She's often called "the Mona Lisa of the North," and just like the Mona Lisa, we don't actually know who she is — because she was never meant to be a real person in the first place.
What you're looking at
Johannes Vermeer painted this picture around 1665, and despite how personal it feels, it isn't a portrait of a specific sitter. It's what's called a "tronie" — a study of an imagined character, a type of face, rather than a commissioned likeness of a real individual. She's caught mid-turn, eyes fixed directly on the viewer, an unusually direct and intimate gaze for a painting of this era.
What the X-rays found
Modern scientific study has quietly rewritten parts of this painting. A 2018 X-ray scan found that the girl once had painted eyelashes, since faded from view, and that a green curtain used to hang in the dark background behind her, now faded to plain black over the centuries. The blue fabric wrapped around her head is real ultramarine, made from ground lapis lazuli, a pigment that was more expensive than gold in Vermeer's lifetime — an extravagant choice for what is, technically, an imagined figure rather than a paying patron's actual portrait.
Even the pearl itself, the object that gives the painting its name, isn't settled fact. Historians still debate whether it depicts a real pearl of an implausibly large size, or a painted illusion using a drop of reflected light rather than an actual jewel.
One detail to look for
Look at the dark background behind her. What reads today as flat black was once, according to those X-ray scans, a green curtain — a whole extra layer of the scene that time has quietly erased.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, printed from the museum's public-domain scan. Shop the canvas print.