Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Chevalier draws the distinctions of class in the mercantile Dutch nation as a contour map whose every gradation bruises the feet. Thus, when the father is blinded in a kiln explosion, leaving the family near destitute, his membership qualifies his daughter for a menial job. Her father, a tile glazier, belongs to the guild of which Vermeer is master. Griet's arrival in the Vermeer household is a descent.

There is strong feeling, but it rises unforcedly from the book's tactile evocation of the social, material and emotional detail of life in Delft of the time, and increasingly from the stormy clarity achieved by Griet as narrator and protagonist.

These range among the dynamics and moralities of art and the artist, their claims upon life, life's claims upon them and the struggle of women to find their own values and place in a male hierarchy, specifically in a 17th-century painter's world. All but the last two sentences of the previous paragraphs are there but they are the armature of a brainy novel whose passion is ideas. The book she has written, despite a lush note or two and occasional incident overload, is something far different and better. Tracy Chevalier steers her novel deliberately close and tacks abruptly away. And the painter is captivated by her brilliance as well as her wildly tumbling hair (once she removes her cap) and so. She shows a brilliantly progressing sensibility for his painting: refusing to clean the windows because it will alter the light on a work in progress, remarking that a map in the background weakens the composition, rearranging a blue cloth to provide the needed touch of disorder for a portrait's serenity.įinally, as model for what will become the celebrated 'The Girl With a Pearl Earring,' she knows before Vermeer does that it is precisely the earring's spark that is needed to ignite the portrait. He is struck by her pictorial sense even when she is arranging vegetables on a platter. Namely, the painter Johannes Vermeer hires Griet, a serving girl, to clean his studio. THE NEW YORK TIMES (Richard Eder, 24 January 2000)įor a while it seems that it will be this kind of novel.

New York Times review - Girl With a Pearl Earring

Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier