Girl with a Pearl Earring

She looks over her shoulder. Lips slightly parted — as if she has just said something, or is about to. Her head is wrapped in a blue and yellow turban. A pearl at her ear. And that look. Direct, alive, a little surprised. As if you had walked into the room and caught her unawares.

Vermeer painted her around 1665. We don’t know who the girl is. We don’t know her name. We don’t know whether she was a real person or an imagined one. For three and a half centuries she has looked at us — and we cannot look away.

Art historians call her the “Mona Lisa of the North”. But the Mona Lisa has a name and a story. The girl with the pearl earring has only her gaze. And that is exactly why she feels closer.

We saw the painting at the Mauritshuis together — my wife Irina and I — standing in front of it for a long time, in silence, the way everyone does. At home we watched the film Girl with a Pearl Earring again, and caught ourselves thinking the same thing: that turn of the head, that glance over the shoulder, could be photographed.

We didn’t shoot it straight away. In January 2013, right after New Year, we gathered almost the whole family in the St Petersburg studio of photographer Oleg Zotov. We put the look together together: our older daughter Lilya and Irina picked out the turban and the earring from their own jewellery, and the makeup artist Katya Bobkova did Valeria’s make-up. Zotov himself wasn’t behind the camera that day — he stood at the lights and set them to fall from the left, just as in the original.

Valeria, who stood by the window, was twelve. One frame. No more were needed.

The painting dates from around 1665. For a long time it went by other names — Girl in a Turban, for one; its present title became established only towards the end of the twentieth century, after its most striking detail. Who she is remains unknown. Perhaps Vermeer’s own daughter, Maria.

The painting hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in a small room, and you can get very close to it.

Vermeer painted about 35 pictures in his whole life. That is very few. But each one is a world of its own. He never hurried: he chose his light, waited for the right moment and worked slowly — two or three canvases a year, it is thought.

Photography works differently — one moment, one frame. But a good photograph is made the same way: you wait for the light, wait for the look, wait for that one turn of the head. And then you press the shutter once.

Three and a half centuries separate Vermeer and this photograph. And yet — the same gesture, the same light from the left-hand window, the same glance over the shoulder. Art does not grow old. It simply passes from hand to hand.