Tag: Girl with a Pearl Earring

Literary adventures in the Netherlands

Relaxing Zeeland

I spent a couple of weeks in my beloved Zeeland recently, a place we have been visiting annually for almost 25 years now. It’s a place where you meet so few Brits and I often find myself feeling the need to explain why I would holiday in such a remote and seemingly unprepossessing place. I am always shocked, therefore when, very occasionally, I bump into someone who knows exactly where I am talking about. This happened just a couple of days ago while chatting to someone I have not met before in my organisation, who is Dutch and knew exactly every town I was talking about!

Middelburg, the main city in the province of Zeeland might just be my favourite place in the world and the only other place I would want to settle permanently outside of Greater Manchester or the UK. It is more of a large town than a city and it is beautiful and relaxing and historic and friendly. It also has probably the best bookshop in Zeeland, a wonderful independent store called De Drukkery, a must-see if you ever find yourself in this part of Europe.

Getting ready for Kerstmas in the Markt, the main square in Middelburg

This trip was our longest ever and very off-season – now that we are not so bound by school term times. We decided to take a trip to Den Haag, just a couple of hours by train from our nearest train station in Goes. Den Haag is a city we have visited briefly before and were very impressed with so wanted to spend a bit more time there. It does not pack as big a punch as Amsterdam or Rotterdam (both of which are actually very close by) but it is a lovely city, rather more relaxed and less touristy than its brasher neighbours. It is also the home of the Dutch parliament and most government ministries, the offices of the Dutch royal family, the International Court of Justice and many international embassies, so it has a feeling of gravitas and authority about it.

The Binnenhof, the home of the Dutch parliament is one of the oldest parliamentary estates in the world still in use. It is undergoing some extensive renovation at the moment so we were unable to visit it. The International Court of Justice is housed in the stunning Peace Palace – again, unfortunately, it was not open to visitors on the days we were there, but I feel sure we will go back.

The Binnenhof, Den Haag

I did not mind this too much as my main objective was actually to visit the world famous Mauritshuis museum, a lifelong ambition of mine. This is a small and stunning museum, located close to the Binnenhof that houses two paintings with literary connections – Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius.

I adore Vermeer’s work – it captures everything that Holland means to me. There was an exhibition of almost all of Vermeer’s paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2023. I would have made a special trip to go and see it, but it very quickly sold out so I was unable to get tickets (although I have just learned that there is a documentary about it now available on Amazon Prime). Girl with a Pearl Earring did not have to travel very far as the Rijksmuseum is less than 60km from the Mauritshuis, the home of the painting since 1902. Tracy Chevalier hit literary gold with her 1999 novel of the same name. It was only her second book and it made her name. I remember reading the book when it came out and I absolutely loved it. It was also what stimulated my interest in the work of Vermeer. We made out first visit to Zeeland in 2002 and I have been in love with the Netherlands and with painting from the Dutch Golden Age (broadly, the 17th century) ever since.

If it was a joy to see Girl with a Pearl Earring in real life, Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (Het Puttertje in Dutch) took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. It is tiny, a little over 30cm high and 20cm wide, and it is so simple, but so deeply captivating – a wild bird, fixed to a perch by a delicate chain. The colours are muted and earthy, apart from a dash of yellow gold on the bird’s wing. The shadow of the bird on the plastered wall behind it creates a sense of foreboding and shows the painter’s skill at creating a sense of light and shade.

Donna Tartt’s book of the same name is one of my all-time favourite reads – I read it about five years ago and it sparked my interest in both this painting (which I had only been vaguely aware of up to that point) and the painter Carel Fabritius. His story is also a fascinating one – he died in an explosion in the city of Delft in 1654 (the year The Goldfinch was completed), at the tender age of 32. His canon consists of only thirteen known paintings, others are assumed to have been lost in the tragedy in Delft which claimed his life. I read Laura Cumming’s excellent biography of the painter, Thunderclap, earlier this year and it has made me want to see all of his works in real life. I now have three under my belt – in addition to The Goldfinch, I saw Young Man in a Fur Cap and A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall on a visit to the National Gallery last January. There are three more in the Netherlands (in Amsterdam and Rotterdam) which I am sure I will get to see at some point, a further two in Germany and Poland, and all the rest but one are in North America. Sadly, I suspect the one in the Pushkin museum in Moscow will never be ticked off.

The town of Delft, where Fabritius died, and also the home of Vermeer (there is a museum there dedicated to him), is just a half an hour tram ride from Den Haag. We paid a brief visit to the town and will definitely go back as it is beautiful.

So, another magical, inspiring and restorative visit to the Netherlands and to Zeeland, a place hardly anyone thinks to visit. Their loss, but that suits me just fine!

Book review: “The Lady and the Unicorn” by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier’s second novel Girl with a Pearl Earring was published in 1999 (really, it was that long ago!) and was a sensation. I remember reading it at the time and was bowled over. It was made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth in 2004. I’m afraid to say that I have not read any of Tracy’s subsequent work and until now would not have been able to name any of her nine other books (although I love the look of New Boy, published this summer, and recommended it just a few weeks ago).

The Lady & the Unicorn imgI picked up The Lady and the Unicorn at the secondhand book stall at my youngest daughter’s school summer fair and read a large chunk of it whilst there. It would not normally have caught my eye on a bookshelf as the cover is more suggestive of a cheap sexy romance (nothing wrong with that if that’s your thing!), but I was very quickly drawn into the world that Chevalier evokes, as she also did so brilliantly in Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The novel is set in Paris and Brussels in 1490-92. Parisian nobleman Jean Le Viste wants an impressive tapestry in his home, a way of showing off his wealth, status and fine taste. He commissions local artist Nicolas De Innocents to paint a design which will then be turned into a tapestry by specialist weavers in Brussels. The subsequent story is about Nicolas’s travels between the two cities, the time he spends in Brussels with the family of weavers and the effect the work has on all their lives.

It’s a very simple premise and you would be forgiven for wondering how a full-length novel could be strung-out from this. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it’s the characters, their motivations, their internal lives and the relationships between them that drive the narrative. Here, Nicolas des Innocents is the central figure. He is young, virile, charismatic and mischievous. In Paris, he threatens to destabilise the Le Viste family when the youngest daughter Claude falls for his charms (he has already seduced the maid!), but socially, he is an outsider, a class well below his employer, and thus it is important he is kept at arm’s length. In Brussels, he penetrates the family more deeply as he needs to work alongside the weavers to design the various features of the tapestry and to help realise these in the final product. Nicolas the charmer develops a close bond with the weaver’s blind daughter. I’ll leave it at that – no spoilers here!

The book is written from several perspectives, with each chapter narrated by different characters. This allows us as readers to observe the events of the story from a number of viewpoints. It’s a sexy novel, there are simmering passions throughout (to that extent the suggestive cover on my copy is not far wrong!). It provides an insight to the issues of the period – honour, social status, the role and standing of women, as well as the process of creating a tapestry and the meaning behind all the imagery – and Chevalier has a brilliant talent for bridging the past and the present and showing us that in many ways day to day concerns remain the same throughout the ages. I particularly like how the author marries her skills for story creating into some bare facts about a real tapestry (it does exist) and real people. This is what she did in Girl with a Pearl Earring too, of course.

Whilst this novel clearly did not make the same splash as Chevalier’s more famous earlier book, it’s a good read and I would recommend it. Glad I found it on that book stall!

Have you read any of Tracy Chevalier’s books?

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