VERMEER: THREE FILMS

John A. Walker (Copyright 2009)

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ALL THE VERMEERS IN NEW YORK (1991)

The work of Johannes or Jan Vermeer, the Dutch painter and art dealer who lived

from 1632 to 1675, has appeared in three feature films, namely, All the Vermeers in

New York (1991), A Brush with Fate (2003) and Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003).
Actually, the use of Vermeer dates back to the days of silent cinema because his

paintings were ‘quoted’ by Friedrich W. Murnau (1888-1931), a German director

who had studied art history, in his 1926 film Faust.

Little is known about Vermeer’s life and what is known does not lend itself to

melodrama and his surviving oeuvre, compared to other major European artists, is

limited in quantity (about 35 paintings) if not in quality. In view of his present high

reputation, it is surprising that Vermeer was little regarded as a painter for two

centuries after his death. It was only in the late nineteenth century that his

reputation was established because of the interest of French realist artists and critics

in Dutch naturalism.

One reason why Vermeer interests modern filmmakers – who employ mechanical

means to record reality - is the almost photographic character of his renditions of

people and objects. It is known that Vermeer also used mechanical means - a camera

obscura - to help him achieve his precise reproduction of surface appearances. Other

reasons are the perfection and poetic nature of his images, the emphasis placed on

the fall of light and the hints of erotic narratives. Jonathan Jones, a British art

critic, elaborates:

‘The rediscovery of Vermeer followed the invention of photography. But he has

exploded in popular culture since the birth of cinema. Vermeer is far more like a

filmmaker than a photographer. For all their stillness, his paintings breathe motion.

They are dramas. He is a dramatist in light; which is why, like Caravaggio, he has

profound affinities for cinema. In using light to create drama, Vermeer anticipates
every cinematographer, and every powerful screen moment … If Vermeer is a

cinematographer, he is a revolutionary one who only ever uses natural light.’ (1)

Vermeer was the son of innkeeper, art dealer and silk worker and once he became

a member of the St Luke Guild of painters (and other trades) and married into an

affluent Catholic family, he lived a bourgeois life. In view of his low rate of output,

painting may have been a spare-time occupation. However, modern research has

shown that his work was appreciated and collected by a small circle of admirers

who included Pieter Claesz van Ruijven who is thought to have acquired half his

paintings. No record indicates that Vermeer travelled beyond his hometown of Delft,

which was a prosperous manufacturing, trading and artistic centre, though he may

have trained in Amsterdam. He died early at the age of 43 leaving eleven children

and a widow who had to auction his possessions to pay off his debts. Vermeer’s

private life, therefore, must have been one of domesticity and a struggle to make

ends meet. Some of his paintings are of religious subjects, some are allegorical but

the majority are genre scenes of interiors with middle-class women engaged in such

mundane activities as conversing, lace making, reading letters, playing music and

sleeping, and a servant pouring milk from a jug. There is little in terms of dramatic

content, therefore, to excite Hollywood producers.

Jon Jost (b. 1943, Chicago) the director of All the Vermeers in New York (Complex

Corporation/American Playhouse Theatrical Films) – of which, incidentally, there

are eight (five in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and three in the Frick Collection)

– is not a typical American director because he is a self-taught, independent

filmmaker of long-standing. He began by making short 16mm documentaries and

‘experimental essays’ during the 1960s and for a while was a member of the Chicago

branch of NEWSREEL, a radical production and distribution group. At that time,

he was involved in both art and politics. His feature films, which date from 1974,

often used improvisation and non-actors. Jost has lived in Europe for many years

and resembles European art-house directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, whom he

admires. Jost maintains his own website (see http://www.jon-jost.com/) and his

published writings indicate a close interest in new digital media, the technical

aspects of filmmaking and in the paintings of contemporary artists such as Lucien

Freud and Gerhard Richter. In 1991, the Museum of Modern Art in New York

honoured Jost with a retrospective in which eleven of his feature films and five

programmes of his short films were screened.

One of Jost’s previous films – Rembrandt Laughing (1989) – had referenced a

Dutch master in its title and anticipated the mediating role of art in a relationship

between a man and a woman: as a token of his love, a young man gives his ex-girl

friend a copy of a Rembrandt etching. All the Vermeers in New York, which Jost

conceived, directed, photographed and edited, is set in New York during the 1980s,

the decade dominated by right-wing politicians and business executives and their

free-market, ‘greed is good’ philosophy. (So graphically depicted in Oliver Stone’s

1987 movie Wall Street.) The apparently slight plot concerns three main characters:

two young women who are roommates – Anna, a French drama student played by

Emmanuelle Chaulet, and Felicity, an American art gallery assistant played by

Grace Phillips - and Mark, a lonely and jaded stockbroker played by Stephen Lack,
who studies Vermeers in museums to relieve the stress caused by the trading floor.

(Lack [b. 1946, Montreal] is an accomplished actor but he is also a visual artist. In

1969, after taking a first degree in Psychology at McGill University, he gained a

Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Universidad Guanajuato, San Miguel,

Mexico. His paintings have been widely exhibited in private and public galleries.)

Mark is also an affluent bachelor seeking romance. People often use museums as

pick-up places and when Mark visits the Met, he encounters Anna standing in front

of Vermeer’s head-and-shoulders portrait Study of a Young Woman (c. 1665-67).

He thinks Anna is as beautiful as Vermeer’s sitter and writes her a note inviting her

to meet him in a cafe. (Mark regards the women portrayed by Vermeer as ‘eternal’

and it may be that he simply projects on to Anna the qualities of his ideal.) They

begin a desultory relationship that avoids the standard Hollywood plot development
and happy resolution. It emerges that Anna is homesick for Paris and her French

boyfriend, and so she merely tolerates Mark’s attentions and exploits him by

obtaining $3000 from him to pay her rent arrears. However, the film does have a

fairly dramatic ending. At Mark’s place of business, there is a financial crisis, which

brings on a headache. Afterwards, while visiting the Met to view its Vermeers again,

Mark begins to bleed from his right ear. He then rings Anna from a phone booth

and leaves a message declaring his love on her answer machine. Immediately

thereafter Mark dies from a cerebral haemorrhage. Anna, who was just about to fly

back to France, takes a yellow cab to the Met but arrives to find the Vermeer room

empty except for Mark’s raincoat draped across a bench. She then stands in front of

the Vermeer portrait and as the image of her head dissolves into that of the painting,

Anna’s voice is heard speaking about spiritualism, mortality, artistic struggle and

Vermeer. This statement seems rather forced and at odds with the rest of the film.

Jost’s film concerns both the art and financial worlds of New York. Scenes of

Rembrandts and Vermeers displayed in a museum represent the high quality

European art of the past, while scenes set in the Gracie Mansion Gallery represent

contemporary American art whose aesthetic merit is still uncertain. The private

Gallery is a real one and the dealer Gracie Mansion appears as herself and we see in

the background works by genuine artists such as Buster Cleveland, Ed McGowin

and Rhonda Zwillinger. Jost introduces the commercial dimension of contemporary

art via the character of Gordon, one of Mansion’s stable of artists, who pleads

desperately for $10,000 to pay off a drug dealer, and via Ariel, a calculating collector

preoccupied by the investment potential of the art she is thinking of buying.

 Mark is one connection between the worlds of art and finance, and Felicity is

another because she works in a gallery and her father is a wealthy individual who

uses her name to make investments in companies that may be damaging the Amazon

rain forest. In one scene, Felicity tries to persuade her father to give her power of

approval over the investments or stop using her name but he refuses and treats her

like a small child.

Summaries of plot and characters do not adequately describe this film because it

manifests some of the formal characteristics of avant-garde or art-house cinema. For

example, Jost pays homage to Godard by panning slowly across clothes, ornaments,

books, magazines and art reproductions that silently reveal the interests, tastes and

lifestyles of his characters. There are also long tracking shots of cityscapes, marble

floors or Doric columns without any dialogue but accompanied by music composed

and conducted by Jon A. English and performed by the Bay Area Jazz Composers

Orchestra of San Francisco. In one prolonged shot, Jost mimics the composition of

Vermeer’s two paintings of a woman in profile reading a letter while standing in

front of a window.

Some viewers, no doubt impatient for violent action sequences and dazzling

special effects, dismissed the film with such comments as ‘boring’, ‘shoddy

storytelling’, ‘worst movie ever’, ‘I left before the end’, and ‘an empty exercise in

the substitution of style for substance’. However, others found it ‘lyrical, witty,

poignant, captivating, elegant … a gorgeously romantic comedy of manners’.

Arguably, it is a subtle and elegiac film that lingers in the mind.

Compared to Hollywood’s summer blockbusters, Jost’s films are made with small
budgets and camera crews, and with available light. They purposefully celebrate

alternative values: art rather than entertainment, smallness rather than bigness.

That Jost strongly identifies with Vermeer – because his paintings are small, simple

and of the finest aesthetic quality - is made clear in an article he wrote in 1992 in

which he attacked the importance placed on largeness in American society: ‘Big

architecture, big science, big sport, big politics, big business, big art. And, of course,

big movies.’ (2) Jost then compared works by Vermeer and Rubens he had seen in

the Louvre Museum in Paris. Naturally, he preferred the gentle, modest canvases of

Vermeer with their ‘compassion for genuine life’ to the vast, florid, fleshy,

spectacular canvases of Rubens, which had probably been commissioned by

powerful monarchs to adorn their palaces.

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(1) Jonathan Jones, ‘He’s the painter of light. Period,’ The Guardian, Friday Review,

(9 January 2004), pp. 14-15.

(2) Jon Jost, ‘Jost speaking directly,’ Film Comment, Vol. 28, No. 2 (March-April

1992), p. 44.

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BRUSH WITH FATE (2003)

Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions made this film for American television and

promoted it as the most ambitious and expensive in the 52-year history of the

Hallmark Hall of Fame series. It was first screened on CBS on 2 February 2003.

Brent Shields was the producer and director. The film is similar to Girl with a Pearl

Earring (see below): both focus upon a single painting by Vermeer, weave a fiction

around it, are based on novels and involve painstaking historical reconstructions in

terms of sets and costumes. In this case, however, the supposed lost Vermeer, entitled

Girl in Hyacinth Blue, is a fictional one.

Jonathan Janson, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Image may be subject to copyright.

The painting depicts an interior in which a girl wearing a blue shawl sits at table

illuminated by the light from an open window. On the wall behind her is a map and

on the table is a still life with a jug and breadbasket. Clearly, the composition is a

pastiche of existing Vermeers. However, the young woman looks more like a figure

from a Norman Rockwell than from a genuine Vermeer.

The best-selling novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue (Denver: MacMurray & Beck, 1999)
upon which the script by Richard Russo was based, was written by an American

author, journalist and teacher of English and ceramics - Susan Vreeland – who has a

Dutch name. (Vreeland has written other volumes about art and artists, namely, The

Passion of Artemisia [New York: Viking, 2002] and Life Studies: Stories [New York:

Viking, 2005].) Historical research for the novel was based on 75 texts, which

included the catalogue to the exhibition of Vermeer held at the National Gallery of

Art, Washington in 1995-96. Vreeland is someone who responds emotionally and

imaginatively to antique works of art and craft preserved in museums and is moved

by the fact that they have survived their makers and generations of humans.

Contemplating works of art, especially during periods of illness, Vreeland thinks has

a ‘healing tranquillity, an enriching and uplifting power’ and she was inspired to

write several short stories about people who lived their ‘defining moments in the

presence of a beautiful painting’. Later, she added further stories to constitute the

novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

The narrative of the film begins in the present at a minor American prep school. A

new male art teacher, played by Thomas Gibson, meets Cornelia Engelbrecht, a

reclusive, eccentric existing member of the faculty played with manic intensity by

the leading Hollywood actress Glenn Close.

Press kit images.

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She invites the art teacher to her home in order to introduce him to her father, a

stroke victim confined to a wheelchair, and to show him a hidden treasure: an

unknown Vermeer. Cornelia says she has spent years researching the provenance of

the painting and then the film enters a long flashback phase in which the several

stories of the Dutch men and women who owned the painting over the centuries are

recounted. The owners include both wealthy and poor people, some of whom
experience personal tragedies such as unhappy love affairs and disasters such as

floods. Often the limpid beauty of the painting acts as a solace for the trials the

characters undergo. Scenes in which the Dutch men folk struggle to prevent the sea

from breaching their dykes are reminiscent of action movies.

Viewers may find the chronology hard to follow because it is told in reverse order

until we arrive back at the days of Vermeer himself living in Delft with his wife and

children. Vermeer, played by Roelant Rodier, is short of money and in debt to trades

people such as the baker.

Roelant Rodier as Vermeer.

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The latter, in fact, admires Vermeer’s art and is willing to accept paintings in lieu of

payment and this is a historical fact. (The actual baker was called Hendrick van

Buyten.) Vermeer’s teenage daughter Magdalena, played by Laurien van den

Broeck, is supposedly the model for the girl dressed in Hyacinth blue and she wants

her father to teach her to paint. (Actually, the painter never had a daughter called

Magdalena.) Vermeer visits his mother-in-law Maria Thins in order to borrow

money and says he deserves it for keeping his brother-in-law Willem Bolnes out of

trouble. The latter is mentally disturbed and violent. He thinks his inheritance is

reducing every time his sister Catharina has a baby. In one scene, he attacks his

pregnant sister with a stick and she miscarries. As punishment, he is confined to a

private house of correction. Again, according to Vermeer scholars such as John

Michael Montias, this person did exist and behaved as depicted in the film.

Finally, the narrative returns to the present. The art teacher points out that

Cornelia has not explained how she and her father came to possess the picture. Her

explanation requires another flashback to Amsterdam during World War II. A

Jewish family now owns the Vermeer but soon German troops arrest them. An

officer confiscates the painting and after the war flees with it to the United States.

This is how it happens to be in America and why it has been kept hidden from the

world. It is true of course, that some Nazis did confiscate Vermeers from Jews; for

example, Vermeer’s The Astronomer [1668] was stolen by the Nazis from Édouard

de Rothschild in 1940 and Hermann Goering even acquired fake Vermeers painted

by the forger Han van Meegeren. It is also the case that ‘cultured’ Nazis were

capable of appreciating beautiful art and music while simultaneously committing

appalling atrocities. Cornelia justifies her father’s actions and her reclusive life

devoted to caring for the Vermeer to the art teacher by saying it was due to ‘love’.

Brush with Fate was filmed in the Netherlands and while much effort went into

finding appropriate settings and into the historical reconstructions, the stories of the

various Dutch owners are not particularly gripping and the film sags the moment

Glenn Close is off the screen. Girl with a Pearl Earring is superior in virtually every
respect and we learn far more about Vermeer’s techniques in the British film.

Since the invented Vermeer that connects all the characters is so crucial to the

plot, it was vital that the painting looked as authentic as possible. Jonathan Janson,

an American professional artist, was commissioned to create it. He was born in 1950

in New Jersey and trained at the Rhode Island School of Design during the 1970s.

Janson, who has resided in Rome for 30 years, once visited Boston to see Vermeer’s

The Concert (1665-66). He subsequently became obsessed with the Dutch painter,

learned everything he could about his methods and techniques so that he could

simulate his work, and now maintains a detailed website (see

www.essentialvermeer.com). He is also the author of a text and a CD: How to Paint

Your Own Vermeer: Recapturing Materials and Methods of a Seventeenth-Century

Master, 2006; How to Paint Your Own Vermeer:A Painting in Progress, (CD with 180

progressive images of the painting of a hypothetical Vermeer composition, 2008). In

preparation for the painting and for the final scenes of the film, a full-scale replica

of the room in which the girl sits (based on the rooms found in Vermeer’s pictures)

was constructed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. Of course, appropriate props,

costumes, lighting and a female model were also needed. Photographs were then

taken for Janson to use for reference. Finally, he visited Amsterdam to examine the

Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum and the features of the actress playing Magdalena.

Eight weeks later, he had completed the ‘Vermeer’.

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GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (2003)

The fact that so little is known about the life and personality of Vermeer and many
of the people he portrayed has given novelists and filmmakers a licence to fantasise

and invent. For instance, in 1999 the American writer Tracy Chevalier, who moved

to London in 1984, wrote a historical novel whose title - Girl with a Pearl Earring –

derived from a small head-and-shoulders Vermeer executed around 1665 preserved

in The Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, in The Hague.

This painting has been dubbed ‘the Dutch or Northern Mona Lisa’. The girl is

represented with her sensuous red lips parted and her eyes gazing over her left

shoulder at the viewer. She is wearing an exotic blue turban and a large pearl

earring, which has a white highlight essential to the composition. Since the face is

strongly illuminated and set against a black background, the effect – to

contemporary eyes – is like a cinematic close up of a spot lit subject. The model’s
identity is unknown – though some think it is his daughter Maria - and for this

reason Vermeer scholars argue it is not a portrait (a likeness of a named individual

that was commissioned by a patron) but a ‘tronie’ , that is, a study of expression,

character type or physiognomy made for the open market. Two other tronies by

Vermeer are known.

Chevalier’s romantic fiction was informed by her reading of historical and art-

historical texts, especially Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An

interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) and John Michael Montias’s

Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History (1989). The latter scholar, a

Professor of Economics at Yale University, is chiefly responsible for establishing the

social context of Vermeer’s life and times, and identifying his small circle of

admirers and collectors. (1) Chevalier’s novel was lauded by critics and became a

best seller (it sold two million copies).

Olivia Hetreed then adapted the book for the screenplay of an art-house film
(budget $10 million, distributed by Lions Gate Films and Pathé Pictures) with the

same title after the principal producers Andy Paterson and Anand Tucker of Archer

Street Productions, London had promised Chevalier that they would respect the

novel’s ‘emotional truth’ and not sex-it up Hollywood fashion. Some subplots were

omitted and another difference between the book and the film was the ending. (2)

Peter Webber, who had previously made dramas and documentaries for BBC

television, was chosen as the director. It was his first feature film. Webber was

familiar with the Vermeer painting that is the main subject because he had seen it on

a school trip to Amsterdam. He had also studied the history of art at university and

during his final year had specialised in Dutch and Flemish art. Webber was

conscious how difficult it would be to make a film about an artist because there were

so many pitfalls and clichés to avoid. He prepared by watching Jacques Rivette’s La

Belle Noiseuse (1991) because of its artist-model theme. Another film he admired

was Stanley Kubrick’s costume epic Barry Lyndon (1975). Since dialogue was to be

used sparingly, Webber thought the film would be as close to a silent film as was

possible in modern times and so he watched silent films by Carl Theodor Dreyer. In

Webber’s view, it would be impossible to make a noisy or fast film about Vermeer.
 The film starred Colin Firth – a handsome heartthrob of British costume dramas –

as Vermeer, and Scarlett Johansson – an emerging 17-year old American actress – as

a servant called Griet.

Johansson resembled the unknown sitter for the Vermeer to some degree but is not

of Dutch origin. However, one of her parents was of Danish stock. In playing the

character of Griet as a hard working, shy but intelligent virgin, Johansson relied on

the script and her instincts. She did not read the novel until after the film was

completed. Firth, in contrast, did read the novel and books on Vermeer for clues as

to how to play him but had to improvise because there was so little information to

rely on. He also visited museums to study Vermeer’s paintings and took some

rudimentary painting lessons. Firth excels at playing enigmatic, moody, taciturn

characters and this is how he portrayed Vermeer while wearing a shoulder-length

wig. In one interview, Firth revealed what he had learned about the ‘elusive’

painter: ‘In 17th century Delft artists were craftsmen who took their civic duties
seriously – they served apprenticeships, and had a union [that is, a guild] to protect

their economic rights. Long before the cult of the tortured rebellious artist took

over, it was perfectly possible to be a good citizen and husband and also be a great

artist.’ (3)

Essie Davis played Catharina, Vermeer’s wife and mother of his brood of children

while the veteran British actor Tom Wilkinson played Pieter [Claesz.] van Ruijeven

of Delft, a wealthy patrician who is thought to have been Vermeer’s most important

patron.

The film is not a biopic of Vermeer because it is more about one of his subjects

than about him. In addition, it concerns only a short period of his life – several

months during 1665 when he was 33-years old - and he is perceived from the

standpoint of Griet, a girl from a poorer Protestant family who is compelled to

become a maidservant in Vermeer’s more affluent Catholic household because of an

accident to her father who had been a tile painter. Delaying Vermeer’s entrance
until the audience is impatient to meet him created suspense. An older and sturdily

built servant called Tanneke – played by Joanna Scalan – shows Griet round the

house and gossips about the family. (It seems there was a real maid called Tanneke

Everpoel and she is thought to have posed for the figure pouring milk from a jug in

Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid [c. 1657-58].) One of Griet’s many domestic duties

is to clean Vermeer’s studio and so they become acquainted. Unlikely though it

would have been in reality, she becomes Vermeer’s assistant – buying and grinding

his colours – and eventually his model/muse. An intense emotional relationship

develops between them that reaches a climax when Vermeer pierces Griet’s ear (a

symbolic deflowering) but the relationship is never consummated sexually and it

may be that Vermeer’s interest in Griet is ultimately professional.

Like Vermeer, Griet has an eye for colour and composition, and so the painter is

willing to explain to her some of his painstaking procedures such as glazing.

(According to the film, Griet even improved one of Vermeer’s compositions by

removing a chair he was depicting. An X-ray of the real canvas in question has

revealed that a chair in the foreground was painted over.) In one scene, for instance,

Vermeer shows Griet a camera obscura and tells her it helps him to see and compose
his pictures better but exactly how it influenced his painting style – as documented

in Philip Steadman’s book Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the

Masterpieces (2001) - is not explained. Nevertheless, cinemagoers do learn something

about his art and artist-model relationships. During the course of the film, not many

completed Vermeers are illustrated nor does the camera dwell on them. Mostly we

see Vermeers, or rather replicas of them, hanging on walls in backgrounds and

partially completed canvases resting on an easel. (In 1663, when a French traveller

visited Vermeer, the painter said he had no works to show him!) From time to time,

we see Vermeer mixing pigments on a palette and applying them to canvas with a

brush while he steadies his wrist with a marl stick.

Griet soon discovers that the Vermeer family is always short of money partly due

to Vermeer’s perfectionism that results in a slow rate of artistic production. Van

Ruijeven has to be flattered and entertained in order to solicit new commissions and

so we learn something about the relationship between art, money and power during

the seventeenth century. Vermeer has power over his patron because of the latter’s

desire to possess his pictures, but the patron has power over Vermeer because the

latter needs his cash. Van Ruijeven is represented as a lecherous individual who

seduces maidservants and so the unequal power relation between men and women is

another theme of the film. Griet resists his advances, but he gains possession of her

image – according to the film – by commissioning Vermeer to paint her without

Catharina’s knowledge while wearing the latter’s earrings. When Catharina finds

out and sees the painting, she flies into a rage and dismisses Griet. Of course,

Vermeer, as Griet’s master (employer) and as an older, better educated man of

higher social standing, also exercises power over her while being reluctant to impose

his will on his jealous wife, shrewd mother-in-law and fractious children.

The whole raison d’être of the film is to explain how Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl

Earring was created and so naturally, the film ends with Griet posing and being told

to wet her lips followed by an extended shot of the actual canvas in which the

camera pulls back slowly from the touches of white paint that represent the gleam

on the pearl earring. In fact, the filmmakers were not permitted to shoot the

painting in situ. Instead, the Mauritshuis supplied a high-resolution still, which was

then filmed with a rostrum camera. Webber believes most gallery goers do not look

at paintings for long enough and was delighted he had the opportunity to make

captive audiences gaze at a Vermeer for a while.

Eduardo Serra was the cinematographer and his work was to be praised as

‘breath-taking’. Serra is of Portuguese origin but lives in Paris. Like Webber, he had

studied the history of art at university (the Sorbonne). Serra aimed for a naturalistic

effect and used natural light as much as possible. He shot the film in widescreen to

reproduce the ‘frames-within-frames’ – open doorways, mirrors and pictures-

within-pictures – so typical of Dutch and Flemish art.

Filming took place not in Delft but on a pre-built set at the Delux Studios in Esch,

Luxembourg that had previously been used for a film about Venice. Delft does have

canals but some outdoor scenes resemble Venice more than they do Delft. Naturally,

the look of the film was heavily influenced by Vermeer’s paintings particularly the

interiors of the artist’s house and his studio (a replica of the latter was built).

However, other scenes inside taverns, and exterior scenes of streets and landscapes
were influenced by paintings by different Dutch and Flemish artists; namely,

Gerard Terborch, Pieter Bruegel, Pieter de Hooch and Meindert Hobbema. (Both

the production designer - Ben van Os - and the costume designer - Dien van Straalen

– were Dutch.) The lower floors of Vermeer’s home were filmed in a gloomy manner

to contrast with the much lighter space of his studio on an upper floor. The studio

had north-facing windows and Serra placed his lights outside them to mimic the

slanting sidelight Vermeer relied upon. Serra also varied the type of film stock in

order to make certain scenes appear softer. According to Serra, who has been

dubbed ‘painter of light’, light was one of the characters in the film.

On its release, Girl with a Pearl Earring received awards at film festivals and its

overall look and design, its acting, directing and musical score were all praised by

reviewers and cinemagoers. It was judged ‘stunningly designed’, ‘painterly,

hauntingly beautiful’, ‘visually ravishing’, ‘pure magic’, ‘a wonderful experience’,

and ‘one of the best films ever made about art’. Chevalier was delighted by the

adaptation and even envious of an incident introduced by the filmmakers: while

polishing a metal bowl outside the house, Griet directs reflected sunlight onto a wall,

which Vermeer’s children try to catch. However, there were some negative

assessments maintaining that the film lacked incident and excitement, was

‘unbearably boring’, ‘a thin veneer of Vermeer’ and its optical splendour was ‘eye

candy masquerading as high art’. More sophisticated were Ann Hornaday’s

comments on the book and film:

‘The entire story is Chevalier’s conjecture, of course, a fanciful and ultimately

polemical piece of feminist revisionism about women’s historically endless capacity

to suffer for men’s art … Griet is the victim of male manipulation on the part of

both Vermeer and his odious patron, but she also only comes alive under the male

artist’s gaze … By this time, the film’s fetishistic treatment of Griet and her world

has become almost unseemly, and when she finally strikes the famous pose, it plays

like a highbrow, literary version of the blockbuster money shot … [the film]

culminates, appropriately enough, on the lingering image of Vermeer’s actual

painting, a conclusion that serves only to remind viewers of how superfluous the

preceding playacting and speculation have been. With luck, even the most lambent

visual seductions of the screen will never supplant the enigmatic power of the real

thing.’ (4)

Hornaday’s final remarks do not acknowledge that the film’s evocation of domestic

life in seventeenth century Delft and Vermeer’s paintings, an evocation that

resembles a history lesson, might well persuade thousands of viewers to visit the

Netherlands to examine ‘the real thing’ for themselves.

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(1) John Michael Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu: A Web of Social History,

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

(2) In the book, there is a final chapter set ten years after Griet left the Vermeer

household. We learn that Griet has married a local butcher’s son and has two
children. Following Vermeer’s death, Griet returns to his house to receive from his

widow a pair of pearl earrings he has willed to her. In the film, she receives a packet

containing the earrings immediately. For a more detailed comparison of the book

and the film see: Laura M. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis

in Literature and Film, (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2008).

(3) <www.firth.com/gwape_notes.html>

(4) Ann Hornaday, ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring: an unintended still life,’ Washington

Post (9 January 2004), p. C01.

NB see also official website: http://www.girlwithapearlearringmovie.com/

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John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and

Artists on Screen and Art and Celebrity.