

This is about a nice city that is really prosperous.

Where nothing seems to be happening.

Besides that the economy is thriving.

And people, you know, are living their healthy lives.

And, you know, they are safe there.

And so this is something that I often wonder about.

He left out any reference to this major disaster.

And so this is sort of like more of an ideal world, perhaps.

And again, this is something he does in The Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Which is sort of like an ideal girl, you know.

Whether or not we know about her identity.

That's not the issue, I think.

This is sort of like how it could be.

So, of course, he painted Delft as it appeared to him.

But he sort of enhanced it.

And he, you know, perhaps what he didn't like.

He just left it out.

And I think that's something that Vermeer often did actually.

So, perhaps that's a little bit of a secret.

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 forties, he sank into debt.

By the age of 43, he was dead.

Think of what has been happening in the world during the years this sweet face was set upon canvas.

The evolutions and tragedies.

The lives lived and ended.

The whole passionate, fretted progress of the nations.

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, Johann Mauritz of Nassau-Ziegen commissioned the building of the Mauritz House in a very prominent position next to the Bienenhof in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch Parliament.

The building was designed in a classical style by Jakob van Kampen and was completed while Johann Mauritz 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 Mauritz House was bought by the Dutch government in 1820 to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings and Curiosities, and officially became a museum in 1822.

The Mauritz House is sometimes referred to as the Little Jewel Box.

It is unique because it is relatively small in scale, but houses a very high quality collection of about 800 paintings.

The collection was amassed by two Princes of Orange, William IV and his son William V, who was the first to allow the general public to see the collection.

With links also to Prince William III of Orange, once King of England, the collection covers a period from around 1400 to about 1750, and is recognised by experts to have some of the best examples of Dutch and Flemish art in the world.

You can go to the gallery of Prince William V, which is actually quite nearby, the Mauritz House itself, and people are always astonished when they enter this.

It's just one large room, which is really filled with paintings from floor to ceiling, and that was actually the way it was done in the 18th century, even in the 19th century.

So, it was actually made for you to impress. So, instead of, you know, searching for a Vermeer or a Rembrandt, it was just see walls filled with paintings.

And the Princes of Orange did that to impress you, but also to say, you know, we are important people.

And I think the message, you know, was understood by visitors to the gallery. And even nowadays, it's an annex of the Mauritz House, so there are still, you know, there are a lot of paintings worth seeing there.

So, unlike many other museums, we're specialists, specialists in paintings, and in paintings in and around the Dutch Golden Age.

So, think early Netherlandish paintings, Flemish paintings, and especially Dutch paintings of that period.

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.

And in this painting, which was a collaboration between two artists, Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Bruegel, or Bruegel, you see this happening.

Now, it seems strange to us today, but actually it was pretty common in Antwerp for artists to work together.

So, what you see here is Jan Bruegel did the landscape with all the detailed animals.

You even see the fish in the river. You see exotic animals like an absolutely huge ostrich.

And this panel, he would have done most of it, and then brought it to Rubens, for Rubens to fill in the figures of Adam and Eve, the serpent, and the animals right behind there.

And then it went back to Bruegel to finish off.

So, what you see here is a collaboration between two artists in an absolutely wonderful work.

It's in perfect condition, as if it were painted yesterday.

The Maritz House collection is not considered encyclopedic, but it serves as an important window onto a period of dramatic change in the Netherlands.

With the rise of the Protestant faith over Catholicism and a burgeoning economy, artists started to specialise in particular genres, and went in search of new patrons amongst the affluent middle classes.

This caused a fundamental shift in a flourishing art market.

If there was one painting that announces the change in art during the Dutch Golden Age, then it is this masterpiece by Hendrik Averkamp.

The decline in Catholic and State patronage gave rise to private commissions from a growing number of wealthy Dutch citizens from the middle classes, also known as burghers, who had a desire to fill their homes with fine art.

Averkamp was a painter who specialised in winter scenes and was deaf.

The scene and cast of characters displayed in the painting marked a shift in subject matter from history and mythological subjects to the observation of everyday life.

Here, you have a painting of a town, probably fictional, that shows all kinds of people outside ice skating.

You can see the entire range of the Dutch population, from the nobleman with his yellow doublet in the foreground, to the fisherman in the background, and even a woman who has fallen over, revealing that she doesn't have anything on under her skirt.

This kind of anecdotal detail, this observation of life, is something that the Dutch really excelled in.

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 they 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 the situation in the Dutch Republic.

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

And as for the art of painting and the affection of the people to pictures, I think none other country goes beyond them all.

In general, striving to adorn their houses, especially the outer or street room with costly pieces.

Butchers and bakers are not much inferior in their shops.

Yea, many times blacksmiths, cobblers and so on will have some picture or other by their forge and in their stall.

Such is the general notion, inclination and delight that this country's natives have to painting.

Even the baker could buy paintings.

And I think that's the secret of the Golden Age, is that there was a lot of talent, but also there was a lot of demand.

So many paintings were made and usually when things are made in large amounts, the quality tends to be lesser.

But that is not the case with 17th century Dutch painting.

The Netherlands really became known for this.

And there are a few accounts of visitors who came to Holland and they remarked,

you know, how many people actually had works of art in their own houses.

So, you know, clearly people were using this art and the demand kept going roughly until the third quarter of the 17th century.

The Bull by Paulus Potter is world famous and the largest painting in the Mauritshaus collection.

Its impressive scale is matched by Potter's virtuoso technique and composition.

From the flies buzzing around the bull's back to the frog in the foreground,

every part of the painting is carefully rendered in a naturalistic way with great attention to detail.

But not all is as it seems.

Here in the 17th century, Protestant country, they were more focused on what they saw around them and on things that surrounded them.

And I think one of the main characteristics of Dutch 17th century painting is that everything,

every detail from everyday life was worthwhile to paint.

And for instance, in The Bull by Paulus Potter, you see cow dung in the corner and painted with such detail

and with such love for it, you could say, is that everything which a painter saw, he could include in his work.

And at first it looks like it's imitating reality, but it's not photographic reality.

And what painters do is they try to improve what they see.

And that's just what Paulus Potter did.

He made a lot of studies of bulls in the fields.

He took them to his studio and he combined these studies to the bull we now see in the painting,

which is not an existing animal because it consists of parts of different animals.

For instance, the teeth are of an animal of two years old.

The horns are of an even older animal.

And the total outlook of the bull is of a very young animal.

So Potter made his own invention out of the details which he saw.

So it's very detailed.

It's based on everyday life.

But the artist has to make something more out of it.

Not just imitating it, but improving it.

They were so well trained in artist studios that the quality was extremely high.

So that must have been part of the attraction that it was so well done.

Flower paintings where they really try to show all the different flowers,

the smallest insects, the smallest butterfly, flowers sometimes from all seasons.

So it's not really that realistic because they couldn't have been together in one bouquet.

But others do become more realistic and show only flowers of one season.

But there's so much to be seen and everything is so nicely depicted with the beautiful colours

and the painting technique is so high level that the combination of what you see

and how well it is done, how well it is painted, today is the attraction,

but I think must have been at that time as well.

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 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 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 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.

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 like to do that.

Clothing actually tells you a lot about what you're seeing.

And sometimes, because we don't live in the time that these works were painted,

we don't necessarily get all the hints.

But what you see in a portrait, for example, one by Van Dyck,

is someone dressed at the very height of fashion.

And it sort of tells you something about the social standing, the wealth, the taste of a sitter.

He takes these people, wealthy merchants, and elevates them, gives them a kind of elegance and aristocratic ease that he really became known for.

So, for example, if you look at Anna Wake, she's dressed in the absolute height of fashion.

These sort of bulbous sleeves that she has on, everything in black, a very costly feather fan.

These were the trappings of the most fashionable Antwerp burgers.

The girl with the pearl earring, to give you a very different sort of example,

would have told the 17th century viewer immediately, this isn't a portrait.

This is a figure, an exotic figure, a figure from history or from mythology.

And the reason is that she's wearing a turban, something that a 17th century woman never would have worn.

So, to a viewer at the time, it would have been a very clear signal that what you're seeing here is not meant to be a portrait of an actual figure, but of a fictional person.

I mean, this is an age when people are collecting cabinets of curiosities and exotica from around the world.

And the Dutch are sailing to New York, South America, China, eventually Japan, South Africa, etc.

So, there's a lot of encounter with other people.

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 suggest 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 trony a la Turk, head in a Turkish fashion.

Trony's were generally produced for the open market, which allowed artists to be more creative with their subject matter and experimental with their technique.

The Harlem painter Franz Hals was a master of the looser style of painting, which he often used when painting trony's.

We have this absolutely amazing round panel with a laughing boy who is one of the darlings of our public.

It's a beautiful painting of a small boy who is laughing, is really very gay and very happy.

And you see yellowish teeth, which are not the best.

And it's done very freely, very brushy paintwork.

It's painted very freely.

That's a trony.

It's not a portrait.

The identity of the sitter is not of any importance.

But if you compare it with the portraits of Mr. Olican and his wife, they are painted much more, less broad and much more sober and more restricted.

Both ways of painting, the rough manner and the smooth manner were appreciated.

But I think when people want their own portraits, they want to look a bit dignified.

And that's different from a boy out of the people, out of the crowds, who is depicted as an image of youthfulness and of youth.

The popularity of tronies and images of everyday characters is partly due to the rising interest in realistic representation in Dutch art.

The portrait became a powerful medium for rich burgers to express who they were and their position in society.

Unlike Girl with a Pearl Earring, it was important that the image portrayed was known and recognized as the person who commissioned it.

Great works by artists like Hans Holbein and Memling mark the beginning of a change in the way portraiture was considered, appreciated and commissioned during this period.

The miracle of the Dutch Golden Age is still that these paintings were made for Dutch burgers.

They were not made for churches and they were not directly connected to religion.

And that is, I think, really important.

If you would look at one of the paintings in our collection, which is an exquisite painting by Hans Memling.

It's a portrait of a man from the Lespinette family.

It's made at the end of the 15th century.

And if you see it, you think, well, this is a really nice separate portrait.

But you see that he has his hands folded.

And so he was originally praying to the Virgin Mary.

One sees a really nice portrait of a man in front of a Flemish landscape.

It's something that was made for him.

It was not meant to be representative in any way.

It was not put on display in his house.

It was something that he perhaps traveled with, but something that was really personal.

And when you would then look at the Flemish portraits by Van Dijk that are in the Maushuis collection,

or other portraits by Dutch artists that were made also in the 17th century,

then you see that they are meant to be representative.

So they were put in the hall or in the living room or in the dining room,

where people would sort of show off even their riches.

It became more common to have your portrait painted.

And that was something that was really exquisite.

Because people got married, got engaged, had portraits made.

They got their children, they were portraits.

So in the end, when you had a large family, you would have a house filled with portraits and other paintings.

This is completely different from how it started in the 15th century.

And I think also that this is sort of like a carte de visite.

It's sort of like when you would make, when you would have your portrait made in the 17th century,

it was also like, this is who I am or this is who I want to be.

And that's something that is completely new.

So it's self-representation.

And the artists would do that for you.

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 von Rijn is considered one of the preeminent stars of the Dutch Golden Age.

And the anatomy lesson of Dr. Nicholas 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 honor for such a young artist, but he did something different with his commission.

And what he did there is very interesting because it's a portrait, a group portrait,

but it's very different from the other group portraits which were made for the Guild of Surgeons,

which was the commissioner of this painting.

What Rembrandt did is make a story out of it.

So he shows something happening. He shows the anatomical lesson himself.

Not really the way it was done in those days. It's imagination. It's a bit different.

It shows the Dr. Tulp. He is the instructor. The other doctors are around it.

And they're all reacting to what is happening in their own way. They show emotion.

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 gilders 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 artists and painters of the day.

Novelists and filmmakers have often been inspired by paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, because of their ability to capture a moment in time and fill it with intriguing narratives.

Paintings like The Anatomy Lesson and Girl with a Pearl Earring construct a scene that invites the viewer in to complete the story.

This is a feature of Dutch art from this period, and something that seems to have universal appeal.

I'm a journalist and a fiction writer, so for me, I love to play with the boundaries of fact and fiction.

And I did a great deal of research for this novel, working with Rembrandt scholars, and also medical historians, and historians of the 17th century.

So it was very important to me to get all the facts right, in the sense that there's an underlying basis of historical reality.

The thing about paintings is that they stop a moment in time, and they allow you to focus on it, and concentrate on it.

And for a writer, writing requires a focus, and it takes a long time to write a novel, and you have to be quite patient and slow.

This is my research notebook from Girl with a Pearl Earring.

It's so tiny, and there's not even that much in it. I don't know how I managed it. It was like a dream, this book.

It's mostly got notes in it, but there's a little bit of the beginning that I wrote.

And as is often the case with novels, you start in the wrong place, and then you have to cut it out.

So I actually had an alternative for a few paragraphs, and then I realized I got rid of that, I got it out of my system, and then I started.

My mother did not tell me they were coming. Afterwards, she said she did not want to make me nervous.

I was surprised, for I thought she knew me well. If I'm nervous, I do not appear so to strangers.

Only my mother would see the tightness along my jaw, the slight narrowing of my eyes.

I was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for the soup, when I heard voices on the front stoop.

A woman's, bright like polished brass, and a man's, low and dark, like the wood of the table I was working on.

That's Vermeer.

You can see gorgeous reproductions all over the place now, but there's something about being in the room with her,

and knowing that Vermeer touched that canvas, it brings you closer to him.

And I think that the internet can have, you know, the computer can have this effect of distancing you,

or the painting being on a t-shirt. It kind of distances you from it.

But when you're actually in the room, it's like everything stops, and the world stops, and you're with that real thing.

It's really you, and it's really the painting. And it's a feeling that is strong, and you just feel really alive.

And I think that that blows everything else out of the water.

Music

In this room we have a beautiful collection of Jan Steen paintings and what's interesting

that we both have the largest painting by Jan Steen, as the old thing, 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 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.

With 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. Young Singh, so Pipe the Young.

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 the 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 Young Singh 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.

I'm pretty sure that all the paintings that you can see in the Mauritshuis, at least those

from the Dutch Golden Age, do tell you a lot about Dutch society.

They liked pretty girls, like the girl with a pearl earring.

They had a good sense of humour.

There was one painting by Frans van Mieres, which used to be called an in-scene, but if

you have a really good look, you see that the man and woman in the painting, they are sort

of like interested in one another.

And there's a bed in the back of the painting.

And there are also, if you haven't got the point yet, two dogs that are really interested

in one another.

So we have renamed that painting actually a brothel scene, because actually the woman

in front of the painting is working in the house, and the man is one of her customers.

And this is something people laugh about.

They like that.

That is also daily life.

So it's like when you walk through the Mauritshuis, you see the beautiful countryside.

You see the Dutch cattle, which is still very important in our country.

You see the nice houses they had, the nice costumes.

They had all the portraits, of course they had made.

But also, this is another side of their life.

They enjoyed one another.

On both sides of the girl with the pearl earring are paintings by a different artist,

Gerard Ter Borg.

And those are both genre paintings with a subject matter that's really linked to the work by Vermeer.

Because Vermeer is most well known of these kind of paintings, of interiors, with ladies working,

sitting, writing a letter, very intimate pictures of people in their houses.

So that's an important reason why these paintings are next to the girl.

What we see is that both paintings, girl with the pearl earring and the girl writing, they

pose some kind of riddle to the viewer.

You do not know exactly what's going on.

The girl with the pearl earring, we do not know who it is.

She has not everyday clothes.

She wears a turban.

She has a very large pearl earring and at that time everyone could see that it wasn't

a real pearl earring.

Pearls weren't that big in the 17th century.

So it's a fantasy figure, and it's a figure of which you can think a story.

She could be an actress in a story.

It's the same with the painting by Ter Borg.

We see a lady writing.

The writing of letters was a famous pastime in the 17th century, and often letters of love

were written.

And there is a bet behind the girl.

We could think that she's waiting for a lover or even writing to a lover.

We can also see that the paper on which she's writing has been folded.

So is it a letter she's writing again?

Or is it a letter she's correcting?

We do not know for sure.

I think that was the intention of the artist, that the viewer can make up his own story with

what he sees in the painting.

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 traveled more than we knew.

I would think he'd gone to Amsterdam and visited Rembrandt or had seen Rembrandts and other collections.

And he certainly knew personally Carol Fabritius, who was perhaps Rembrandt's most brilliant

pupil, who moved to Delft in the late 1640s.

I think at least two tronies by Fabritius are listed in Vermeer's own inventory.

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

One made himself for the goldfinches.

One made the goldfinch.

No part of this event that eroded master строitaities in Harry Mahler could not have much

If he felt worse in the last game and then he was it not?

And he would have to come to Italy and no might be as it.

And he would have had this experience plan and enough.

So, you'd be my last seminalcy in the past two years,

I think he was just for all your so-called reminder that it was the Forest

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.

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.

And Vermeer's looking at those technical qualities and thinking, what can he do within his own

style to also suggest a sense of motion and immediacy and the dynamic qualities of optical

experience which are atmosphere and focus and the behaviour of light itself.

The goldfinch is fast becoming an iconic painting in the Mauritshaus 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 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 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,

one, 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 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.