Vermeer's emphatically empirical approach to his models culminated a strain of radical naturalism in early modern art beginning with Caravaggio.
This essay explains that Vermeer based all his interiors on rooms in his house and all his figures on family members as models, which he sometimes also adapted in minor ways, a "subjective empiricism." He followed Rembrandt in using family members as models and drawing on his personal circumstances in his art, which anticipated and partly inspired Romantic artists. Johannes Vermeer may be the foremost painter of interiors and the interiority of figures in the history of art, although we have not necessarily fully understood his achievement in either domain or their complex relation. There are crucial similarities in their treatment of history and their representation of gender and heterosexuality. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to offer detailed close readings of Tulip Fever, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, the conclusion suggests the relevance of its approach to Girl with a Pearl Earring to these less well-known novels. Part 2 focuses on Girl with a Pearl Earring and its treatment of the relationship between history and romance. Part 1 of this article argues that they are best classified as historical romance fictions.
All three novels animate the figures in Vermeer's paintings as characters in remarkably similar tales of "restrained" sexuality. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tulip Fever, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister interpret Vermeer's paintings as moments of suspended narrative.
The most well-known re-imagining of Johannes Vermeer's (1632-1675) art and life is Tracy Chevalier's 1999 bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring however seven novels published since 1998 use Vermeer as their "launch-pad." Three of these novels are set in seventeenth-century Holland: Girl with a Pearl Earring, Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999), and Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever (1999).
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