With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.

Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss: I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical. In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton


From Publishers Weekly
The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer, and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be provoke to the literary imagination, as witnessed by this third fine fictional work on the Dutch artist in the space of 13 months. Not as erotic or as deviously suspenseful as Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson, or as original in conception as Susan Vreeland's interlinked short stories, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Chevalier's first novel succeeds on its own merits. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the modest daughter of a tile maker who in 1664 is forced to work as a maid in the Vermeer household because her father has gone blind, Chevalier presents a marvelously textured picture of 17th-century Delft. The physical appearance of the city is clearly delineated, as is its rigidly defined class system, the grinding poverty of the working people and the prejudice against Catholics among the Protestant majority. From the very first, 16-year-old narrator Griet establishes herself as a keen observer who sees the world in sensuous images, expressed in precise and luminous prose. Through her vision, the personalities of coolly distant Vermeer, his emotionally volatile wife, Catharina, his sharp-eyed and benevolently powerful mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and his increasing brood of children are traced with subtle shading, and the strains and jealousies within the household potently conveyed. With equal skill, Chevalier describes the components of a painting: how colors are mixed from apothecary materials, how the composition of a work is achieved with painstaking care. She also excels in conveying the inflexible class system, making it clear that to members of the wealthy elite, every member of the servant class is expendable. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant, and later demands that she pose for him wearing Catharina's pearl earrings. While Chevalier develops the tension of this situation with skill, several other devices threaten to rob the narrative of its credibility. Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve a painting demands one stretch of the reader's imagination. And Vermeer's acknowledgment of his debt to her, revealed in the denouement, is a blatant nod to sentimentality. Still, this is a completely absorbing story with enough historical authenticity and artistic intuition to mark Chevalier as a talented newcomer to the literary scene. Agent, Deborah Schneider. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-A fictional account of how the Dutch artist Vermeer painted his masterpiece. In this splendid novel, the girl in the painting is Griet, the 16-year-old servant of the Vermeer household. The relationship between her and Vermeer is elusive. Is she more than a model? Is she merely an assistant? Is the artist's interest exaggerated in her eyes? The details found in this book bring 17th-century Holland to life. Everyday chores are described so completely that readers will feel Griet's raw, chapped hands and smell the blood-soaked sawdust of the butcher's stall. They will never view a Dutch painting again without remembering how bone, white lead, and other materials from the apothecary shop were ground, and then mixed with linseed oil to produce the rich colors. YAs will also find out how a maid from the lower class, whose only claim to pearls would be to steal them, becomes the owner of the earrings.Sheila Barry, Chantilly Regional Library, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Set in 17th-century Delft, this historical novel intertwines the art of Johannes Vermeer with his life and that of a maiden servant in his household. From the few facts known about the artist, Chevalier creates the reality of the Netherlands. The parallel themes of tradesman/artist, Protestant/Catholic, and master/servant are intricately woven into the fabric of the tale. The painters of the day spent long hours in the studio, devising and painting re-creations of everyday life. The thrust of the story is seen through the eyes of Griet, the daughter of a Delft tile maker who lost his sight and, with it, the ability to support his family. Griet's fate is to be hired out as a servant to the Vermeer household. She has a wonderful sense of color, composition, and orderliness that the painter Vermeer recognizes. And, slowly, Vermeer entrusts much of the labor of creating the colored paints to Griet. Throughout, narrator Ruth Ann Phimister gives a strong performance as the enchanting voice of Griet. Highly recommended. Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Coughlin
Chevalier's exploration ... is moving, and her depiction of 17th-century Delft is marvelously evocative.


The New Yorker, January 24, 2000
Absorbing novel ... as Chevalier's writing skill and her knowledge of seventeenth-century Delft are such that she creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior: suspended in a particular moment, it transcends its time and place.


The Wall Street Journal
A vibrant, sumptuous novel...triumphant...a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it.


The New York Times
Marvelously evocative.


USA Today
Outstanding.


From AudioFile
Vermeer's evocative painting is the inspiration for this novel of sixteenth-century Delft about a young girl who goes to work as a servant in the home of the painter and becomes his subject. Tracy Chevalier tells the story from the perspective of the girl, Griet, who is intrigued by the painter as she cleans his studio, studies his paintings, and comes to know something of the interrelationships among the painter's wife, his many children, and his mother-in-law. Jenna Lamia infuses this glimpse into Vermeer's world with a girlish curiosity and innocence, capturing both the freshness of youth and the stirrings of womanhood. Other characters are also well presented; the jealousy of Vermeer's oldest daughter, the wisdom of his mother-in-law, and the painter's own quiet desperation are all expressed fully. Through the marriage of insightful prose and expressive narration, the listener feels a part of this world. It is a glimpse as intimate as one of Vermeer's own paintings. M.A.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
England-based Chevaliers first US appearance is another novel based on a painting of Vermeer (see Susan Vreelands Girl in Hyacinth Blue, p. 998). The tale this time is toldalluringly indeedby the housemaid who sat as model for the painting in question. Griet is only 16, in 1664, when shes hired as a maid in the grand Delft household of Johannes Vermeer, who practices the Catholic faith and has a family consisting of wife, mother-in-law, cook, and 5 children (by storys end there will be 11). Griets own faith is Protestant, and her humble family has been made even poorer since her father, a tile-painter, had an accident that left him blind. Hard-working and sweet-tempered Griet is taken on, then, partly as an act of charity, but the austere and famous painter is struck by her sensitive eye for color and balance, and after a time he asks her to grind paints for him in his attic studioand perhaps begins falling in love with her, as she certainly does with him. Let there be no question, however, of anything remotely akin to declared romance, the maids station being far, far below the eminent painters, not to mention that his bitterly jealous wife Catharine remains sharply resentful of any least privilege extended to Grieta complication that Vermeer resolves simply through intensified secrecy. Theres a limit, though, to how much hiding can be done in a single house however large, and when Griet begins sitting for Vermeer (his patron, the lecherous Ruijven, who has eyesand handsfor Griet, brings it about), suspicions rise. Thats as nothing, though, to the storm that sweeps the house and all but brings about Griets very ruin when Catharine discovers that the base-born maid has committed the thieving travesty of wearing her pearl earrings. Courageous Griet, though, proves herself a survivor in this tenderhearted and sharp-eyed ramble through daily lifeand high artin 17th-century Delft. Another small and Vermeer-inspired treasure. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


The Cleveland Plain Dealer
The richest, most rewarding novel I have read this year.


The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Tracy Chevalier has so vividly imagined the life of the painter and his subject that you say to yourself: This is the way it must have been.


The Miami Herald
A jewel of a novel.


San Francisco Chronicle
Superb...vividly captures the world of 17th-century Delft.


Time magazine
Chevalier brings the real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel.


Mira Sorvino
It's so strong, in fact, that the writer was able to create a whole story about this unknown girl.


Book Description
History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of sixteen-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius ... even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil.


Download Description
Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings. "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is the story of 16-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius, even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil.


From the Author
Q>Everyday life in 17th-century Delft is so vivid in Girl with a Pearl Earring. How did you conduct your research? Where?

A>Most of it, I confess, was done in my armchair. I read a lot (especially Simon Schama's The Embarrassment Of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in The Golden Age) and looked at a lot of paintings. Luckily 17th-century Dutch paintings are mainly scenes from everyday life and so it was easy to see what houses looked like inside and how they were run. I also went to Delft for four days and just wandered around, taking it in. Vermeer's house no longer exists, but there are plenty of 17th-century buildings still left, as well as the Market Square, the Meat Hall, the canals and bridges. It's not hard to get an idea of what it was like then.

Q>Little is known of Vermeer's life-at least compared with other Baroque painters like Rembrandt. Why did you choose Vermeer's work to write about?

A>I chose Vermeer's work because it is so beautiful and so mysterious. In his paintings, the solitary women going about their domestic tasks-pouring milk, reading letters, weighing gold, putting on a necklace-inhabit a world that we are getting a secret glimpse at. And because it feels secret-the women don't seem to know we're looking at them-it seems also that something else is going on underneath, something mysterious we can't quite grasp. The fact that so little is known about Vermeer was happenstance-happily so, as it turned out, for it meant I could make up a lot without worrying about things being "true" or not.

Q>Were you inspired by this particular painting or by Vermeer's work in general? A>I was inspired specifically by this particular painting, though I know his other work as well. A poster of this painting has hung on the wall of my bedroom since I was nineteen and I often lie in bed and look at it and wonder about it. It's such an open painting. I'm never sure what the girl is thinking or what her expression is. Sometimes she seems sad, other times seductive. So, one morning a couple years ago I was lying in bed worrying about what I was going to write next, and I looked up at the painting and wondered what Vermeer did or said to the model to get her to look like that. And right then I made up the story.

Q>Is Girl with a Pearl Earring a true story? To what extent is it based in fact?

A>It isn't a true story. No one knows who the girl is, or in fact who any of the people in his paintings are. Very little is known about Vermeer-he left no writings, not even any drawings, just 35 paintings. The few known facts are based on legal documents-his baptism, his marriage, the births of his children, his will. I was careful to be true to the known facts; for instance, he married Catharina Bolnes and they had eleven surviving children. Other facts are not so clear-cut and I had to make choices: he may or may not have lived in the house of his mother-in-law (I decided he did); he converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage but not necessarily because Catharina was Catholic (I decided he did); he may have been friends with the scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope (I decided he was). But there was a lot I simply made up.

Q> You chose to give your novel the same title as the painting. Is there a greater purpose for this? What sort of a relationship do you see the novel and the painting having?

A>The novel has the same name as the painting because the painting is the culmination of the story; its creation is what the story is leading up to. It also points up the earring, which is important as a symbol because it represents the world Griet gets drawn into and ultimately rejected from. The novel could not exist without the painting. I would never have written it, and I don't think it would have the same resonance with readers if the painting didn't exist.

Q>Do you paint? If not, how did you learn about the process and tools?

A>I don't paint, though I did take a painting class while writing this book so I could find out a little about how it's done. I was absolutely awful at it, but I learned a lot. I also read about Vermeer's painting technique, and spoke with the woman who restored the painting for the 1996 Vermeer exhibition. She was able to explain to me some of the finer details of how he painted.

As for the paints and how they were made, I found some old books about making paints and learned from them. I also bought some linseed oil (which is mixed with pigment to make paint) and left the bottle open as I was writing so that I could smell what they would have smelled.

Q> 17th-century literature reflected religious and social changes just like 17th-century painting. Milton's radical Paradise Lost was published during this time. Did you consider this sort of thing when writing an historical novel?

A> I didn't consider Paradise Lost, but clearly religious change in the Netherlands at the time was a very important issue. The Dutch had just thrown off the rule of the Catholic Spanish and were keen to distance themselves from Catholicism. Protestantism suited their natures. The Dutch Catholics were tolerated but were seen as slightly outside the system, which is fascinating when you consider that Vermeer actually converted to Catholicism, and so chose to be a maverick. You have to consider religious and social change when writing historical novels. They are essential to the push and pull of the story. In fact, all my novels are historical and set during periods of great social change. My first novel, The Virgin Blue (published in Britain), is set during the 16th-century Reformation in France, and the novel I'm working on now is set in England at the beginning of the 20th-century and up through World War I.

Q>While reading the novel, I couldn't help examining and re-examining the painting every few pages. Did you write the novel with the painting at hand?

A>Oh yes. With all his paintings, in fact. I kept the catalogue from the 1996 Vermeer exhibition almost permanently open. Most of the characters' looks are based on people in his other paintings.I had the whole story worked out (except for the odd detail) before I started writing. This is unusual for me. Often I know only some of the story before I start writing. This book was a dream to write because of that and because the style is so spare.

Q>Why the camera obscura? It plays such an important part, lending all sorts of ideas about technology and foreshadowing what's to come.

A>The camera obscura is a tangible representation of a different way of looking. Griet has the capacity to look in a different way, but she needs Vermeer to show her how. He does that partly with the help of the camera obscura. It also reminds us that in order to see clearly you have to focus, shut out the world and look at one corner of a room. That is what Vermeer's paintings do-they reveal the world in a room. That is also what the novel tries to do-it is deliberately narrow and focused, and in it is a whole world.

Q>What's next? Are you ready to work on another historical novel?

A>Yes. The next novel is set in a Victorian cemetery in London at the turn of the century and up through World War I. It's about two girls whose families have adjacent plots at the cemetery, and the apprentice gravedigger they meet there. In a wider sense the book is about the changing values at the beginning of the modern era, looked at through the changing attitudes to death and mourning. The Victorians bought elaborate tombs for their dead and followed strict and elaborate mourning rituals, but by the end of World War I graves became much simpler and mourning was conducted in private. Why did this change occur? The book attempts to answer that. I can't seem to write a contemporary novel. I suppose I'm more comfortable in the past, where I know what is important and lasting. If I write about today, I worry that it will date in ten years' time.


About the Author
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Tracy Chevalier moved to London in 1984 after earning her bachelor's degree in English from Oberlin College in Ohio. Intending to return after six months, she lives there still.

Chevalier worked for several years as a literary editor for a reference book publisher, editing encyclopedias about writers and literature. In 1994, she graduated with a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Her first novel, chosen by W. H. Smith for its prestigious Fresh Talent promotion, was published in the U.K. in 1997. Set in France and Switzerland, The Virgin Blue explores the persecution of French Huguenots in the 16th-century through the lens of a contemporary American woman, who unravels the puzzling secrets of her own ancestry. The Virgin Blue will have its first American publication in a Plume edition to be published in 2002.

Chevalier lives with her husband and son and is at work on a third novel, set in London at the dawn of the 20th-century. To date, she has stood face-to-face with 28 of Johannes Vermeer's 35 known paintings. One of her primary goals in life is to see them all in person.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
The unknown subject of a Vermeer masterpiece is the basis for this remarkably evocative novel. The illiterate young Griet, held captive by the strict social order of 17th-century Delft, becomes a maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer to help support her family. She knows her role well: tend the laundry, keep up with the housework, and make sure Vermeer's six children stay out of the way. Griet even thinks she can handle Vermeer's shrewd mother-in-law, his bitter, neglected wife, and the family's jealous servant. But what no one suspects is that Griet's quiet manner, uncanny perception, and fascination with her master's paintings will draw her inexorably into the painter's private world. And as Griet witnesses the creative process of a great master, her long-suppressed passion becomes the catalyst for a scandal that irrevocably changes her life. (Summer 2000 Selection)

ANNOTATION

Winner of Barnes & Noble's 2000 Discover Great New Writers Award

FROM THE PUBLISHER

History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of sixteen-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius ... even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil.

Chevalier brings the real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel. (Time magazine)

A vibrant, sumptuous novel...triumphant...a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it. (The Wall Street Journal)

The richest, most rewarding novel I have read this year. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Outstanding. (USA Today)

Marvelously evocative. (The New York Times)

Superb...vividly captures the world of 17th-century Delft. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Tracy Chevalier has so vividly imagined the life of the painter and his subject that you say to yourself: This is the way it must have been. (The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

A jewel of a novel. (The Miami Herald)

Author Bio: Tracy Chevalier holds a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, The Virgin Blue, was chosen by UK bookseller WH Smith for its 1997 Fresh Talent promotion.

FROM THE CRITICS

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

It's great strength is its projection of a complex, emotional universe onto an intimate canvas. The details, like the world of colors that Vermeer found in a single fold of white cloth, add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Plain Dealer

Girl With a Pearl Earring, the second novel by Tracy Chevalier is the richest, most rewarding novel I have read in 1999. The strong, complex relationship between these two lover and beloved, powerful and powerless - is played out with subtlety and grace. Chevalier's way of resolving it is as fitting as it is haunting.

SF Chronicle Review

Girl With a Pearl Earring is an engaging fictionalization. Fittingly, Chevalier's writing style adopts a painterly approach: The elegant prose evokes contemplation, the pace is slow and cumulative the drama emotional rather than visceral. Looking at the painting after having read the novel. The reader thinks, Yes, Chevalier got it right - that was the story hidden behind those eyes, silent for centuries.

Denise Kersten - USA Today

Chevalier's imagination adds life to an already brilliant painting in this elegantely developed and beautifully written novel.

Katie Flatley - Wall Street Journal