Every now and then it happens. The light splashes a leaf, turning what appeared to be green into half a rainbow. Or, a sudden breeze stirs a glass-like pond, making you shiver.
These moments freeze like ice. You can’t really move your eyes away even if you try.
Painters live for moments like these; all artists do.
Often when in Europe on business trips, I would visit museums, which at that time were unlike their American counterparts; you could walk right up to a painting as if to touch it. On those visits, I came to admire the use of color and light; for some reason the black in Rembrandt paintings always struck me not as the absence of light but as the essence of beauty.
Of course it wasn’t always black, it may have been green. Splashed by the light it could turn into half a rainbow if you looked long enough.
This memory came back to me recently when I discovered the 2003 film version of the historical novel “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” The book and the film re-imagine the character who might have inspired what was arguably the Dutch baroque painter Johannes Vermeer’s greatest painting.
As per the book, the film posits that Vermeer's model for the painting was his maid, though there is no evidence this was the case. The original actors cast for the film were Ralph Fiennes and Kate Hudson, but when they both left the project before production started (he for "Maid in Manhattan"), 17-year-old Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth stepped into the roles.
Both Firth and Johansson are simply terrific. The unresolved sexual tension between these two yields the story (and in the fictional version the painting) and Johansson does resemble the girl in the actual piece to a remarkable degree. The film also contains scenes that present the Dutch environment of the 1600's as a replication of Vermeer's painting style -- a luminous realism celebrating how light animates our surroundings if we just care to look.
The girl's expression in the painting is the look of knowing she is desired and daring to look back. You don't have to be an artist to appreciate that.
(This essay originally appeared in 2021.)
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