Vermeer's Girl with the pearl earring

THE GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (Meisje met de parel)
c.1665-1667  oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. (46.5 x 40 cm.)

Mauritshuis, The Hague

"It is always the beauty of this portrait head, its purity, freshness, radiance, sensuality that is singled out for comment.  Vermeer himself, as Gowing notes, provides the metaphor: she is like a pearl. Yet there is a sense in which this  response, no matter how inevitable, begs the question of the. painting, and evades the claims it makes on the viewer.  For to look at it is to be implicated in a relationship so urgent that to take an instinctive step backward into aesthetic  appreciation would seem in this case a defensive , an act of betrayal and bad faith. It is me at whom she gazes, with  real, unguarded human emotions, and with an erotic intensity that demands something just as real and human in  return. The relationship may be only with an image, yet it involves all that art is supposed to keep at bay."

"Edward A. Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 1979"