The girl with the pearl

I have only seen the painting entitled The girl with the pearl earring once at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Holland.

By Vermeer, it has been categorized as a tronie. Seventeenth-century Dutch girls did not, apparently, wear turbans or pearls that were of an impossible size. Tronies are not portraits, but expressions of type. Her meaning is contained in the small rectangle of the frame, called into being by pigment bound in oil. This is a work of fiction, not the record of a sitter, for suitor or father or mother. Yet her gaze captures me, and I am held in the immediacy of a moment, which, if it existed at all, happened over 300 years ago. Truth comes in many guises.