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. Tronies are not portraits, but expressions of type. Seventeenth-century Dutch girls did not, apparently, wear turbans or pearls that were of an impossible size. This is a work of fiction, not the record of a sitter, for suitor or father or mother. She is contained in the small rectangle of the frame, and called into being by pigment bound in oil. 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.