VERMEER: THREE FILMS

John A. Walker (Copyright 2009)

----------------------------------------------------------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 Vermeers 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. Vermeers
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 Josts 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 Stones
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 Vermeers head-and-shoulders portrait Study of a Young Woman (c. 1665-67).

He thinks Anna is as beautiful as Vermeers 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 Marks attentions and exploits him by
obtaining $3000 from him to pay her rent arrears. However, the film does have a
fairly dramatic ending. At Marks 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 Marks 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, Annas 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.
Josts 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 Mansions 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
Vermeers 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 Hollywoods summer blockbusters, Josts 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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) Jonathan Jones, Hes 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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The latter, in fact, admires Vermeers 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.) Vermeers 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, Vermeers The Astronomer [1668] was stolen by the Nazis from douard
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 fathers 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 Vermeers 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 Vermeers
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 Vermeers pictures)
was constructed at Romes Cinecitt 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.
------------------------------------------------------

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 models

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.
Chevaliers romantic fiction was informed by her reading of historical and arthistorical texts, especially Simon Schamas The Embarrassment of Riches: An
interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) and John Michael
Montiass 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 Vermeers life and times, and identifying his small
circle of admirers and collectors. (1) Chevaliers 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 Path 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 novels 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 clichs to avoid. He prepared by watching Jacques Rivettes La
Belle Noiseuse (1991) because of its artist-model theme. Another film he admired
was Stanley Kubricks 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
Webbers 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 Vermeers 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, Vermeers 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 Vermeers 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 Vermeers more affluent Catholic household because of an
accident to her father who had been a tile painter. Delaying Vermeers 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
Vermeers painting The Milkmaid [c. 1657-58].) One of Griets many domestic duties
is to clean Vermeers studio and so they become acquainted. Unlikely though it
would have been in reality, she becomes Vermeers 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 Griets ear (a
symbolic deflowering) but the relationship is never consummated sexually and it
may be that Vermeers 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 Vermeers 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 Steadmans book Vermeers 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 Vermeers 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 latters
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
Catharinas knowledge while wearing the latters earrings. When Catharina finds
out and sees the painting, she flies into a rage and dismisses Griet. Of course,
Vermeer, as Griets 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 dtre of the film is to explain how Vermeers 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 Vermeers paintings particularly the
interiors of the artists 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 Vermeers 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 Vermeers 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 Hornadays
comments on the book and film:

The entire story is Chevaliers conjecture, of course, a fanciful and ultimately

polemical piece of feminist revisionism about womens historically endless capacity

to suffer for mens 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
artists gaze By this time, the films 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 Vermeers 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)

Hornadays final remarks do not acknowledge that the films evocation of domestic
life in seventeenth century Delft and Vermeers 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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(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 butchers son and has two

children. Following Vermeers 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/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and
Artists on Screen and Art and Celebrity.