Summer Reading: 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'

“Girl With a Pearl Earring: A Servant’s Life, a Master’s Obsession, a Matter of Honour” is Tracy Chevalier’s fictional recreation of the story behind Jan Vermeer’s famous painting. The main character, Griet, lives in 17th-century Delft, Netherlands. As Vermeer’s maid, Griet’s tasks include mixing his paints and modeling for him after he becomes aware of her interest in his paintings and her striking appearance. Although he maintains emotional distance from Griet, Vermeer is obsessed by her complex innocence. Even at the novel’s close, Vermeer’s fascination with Griet does not end and the story quite vividly lives on in Vermeer’s painting, now associated with Chevalier’s narrative.

This summer I returned to Delft, where I had lived as a child, and felt an odd sense of the character’s presence exiting the pages of the book and entering the real world. Their experiences overlapped my own, and had me walking a line between memory, fiction and present. I walked past Vermeer’s home on the corner of the central market square numerous times. I passed by the Jan Vermeer Museum, formerly the Jan Vermeer School that I had attended, and examined the various tourist trinkets for sale plastered with the Girl with the Pearl Earring’s enigmatic face. I remembered the star in the middle of the market square that Griet mentions in the opening pages of the novel. While the star was far removed in my memory, I recognized it from the first time I had lived in Delft, when I was nine, attending the Jan Vermeer School and ran my finger across its points at recess. I sat and drank coffee on the Beestenmarkt, another place that Griet visits, only there were no beasts for sale. My Beestenmarkt only featured small groups drinking coffee and tea as a break from shopping.

I spent my time in Delft taking photographs, examining closely what can only be described as the characteristically clear, specifically Dutch light. I tried to capture moments of ordinary life, just as Vermeer managed to do hundreds of years ago. Nearly every day I looked at the present-day view of Delft from the Oostport (another painting of Vermeer’s) and noticed little had changed through the centuries. I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which houses a number of other important Vermeer paintings, and wondered what it might have been like to sit for a portrait by Vermeer. Would he stare at me as an object or as a person? I pictured myself in a Vermeer painting, set in a gilded frame in a museum, and wondered what pose he would have placed me in? What story might I have told? Finishing The Girl with the Pearl Earring as I wandered the streets of Delft, left me tangled in the intertwined web of life and the stories we tell. My focus on capturing moments through photography left me feeling a connection to the artist Vermeer and his subjects as well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, can it also raise a hundred questions? Each picture seemed to hold as many mysteries as clarifications. The Dutch light illuminated and blinded me, leaving much to the imagination.?