Girl with a Pearl Earring by Chevalier, Tracy - 2003

Plume, 2003. Good. With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermee r represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrai t of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fasci nation for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the hea rt of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.