Girl With a Pearl Earring

“1665” opens in March of that year, during one of Griet’s visits home. Her father, who “was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear […] suffered when the winter was long” (89), and is made more irritable by Griet’s inadequate description of the painting that Vermeer is currently working on. When he petulantly asks why she hasn’t brought him sweets smuggled from Tanneke’s kitchen, she admits that she and Tanneke are not getting along. When asked why, she lies and says it’s because she spilled “some of their best ale” (92). Later, when walking her out, Griet’s mother mentions her upcoming seventeenth birthday and Pieter’s romantic interest in her. Griet expects her mother to warn her about protecting her virtue, but instead she asks her to be nice to him, and Griet observes the “hunger for meat” in her eyes “that a butcher’s son could provide [for]” (92).

We learn that the real reason Tanneke is not happy with Griet is because she has been assisting Vermeer for two months in his studio. The assistance began on one of the coldest days in January, when Griet is tasked with going to the apothecary to get medicine for the babies’ coughs. Vermeer asks her to get painting supplies as well when she is there, something which he has always done for himself. Upset by her father’s trust in Griet, Cornelia breaks the tile Griet’s father had painted, that was modeled on her and her brother Frans: “When I opened [the handkerchief] the tile came apart in two pieces. It had been broken so that the girl and boy were separated from each other, the boy now looking behind him at nothing, the girl all alone, her face hidden by her cap” (97).

After this first errand to the apothecary, Vermeer relies on Griet more and more, and even asks her to start laying out his paints in the morning after she cleans. One morning, he asks her to stand in for the regular model, who is ill. It is during this time that Griet learns how to paint by watching the progress Vermeer makes day by day.

Vermeer’s demands on Griet increase, and she begins to feel as if she is doing something wrong or scandalous because her new duties must be hidden from Catharina and the children, though Maria Thins soon figures it out and supports whatever will aid Vermeer in his painting. He teaches Griet how to grind pigments for paints and then asks her to grind all of his paints but ultramarine, which is too difficult and expensive to give to the maid. This new job causes her considerable anxiety, since she can’t figure out a way to account for the amount of time she spends in the studio. Though Vermeer could tell Catharina what is going on, he chooses to have Griet’s sleeping arrangement changed instead, moving her from the cellar to the attic, which is reached through the studio. This gives Griet more time and flexibility with which to grind colors in secret, but it also means she will be locked in every night after Catharina locks the studio door.

Some time after Griet has begun grinding Vermeer’s colors, Cornelia steals some madder and stains Griet’s apron with it, causing Tanneke to suspect something is amiss and she threaten to go to Catharina. When Griet demands that she speak to Maria Thins first, she ruins her already tenuous relationship with Tanneke, and from then on, Tanneke makes Griet work harder than ever.

One morning in April, Griet meets Pieter who is out delivering meat and whose eyes “felt like needles pricking [her] skin” (115). He tells her the story of Catharina’s “mad brother,” Willem, who came one day when Catharina was pregnant with Johannes and began to beat her in the street. From Pieter, Griet learns that Tanneke was the one to step in and save Catharina. The story confuses Griet, not so much because of Tanneke’s role in it, but because she “tried to imagine [her] own brother beating [her] in the street but could not” (117) and wonders where Vermeer was when his wife was being beaten.

After this exchange, Pieter begins attending services at Griet’s family’s church and secures an introduction to her parents. He shows up at services, intermittently, for several weeks, while Griet and her parents grow more and more used to his easygoing presence.

After a while, Griet’s parents invite Pieter to Sunday dinner. Griet knows this means they will have to eat less during the week to accommodate an extra mouth on Sunday, and soon Pieter begins sending them gifts of meat to compensate. Griet soon realizes: “They would not say so to me, but they must have seen feeding him as a way of filling our own stomachs in the future. A butcher’s wife—and her parents—would always eat well” (120).

After one Sunday meal, Griet’s mother urges her to walk Pieter out, and Griet feels “that a deal had been made and [she] was being passed into the hands of a man” (121). This walking-out marks the first of Griet and Pieter’s alley trysts—when Pieter guides Griet into an alley and kisses her against the wall. He also attempts to put his fingers in her hair, and she pulls away. Pieter then quizzes Griet about her hair, asking why she doesn’t show any of it to anyone or let him see it. She doesn’t answer him, but thinks to herself that with her hair uncovered, she is “another Griet” (122), one whose untamed hair frightens her.

By May, Vermeer has finished his painting of the baker’s daughter, but he does not begin a new one until July. The new painting is to be another of the wife of his patron, van Ruijven, but this time with the subject looking out at the painter. This pose is a scandalous one because van Ruijven has previously commissioned a painting in which the female subject who looks out at the painter was a maid whom van Ruijven impregnated, a story that Pieter relates to Griet when she inquires about it. When Griet asks what happened to the maid, Pieter “shrugged. ‘What happens to girls like that?’” (127). At that moment, Griet sees a version of her own possible future and her blood runs cold.

When van Ruijven’s wife begins sitting for the new painting, Griet is there to help and to witness the other woman’s ability to do exactly what Vermeer wants, to be “simply […] what he wanted” (129) as she “gazed into space, seeing nothing” (128). Later, when van Leeuwenhoek brings the camera obscura back, Vermeer has Griet stand in as the model; she “trie[s] to be van Ruijven’s wife,” trying to “sit and think of nothing” (131). Van Leeuwenhoek is surprised to find that Griet has become Vermeer’s assistant, and she thinks she sees “a look of pity cross” his face when she leaves the room.

As the painting continues, Griet realizes that “the scene was too neat” and it becomes “clear to [her] what he should do to the scene” (132). She waits for Vermeer to make the change, but he doesn’t, and every time she looks at the scene, her “chest grew tight as if something were pressing on it” (133). She decides to make the change herself and “pulled out the front part of the blue cloth onto the table so that it flowed out of the dark shadows under the table and up in a slant onto the table in front of the jewelry box” (133). These changes “echoed the shape of van Ruijven’s wife’s arm as she held the quill,” (133) and although Griet fears she will be “sent away” for changing the scene, she is satisfied that “it is better now” (133). When Vermeer questions her about the change, in the same tone “as when he had asked [her] about the vegetables at [her] parents’ house” (135), she explains the need for a kind of pleasing disorder in the scene to “contrast with her tranquility” (136). Vermeer responds by observing: “‘I had not thought I would learn something from a maid’” (136).

When Griet tells her family about the painting, her mother observes that “his paintings are not good for the soul” (136). This pronouncement, and the quarrel between Griet and her mother that follows it leave Griet feeling ashamed when she looks at the painting the next morning and she ask Vermeer whether his paintings are “Catholic.” His response is that his paintings are neither Catholic nor Protestant.

Because the new painting includes Catharina’s jewelry box, she becomes concerned about it being left in the studio overnight with Griet. In order to prevent Griet from being moved out of the attic, Vermeer opts instead to bring the box down each night and have Catharina bring it back up each morning. Noticing her mother’s anxiety about her valuable things and ever on the lookout for ways to cause trouble for Griet, Cornelia steals one of her mother’s tortoiseshell combs and hides it in Griet’s things, replacing Griet’s grandmother’s comb with Catharina’s. When Griet finds Catharina’s missing comb in her things, and her own grandmother’s comb gone, she asks Vermeer for his help. He instigates a search for Griet’s missing comb, and eventually Maertge finds it hidden in Cornelia’s things. Maertge later tells Griet that Cornelia sneers through the beating she receives as punishment for stealing.

This incident results in Catharina being informed of Griet’s role as her husband’s assistant, but rather than making her treat Griet poorly, this new information makes Catharina afraid of her maid and she avoids her as much as possible. Maria Thins and Tanneke also treat Griet with more respect, though Cornelia does not change her attitude at all. Nor does Vermeer himself, though Griet now feels indebted to him and “felt that if he asked [her] to do something [she] could not say no” and does “not like the position [she] had come to be in” (151).

What she will be asked to do she finds out soon enough. At the completion of the Woman with a Pearl Necklace, the Vermeers have van Ruijven and his wife and Van Leeuwehoek to dinner. When van Ruijven sees Griet again, he demands to be painted with her. Rumors then spread around town that Griet is to be a model for a painting with van Ruijven, and she goes to Pieter the son to assure him that the rumors are not true. He reminds her that she has “little power over what happens to” her (159).

Though Maria Thins and Vermeer are able to convince van Ruijven to use a different model in his next painting, thus saving Griet from the fate of the last maid who was painted with van Ruijven, the solution is that Vermeer will paint Griet by herself and the painting will, of course, go to van Ruijven when it is finished. The second section of the novel ends with Griet’s realization that Vermeer intends to paint her.