“Girl with a Pearl Earring” the novel

“Girl With A Pearl Earring” is an intelligent, visually ravishing adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s best-selling novel about the Dutch master Vermeer and the model for one of his most famous paintings. With concision and well-chosen detail, Peter Webber’s exceedingly accomplished first feature beautifully evokes the world the artist inhabited 340 years ago while deftly and discreetly delineating the personal intrigue within his teeming household. With its literary pedigree, artsy period backdrop, refined Euro air and wondrous central performance by emerging star Scarlett Johansson, who is receiving concurrent raves for her work in “Lost in Translation,” pic has all the ingredients to become an international specialized circuit hit.

Little is known about Johannes Vermeer, who lived his entire life (1632-75) in the city of Delft, and certainly nothing of the young woman who modeled for the celebrated portrait he created in about 1665. This gave U.S.-born, British-based novelist Chevalier considerable latitude in fashioning her fictional story of a teenager whose destitute Calvinist parents place her as a maid in the home of the Catholic Vermeer, a meticulous, slow-working artist who also works as an art dealer and whose home overflows with innumerable children, an overwrought wife and a queen bee-like mother-in-law.

Even before Griet (Johansson) arrives to take up her duties, one is struck by the unusual nature of the girl. Porcelain-skinned, with largish nose and lips and wide-set eyes, she seems keenly observant and self-possessed, with an intelligence and integrity that trump her illiteracy and low station. The prevailing hallmark of Johansson’s superb performance, which could be considered worthy of great silent film acting, is that her Griet is always holding something in reserve, an innate intelligence and sense of mystery that eventually intrigue Vermeer and severely threaten the latter’s wife.

Courtesy of Ben van Os’ vibrant production design, which is intersected by canals and is populated as much with livestock as it is with humanity, the thriving mercantilist Holland of the time jumps to life as Griet arrives for work. Under the thumb of fleshy housekeeper Tanneke (Joanna Scanlan) and watched with close suspicion by Vermeer’s neurotic wife Catharina (Essie Davis) and the latter’s stern mother Maria Thins (Judy Parfitt), Griet develops a fascination with the one room in the cramped house that is off-limits to the family in general, Vermeer’s spare, light-drenched studio.

While fulfilling active public and family roles, Vermeer (Colin Firth) puts his art first, often seeming remote and insisting upon privacy to work at his own deliberate pace despite domestic demands and pressure from his wealthy patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson). Soon, however, he notices a nascent sensitivity in Griet to such matters as light, paint materials and composition, which earns her access to the privileged studio; before long, the artist shows her his new acquisition, a camera obscura, which he admits helps him with his work, and invites her to help him grind and mix his paints.

In such a tight household, Griet’s activities do not go unnoticed, and her position there is soon tenuous. The object of mean pranks by one of the painter’s daughters, Griet is politely courted by the nearby butcher’s son (the impossibly handsome Cillian Murphy, who looks like he just stepped out of a Zeffirelli film), just as she is lusted after by the boorish Van Ruijven, who makes a secret deal with Vermeer that looks to bode ill for Griet. 

Amidst all these swirling emotions and intrigues, a highly delicate central drama emerges: While producing a group picture for Van Ruijven, Vermeer embarks upon the secret, simultaneous project, a portrait of Griet. Posing for him in a manner that almost seems illicit, the film builds to sensual highlights that consist of a resistant Griet finally consenting to removing her white cap to reveal her resplendent hair, and Vermeer piercing her ear so she can wear the earring he insists is necessary to complete the painting.

When Catharina discovers that the servant girl has been wearing her earrings and demands to see the picture, she hysterically calls it obscene and tries to rip it to shreds. Griet’s fate hangs in the balance, but her capacity for survival proves resilient in a mixed-mood conclusion that is in proportion to the careful balance achieved throughout the picture.

Script by Olivia Hetreed jettisons the book’s first-person p.o.v., probably wisely in that the approach preserves Griet’s mysteriousness, but is quite faithful in tone and spirit. A former editor and documaker, Webber maintains an admirably restrained hold on the material while still keeping the action lively and intriguing. Drama tips into too-overt melodrama on a couple of occasions, however, notably in Van Ruijven’s one-dimensional lechery and Catharina’s  overweening jealousy.

Arching over everything is the film’s look, which in cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s exceptionally skilled hands is that of a Vermeer painting from beginning to end. The jumbled textures and colors of the home’s family quarters are set off by the austere loveliness of the artist’s soft-hued studio, which was the setting of so many of his works. Hugely evocative, the studied approach of approximating the Vermeer look, with light slanting in from the side, never feels stilted or fussy, and an emotionally climactic zoom in on Griet striking her pose for the picture, earring finally in place, is breathtaking.

While physically and dramatically credible, Firth is reserved as the guarded artist. Davis as his wife conveys the brittleness of a woman living permanently near the breaking point, and Parfitt has her moments as the matriarch who quietly sympathizes with her son-in-law more than with her daughter.

In a film of outstanding craft contributions, noteworthy are Dien van Straalen’s costumes and, particularly, Alexandre Desplat’s supple, beautifully nuanced score.

 

City of Delft

        Delft is a city located in Holand, in mid way from Rotterdam to La haya. The city had 94.098 habitants in 2005. Delft is more than 750 year old and its name comes from the word “dig”, “diging the oldest channel”, The Oude Delft.  Delft received its license of city in 1246. From then on, the city thrived and new neighbourhoods appeared.

       THE FIRES

   In 3rd of may 1536, the big fire burned out. The cause of the fire is unknown yet bit it is believed that the wooden neddle of the Nieuwe Kerk had been shaked by a flash of lighting and the spark fly set fire in the houses nearby. Aproximately, 2,300 houses were in fire until they become ashes. More than a hundred years later, in 1654, an explosion ruined a big part of the houses of the city. The basement of the Poor Clares convent on the top of Paardenmarkt was used to store gunpowder. This central store for the Dutch region contained more or less 80,000 pounds of gunpowder. The consequences of the explosion had been huge, 200 houses had been devastated, others end up semi-ruined and many others got broken windows. In 1660 a new gunpowder house was built a mile away from the center of the city.

         THE DUCTH EAST INDIA COMPANY

    The Dutch East India Company was one of the most important merchant societies of the world with a more than a hundred shiped fleet, thousands of employees, offices settled in Asia and six places in Benelux ( Belgique o Belgie, Nederland and Luxemburg) among then one being in Delft. In 1602, Delft was a flourishing city, a center of painting, arts, crafts and science. The stablishment of the company and the opening of the branch in the city, added another important motive to the economy of Delft and the trade with distant countries. Since then on, spices, coffee, te and the Chinese porcelain were connected with the city.

         KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURE

        In 1842 the Benelux was under the other neighbour countries from an industrial point of view. The country required technicaly qualiphied people so the Royal Academy for Civil Ingeniering was founded. The academy used the building of the old artillery school. Nowadays, the old academy has turned to be the Technical University which is the most important building of Delft.

         Delft is not only a cultural city, but also a city of knowledge. The university is not the only building for education. There are also plenty of Institutes based on knowledges and bussiness, for instance, the DSM essencial idea, The Ducth Institute of Meassurement, Exack Software, Delft Instrument and so on.

         PEOPLE CONNECTED TO THE CITY

• The painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft. Vermeer made use of the streets and insides of Delft as motives or background of his paintings. His master pieces, famous worldwide, are shown in museums all over the world. Apart from the refined colours and armonious compositions, the treatement of the deepness and the play with the light is what makes the paintings of Vermeer to be so good. Vermeer worked and lived with his family in different places of the center of the town, which he used as his inspiration. Thanks to his paintings, an idea of the old Delft and also the life in Deflt at Golden Age, can be easily made.
• Delft is also the birthplace of the scientist Antoni Van Leeuwehoek (1632-1723) who polish some minuscule lens which increase the image up to 266 times, using them fro an interesting device; the microscope. Vermeer lso based on this device in his painting “The Geographer” and “The Astronomer”. Van Leeuwenhoek became the administrator of the inheritance of Vermeer after his death. 

 

 

The Picture “View of Delft”

   The “View of Delft” is a painting made between 1659 and 1660 by the Dutch painter Johanes Vermeer. Nowadays, it can be found in the Mauritdhuis of the Hague.

   If one knows the paintings belonging to Vermeer, it is quite amazing to find a painting about a view. However, topographic views of cities had become a tradition by the time Vermeer painted his famous canvas. Hendrik Vroom was the author of two works depiciting Delft, but they are more archaic as they follow the traditional panoramic approach that can be seen in the cityscapes by Hercules Seghers at the Berlin museum. The latter artist was one of the first to make use of the inverted Galilean telescope to transcribe the preliminary prints and their proportions (more than twice as high as wide) into the more conventional format of his paintings.

   Vermeer shooted his “View of Deflt” on the first floor of a house in the south of the river Schie. He worked on the spot, but the optical instrument pointed towards the city and providing the artist with the aspect translated onto canvas, which we admire for its consciseness and special structure, was not the camera obscura but the reversed telescope. It is only the latter that codeness the panoramic view of a given sector, diminishes the figures of the foreground to a smaller than normal magnification, emphasizes the foreground as we see in the picture, and by the same signe makes the remainder of the composition recede into space. The image obtained provides us with optical effect that, without being unique in Dutch seventeeth-century painting, as often claimed, convey a cityscape that is united in the composition and enveloped atmospherically into glowing light.

   We admire the town, but it is not a profile view of a township, but an idealized representation of Delft, with its main characteristics simplified and the cast into the framework of a harbour mirroring selected reflections in the water, and a rich, full sky wik magnificent cloud formations looming over it.

   The “View of Delft” is chronologically the last painting by Vermeer that was painted in rich, full pigmentation, with colour accents put in witha full loaded brush. The artist outdid himself in a rendition of his hometown, which stands as a truly great interpretation of nature.

View on Deft