Vermeer's Pearls

From Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury, $27.95), comes some interesting pearl trivia. Did you know that in no fewer than eight of his pictures, Vermeer paints women wearing pearl earrings? He also paints on the pearls shapes and outlines hinting at the contours of the rooms the women inhabit. Brook writes, "No pearl is more striking than the one in the Girl with the Pearl Earring (the painting pictured at left). On the surface of that large pearl...we see reflected her collar, her turban, the window that illuminates her off to the left, and, indistinctly, the room where she sits. Look closely at one of Vermeer’s pearls, and his ghostly studio floats into view."