Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, published in 1999, is set in Delft in the 1660s and takes its subject from Johannes Vermeer's painting of the same name. Sixteen-year-old Griet has to leave her family home in 1664 after her father, a tile painter, is blinded in an accident and the family loses its income. Because her father belongs to the artists' guild, a place is found for her as a maid in Vermeer's household; in the strictly ordered society of the time this is a fall in status, and Griet is a Protestant in a household that belongs to the grudgingly tolerated Catholic minority.

Griet is careful and quiet in the house, and she watches how the painter works. In time she is allowed to help him in the studio, and eventually she sits for him as a model, which the rest of the household notices. The novel's account of the painter, the model and the painting is a fictional one built around a documented household, and the daily life of the studio sits alongside the family's debts and the order it tries to keep.

The novel was adapted into a 2003 feature film of the same name and into a 2008 stage play, and a new dramatisation was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in May 2020.