OF VERMEER’S TINIEST JEWELS AND THE DEFINITION OF EXQUISITE

Girl with a Red Hat
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1666
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

One of the most exquisite Vermeers is also one of the smallest: the mesmerizing painting, The Girl with a Red Hat at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Notwithstanding that the attribution to Vermeer is still being debated by art historians, virtually all of us would say, purely on observational grounds, pattern-recognition from a lifetime of thinking and looking and reflecting on Vermeer’s sublime oeuvre, and the je ne sais quoi of the colors and the sfumato finish, that this is indeed a Vermeer. The painting is of a type called a Tronie. Most likely the sitter was not a famous or aristocratic person, but someone who simply represented a certain facial expression or emotion: sadness, joy, or in this case, perhaps surprise. Rembrandt painted dozens of Tronies and then used them as character types in his major paintings.
The Girl with a Red Hat was created around 1666, and is one of only two Vermeers that he painted on wood panel (instead of linen or canvas).
The vermillion base of the red and the ultramarine (an alchemically magical blue from the pulverization of lapis lazuli) are astonishingly beautiful. Pigment analysis reveales a palette consisting of natural ultramarine, lead white, yellow ochre, umber, green earth, vermilion, and madder lake.
I see many pearls in this sublime painting- one on each earlobe and several on her necklace, of course. Then, as I look closer, mirabile dictu, I see yet more pearls, as if they had just appeared: one as the reflection off her nose, one on the tip of her tongue, and three more reflecting off her lips..... it is as if her lips are Nacre, and the pearls, metaphorically, three reflections, three tiny pearls of exquisite beauty.....

Exquisite. And in my view, by Vermeer, as this jewel of a painting could not have been crafted by anyone else...
Girl with a Red Hat
Johannes Vermeer c. 1666 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC