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Girl With A Pearl Earring Essay

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Girl With A Pearl Earring Essay
Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier is an exhilarating novel about art, passion, and life. This novel can give a reader an insight on artistic views and prove just how harsh life was in the seventeenth-century. A young sixteen-year-old girl is forced to work as a maid for famous painter Johannes Vermeer due to the fact that her father lost his eyes in a kiln explosion and can no longer work to support the whole family. As a maid, she must do housework, take care of Vermeer’s children, do laundry, buy meat from the butcher’s shop and withstand her solicitous and envious mistress Catharina along with her trouble-maker of a daughter Cornelia, a moody maid Tanneke and Catharina’s canny mother. In the beginning of the book when Griet meets her new master and mistress, Vermeer is captivated with the way Griet chopped and separated her vegetables. When Vermeer questioned why they are arranged in such way, …show more content…
I see it more as perspective. This is a well-written and magnificent fictional novel about a historical exquisite painting. After reading this book I did feel a little inspired. I began observing the clouds, the sun shine, light reflecting off of mirrors, and sometimes even people I know or don’t know. I am no artist. I do not have artistic visions nor do I see a complete story, complexity or message behind a painting or portrait. This novel has a lot to do with perspective. I don’t believe Vermeer loved Griet while many others do. I feel he appreciated having someone who could understand him and his art. Catharina loved him, but she could never understand his works of art even though she knew his paintings were beautiful. I believe Vermeer did love Catharina, he wished she would understand art like Griet did, but she couldn’t; which is why he didn’t paint her. He learned a bit from Griet as she learned plenty from him. He was a quicker and better artist because of her. That’s why he agreed on painting
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