Young lady with a pearl necklace
The Young Lady with a Pearl Necklace is an oil painting by Jan Vermeer that was painted between 1662 and 1665. The image is 56.1 inches high and 47.4 inches wide. Today it belongs to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and is exhibited in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin .
Image description
A young woman in profile looks at herself in a small mirror that is hung next to a stained glass window. Bright sunlight streams through the window, bathing the narrow curtains and the room in a golden light and brightly illuminating the woman's face and upper body. She wears a hermelin-trimmed , hip-length jacket made of yellow silk over a pleated, wide skirt that reaches to the floor. She is in the process of adjusting the pearl necklace she wears around her neck. She pulls it apart at both ends, but seems motionless to be absorbed in her own sight in the mirror. She wears precious teardrop-shaped pearl earrings, her hair is pinned up and adorned with a rose-colored bow. On the table with a heavy double tabletop, a heavy cloth billows, half covering a precious blue lidded vase. There is a powder brush next to the cloth.
The picture of colored glass in the closed window can hardly be seen. It is probably the same thing that Vermeer clearly put into the picture in his pictures Herr und Dame bei Wein and The Girl with the Wine Glass (1659/69), in which the enjoyment of wine plays a role, and which represents an allegory of temperantia .
meaning
The painting is intended to illustrate the conflict between vice and virtue, but is so cautious that this topic is only hinted at. Clothes, powder puffs and pearl necklaces are symbols of woman's vanity. She seems to be subject to self-love , while social norms saw humility as a virtue.
Provenance
The earliest evidence of the picture probably comes from the year 1696, where a Vermeer is mentioned as No. 36 ("A young woman in dressing; very beautiful") and sold for 30 guilders. In 1809 it appeared at auction at J. Caudri in Amsterdam and sold for 55 guilders. Two years later, there, it was offered again and sold for 36 guilders. There is evidence that it was part of the H. Grévedon collection and was acquired from there by Théophile Thoré , who later sold it to the Aachen industrialist Barthold Suermondt . At the time, his collection of pictures was the largest private collection in Germany, mainly containing works from schools in northern Europe. In 1874 the picture, together with the Suermondt Collection, was acquired for the Berlin Gemäldegalerie , where it is still located today.
reception
Sophie Matisse , who has alienated a number of famous pictures from art history by removing people and other living beings from the picture, while keeping the space and colors exactly, has also paraphrased Vermeer's Young Lady .
The American author and art theorist Mark von Schlegell gives the painting a central role in his book "High Wichita". In the form of a science fiction crime novel - the painting is faithfully replicated in the novel by means of a "quantum lock" - the problem of the original and forgery and the question of the value of art.
Web links
literature
- Piero Bianconi, István Schlégl: The Complete Works of Vermeer . Kunstkreis, Lucerne 1967
- Young lady with a pearl necklace. In: Johannes Vermeer. Exhibition catalog National Gallery of Art, Washington, Mauritshuis, Den Haag 1996. German edition Stuttgart 1996. pp. 152–155. ISBN 90-400-9804-2
- Thierry Greub: J. Vermeer van Delft. Young lady with a pearl necklace . (Der Kunstbrief.) Berlin 2003. ISBN 978-3-7861-2448-1
- Mark von Schlegell: High Wichita Translator by Simon Elson. Berlin 2011. ISBN 978-3-88221-620-2
Individual evidence
- ↑ Young lady with a pearl necklace. In: SMB Digital. Retrieved July 14, 2020 .
- ^ Sophie Matisse, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, 1999
- ^ Review in Deutschlandfunk, June 29, 2011