Girls with Earrings Pearls is a 1999 historical novel written by Tracy Chevalier. Located in the 17th century Delft, Holland, the novel was inspired by the local painter Johannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring . Chevalier presents Vermeer's fictional accounts, models and paintings. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name and a 2008 drama.
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Tracy Chevalier's inspiration for this novel is a poster from Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring . He had bought the poster as a nineteen-year-old teenager and depended wherever he lived for sixteen years. Chevalier notes that the "ambiguous look" on the girl's face left a lasting impression on her. He described her expression as "a lot of contradictions: innocent but experienced, happy but full of tears, full of longing and yet full of loss." He began to think of "the story behind the look", picturing it as directed at the painter.
Chevalier's research includes reading the period's history, studying Vermeer's paintings and his friends, and spending several days in Delft. Pregnant at the time of researching and writing, he finished the job in eight months because he had a "biological deadline".
Maps Girl with a Pearl Earring (novel)
Plot
The sixteen-year-old Griet had to leave his family's home in Delft in 1664 after his father was blinded by an accident. As a tile painter, his father was a member of the artist's union, so the work was found for him as a maid in the home of the painter Johannes Vermeer. In a very time-lined society, this is a decline in status because of the bad reputation the maids have for stealing, spying and sleeping with their employers. A further complication is that Vermeer is a cruelly tolerated member of the Catholic minority while Griet is a Protestant. In their home, she befriends the eldest daughter of the family, Maertge, but has never had a good relationship with Cornelia, a younger daughter who takes her class-conscious mother, Catharina. Griet also found it difficult to stay on the right side of Tanneke, another housemaid, who was moody and jealous.
Griet stayed for two years at his employer and was only allowed to visit his home on Sunday, where the family circle broke up. His younger brother, Frans, interns outside and eventually his younger sister, Agnes, died of the plague. But during the early months of his work at Vermeers', Pieter, the son of a family butcher in the meat market, began to target Griet. He really grew up and did not welcome this at first, but tolerated his interest because it was favorable to his poor parents.
Griet is increasingly fascinated by Vermeer's paintings. Vermeer finds that Griet has an eye for art and quietly asks him to perform tasks and perform tasks for him, such as mixing his paint and acting as a substitute model. Griet aroused Catharina's suspicions, but Vermeer's mother-in-law, Maria Thins, recognized Griet's presence as a stable force and catalyst in Vermeer's career and conspired with domestic arrangements that allowed her to devote more time to her ministry. However, Griet was warned by Vermeer's friend, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, not to get too close to the artist because he was more interested in painting than people. Realizing that this is true, Griet remains cautious.
Rich but immoral Vermeer supporter Pieter van Ruijven informed the "wide-eyed servant", berating him when he could and pressing Vermeer to paint them together, as he did with the previous waiter whom Van Ruijven had once made pregnant. Griet and Vermeer were therefore reluctant to meet this demand and eventually Vermeer came up with a compromise. Van Ruijven will be painted with his own family members and Vermeer will paint his own portrait of Griet to be sold to van Ruijven. For the painting, he forced him to pierce his ear and put on his wife's pearl earrings without permission. Cornelia seizes the opportunity to let Catharina find this and in the resulting scandal Vermeer remains silent and Griet is forced to leave.
Ten years later, long after Griet married Pieter and lived as a mother's wife and butcher, she was called back home after Vermeer's death. Griet assumes that the Vermeer widow wants to pay the unpaid household butcher's bill. There Griet learned that Vermeer had asked for his painting to be hung in a room when he was dying. In addition, although the family is now poorer, Vermeer will include a request that Griet receives the pearl earrings he wears when he paints it, which Van Leeuwenhoek forces Catharina to hand it over. However, Griet realized that he could no longer use it as a butcher's wife than he could do as a maid. Therefore he decided to pawn the earrings and pay fifteen guilders owed to her husband from the price.
Reception
The novel was published in England in 1999 and a year later in the United States, where he became a bestseller of the New York Times. Despite being nominated for several fictional prizes, he won only Barnes & amp; Noble Discover Award in the 2000 and 2001 Alex Awards for books that have special appeal for young adults. In 2001, Plume released a US paperback edition with an initial printout of 120,000 copies; a year later the book was reprinted 18 times with nearly two million copies sold. In 2005, HarperCollins published a special English edition with nine vermeer paint plates, published in celebrations of one million copies sold.
The New York Times describes the work as "an intelligent novel whose passion is ideas"; The Atlantic Monthly praised Chevalier's efforts to create a sense of community with a sharp division of status and belief. " However, the Weekly Publisher records details that "threaten to rob his narrative of credibility." Griet's ability to suggest to Vermeer how to improve painting demands a stretch of reader's imagination and Vermeer's recognition of his debt to him, revealed in the end, bright against sentimentality ". The details are also questioned by art historian Gary Schwarz, especially the simple depictions of the Catholic/Protestant division in a country where the distinction between Protestants is equally important.
As well as sales of high English, the popularity of this novel has been translated into most European languages ​​and in Asia to Turkey, Georgia, Persia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Korea.
Themes
Instead of writing a story about Vermeer having an affair with housemaids, Chevalier builds tension in the work with their portrayal of control. As the magazine's Notes
This is a cool approach that distinguishes the book from three other novels published in 1999 that also deal with seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a series of stories centered on paintings suspected to be missing by Vermeer; and Katharine Weber's The Music Lesson dealt with Vermeer's paintings stolen from the title. Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever , on the other hand, is set in Amsterdam and also deals with love between the painter and his subject. In addition, this also begins with attempts to describe the appearance of the mysterious caregiver in the painting of that period.
Another theme - shown in the narrative rather than openly commented - is how women at the time, in the words of Lisa Fletcher, "lacked their bodies, but were the first possessions of their parents, then from their employers, and finally from their husbands As the novel progresses, Griet becomes increasingly aware that he is 'sold' ". He is not given a choice by his parents whether or where he will work. Van Ruijven and other figures assume he is sexually available only because he is a maid who is not nurtured. And once Pieter becomes an accepted applicant to Griet, his parents leave him alone for physical progress, anticipating that the match will benefit them.
Historical material
Apart from the Girls with Earrings Pearl itself, where Griet is a nanny, some Vermeer paintings are featured in Chevalier novels. Initially, View of Delft is remembered by Griet's father. When Griet enters the household, Vermeer is working on Women with Pearl Necklaces and Tanneke mentions soon afterwards he becomes the Vermeer model for The Milkmaid. The next subject is Woman with a Water Jug , which is the baker daughter's model. Griet described the painting to his father and also witnessed his creation in more detail now because he helped in the studio. Van Ruijven's wife (Maria de Knuijt) later became a model for A Lady Writing a Letter . During this episode it is remembered that she previously appeared in Woman with a Lute and that her husband had seduced the waitress who sat for The Girl with the Wine Glass . Van Ruijven himself, a sister and a daughter, a figure in the The Concert , understood as a substitute for The Music Lesson . A final painting, The Procuress , is not Vermeer's painting of the title but a genre by Maria Thins's Dirck van Baburen. It hangs on the wall to the right of The Concert .
These surviving paintings compensate for the lack of much real information available in the historical record of the main male character. It has allowed Chevalier to integrate into his imaginary scenario some of the few known facts about Vermeer and thus provide his fictional apparitions of reality. But the scarcity of evidence extends beyond Vermeer's home as well. Although Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is known to have acted as Vermeer's testament, there is no documentary evidence of friendship between the two. Van Leeuwenhoek is of course interested in optical devices and has speculated that Vermeer uses an obscura camera, but so far the proof. Again, there is a high probability that Pieter van Ruijven is the protector of Vuber, as 21 artist paintings are his, but no documentary evidence survives. And of course there is no hint that he is a sexual predator described by Chevalier.
Such considerations are important because, as Lisa Fletcher says, historical novels "intervene in our view of the past" and influence our reaction to it in the present. Thus it was noted that the 2001 exhibition "Vermeer and the Delft School" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York "attracted almost twice the number of visitors than the Vermeer exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1996. Walter Liedtke, curator of the painting gallery - European art, the success [of the exhibition] is due, at least in part, to the Chevalier novel. "
See also
- Girl with Earring Pearl (movie)
- Girl with Earrings Pearls (playing)
References
Bibliography
- Tracy Chevalier, Girl with Earring Pearl, HarperCollins paperback, London 2000
- Lisa Fletcher, Chevalier Girl with Pearl Earrings, Insight Publications 2012
- Lisa Fletcher, "Her paintings do not tell the story...": The Historical Romansa and Vermeer, University of Sheffield Hallam
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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