Young Lady with a Pearl Necklace

A young woman stands at a table and looks attentively into a mirror that hangs on the wall opposite her. She is engaged in putting on a pearl necklace, which she is holding on yellow ribbons. Cool light enters through a leaded window. On the table is an arrangement like a still-life of a vase with lid, fabrics, a powder box, jewellery case and comb. Here, by means of differentiated tonal gradations, Vermeer created masterly, finely nuanced colouring, which is further enhanced by oppositions such
as the yellow of the curtain and the fur-trimmed jacket against the dark, blue-black foreground. By placing the vanishing point of the painting a little above the table top, he succeeds in imparting a monumental quality to the figure and the objects. With the chair, cropped by the edge of the painting at the front right, he achieves the effect of depth and at the same time increases the impression of intimacy. At first glance, it appears that Vermeer, like a number of painters, has represented the subject of the morning toilet that was so popular in the 1650s and 1660s. Painters such as Gerard Ter Borch and Frans Mieris (fig. p. 271) indeed found comparably intimate solutions, which may have served as an impulse for Vermeer in his own works. However, Vermeer’s depiction does not include, as was long assumed, the simple beauty and attractiveness of a young woman at her toilet. Nor is the hidden meaning revealed here primarily a moral admonition, a warning against devotion to earthly luxury (vanitas) or excessive pride (superbia). On the contrary, through his reduction of the narrative, objects and colouring, Vermeer achieves a shift in content. The depiction becomes ambiguous. In contrast to thematically related works by his contemporaries, the centre of attention here is the sensual complexity of processes of visual perception rather than moralising adages.
In this context, the corrections, visible in technical screening, that Vermeer made during the painting process are highly illuminating. On the chair in the foreground, for example, a string instrument like a lute originally lay. On the wall behind the woman’s figure hung a map, already sketched in broad brushstrokes, of the kind that can be seen in various other paintings by Vermeer. For reasons of aesthetics and composition, however, the artist removed both of these motifs from the picture by overpainting them. Whereas the composition was previously densely crowded and busy due to the large number of objects portrayed, now the viewer’s interest is directed immediately to the woman, whose gaze bridges the wall, which is shaded in the finest gradations, and draws the beholder’s eye to the mirror on the left. Now all attention is guided to the interaction between the figure of the young woman and her mirror image, which is not visible to the viewer. The viewer’s eyes follow hers to the mirror opposite, and are guided back in a kind of circular movement via the fabrics on the table to the crooked fingers of her left hand and her face. Narrative chronology is banished here. Concentration on the sensuality of the process of looking predominates. This stroke of artistic genius required an empty wall that does not divert attention and is now the centre of the picture. For a good reason, therefore, the items discernible in the foreground were depicted in reduced form and in dense shadow. Katja Kleinert | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019