The archive / Baroque / Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer · 1632–1675
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 30×40″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 40×60″.
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The work
She was never a real person.
A single oversized pearl hangs in her ear. No one sat for this. It is a tronie, a Dutch study of an invented face rather than a likeness of a named person. Vermeer dressed his imaginary girl in exotic clothes, wound an oriental turban around her head, and turned her toward us as if she had only just looked up.
Look closer
The most precious thing here is the blue.
Follow the headscarf and the blue deepens where the cloth folds. That blue is ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli, a stone carried from far away and prized in the 17th century above gold itself. Vermeer used it here in unusually large amounts. He spent his most expensive pigment on a cloth wrapped around a face he never set out to name.
Why it matters
What you see today is not quite what Vermeer painted.
The dark void behind her was once a green curtain, and faint eyelashes ring her eyes, almost too fine to see. Both came to light in the 2018 'Girl in the Spotlight' technical study. The painting has hung in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902, left to the museum by Des Tombe, a collector who died without heirs. Time dimmed it; the study gave some of it back.
It's surprising how much high quality ultramarine Vermeer used in the girl's headscarf. This blue pigment was more valuable than gold in the 17th century.— Abbie Vandivere, Mauritshuis conservator, 'Girl in the Spotlight' project lead, 2018
The file & the facts
- Title
- Girl with a Pearl Earring
- Artist
- Johannes Vermeer
- Year
- c. 1665
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original
- 44.5 × 39 cm
- Collection
- Mauritshuis, The Hague
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · Reproduction: Mauritshuis, The Hague — digitized by Madpixel (Google Arts & Culture)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
