Girl with a Pearl Earring Study Guide

Tracy Chevalier was born in Washington, D.C., where her father, a photographer, worked with the Washington Post. Her mother died when she was just eight years old. Chevalier was educated in the United States, where she attended Oberlin College to study English literature. After graduating in 1984, she moved to England, where she had a series of jobs in the book publishing industry. She published her first book in 1997, but she did not rise to prominence until she published Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1999. It quickly became an international best seller. Chevalier has since published 10 novels of historical fiction set in both Europe and the United States.

Girl with a Pearl Earring peers into a short period late in the life of Johannes Vermeer, a master painter of the Dutch Golden Age. This period, which followed the formation of the Dutch Republic (the forerunner of the modern country known as the Netherlands) in 1579, was characterized by flourishing trade and expanding wealth, a consequent flowering of visual arts, and religious tolerance. Despite Vermeer’s modern renown, little is known about his life. Born in 1632 to middle-class, artisan parents, Vermeer grew up in his parents’ inn  and later inherited his father’s art dealing business. It is not clear with whom he apprenticed as a painter, but he became a member of the Delft Artist’s Guild in 1653, the same year he converted to Catholicism in order to marry Catharina Bolnes. The couple went on to have 15 children, four of whom died in infancy. Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knujit were Vermeer’s chief patrons. A series of economic and political calamities struck the Dutch Republic in 1672; these, combined with his slow rate of work and growing family, seem to have impoverished Vermeer. He died after a short illness at the age of 43 in 1675. Although he was not well-known in his day, his works began to receive attention and appreciation starting in the 1860s. The small size of his body of work, along with its beauty, have made his paintings incredibly valuable, encouraging forgeries and mistaken attributions as well as several notable thefts.

Girl with a Pearl Earring tells a story about the milieu of Johannes Vermeer, a master artist who painted during the Dutch Golden Age. Three other books published around the same time as Girl with a Pearl Earring draw inspiration from Vermeer or his era. Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue traces the history of a fictional painting by Vermeer—authentic but without the necessary paperwork to prove it—from its modern American owner back through its history, imagining Vermeer selecting one of his daughters as his model. Kathrine Webber’s The Music Lesson follows another modern-day protagonist recruited by an Irish cousin to help “kidnap” Vermeer’s painting of the same name—an actual piece, owned by the English royal family—and hold it for ransom. And finally, Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, which, like Girl with a Pearl Earring, was adapted into a movie, imagines the opulent lifestyle that Dutch trade domination allowed and explores the way that art—and artists—mediate desire. Furthermore, because it centers around another famous 17th-century painting by a Dutch master, it’s worth considering Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Girl with a Pearl Earring.