After trotting thousands upon thousands of miles around the globe during the restoration of the Mauritshuis, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring thought her performance would come to an end when she got home.
How wrong she was.
If I have translated the Dutch news dispatch correctly, the Mauritshuis staged a competition inspired by the Japanese Vermeer enthusiast Shin Ichi Fukuoka which called on other Vermeer enthusiasts to submit a photograph of their own living rooms that includes a reproduction of the iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring on one of its walls. The winner, so to speak, would have his or her living room reassembled on the premises of the Mauritshuis with the iconic picture incorporated, in the manner of photo stand-ins (once called carnival cutout) that are present in virtually every zoo, children’s museum and theme park in America. The lucky winner was recently announced on Mauritshuis Facebook page, and she is Elsa Oudshoorn.
Although I can’t quite grasp the sense of the Mauritshuis’ initiative, it would appear to be distantly related to the “win-an-evening-with-your-favorite-movie-star-or-starlet” competition of glamorous days gone bye. I have no idea what it would be like to sit in the reconstruction of my living room with a real Vermeer peeping through a hole, but I can imagine how deeply embarrassing it would be to have won the other type competition and have found oneself sitting across a dining table with a Hollywood starlet who would rather be anywhere in the world except with one hers fans.
Those who read this blog regularly will have sooner or later understood that my own enthusiasm for the work of Vermeer stops more or less at building the Essential Vermeer, reporting “Vermeer news” and looking at Vermeer’s real pictures when life permits. And they will also have intuited that I do not subscribe to the “anything-that-draws-people-to-art-is-good” philosophy (see here, here and here). On the contrary.
So, my only hope is that I got the Mauritshuis story all wrong or that Vermeer was a very fun-loving man who wouldn’t have minded having his head (or the head of one of his pictures) stuck in a hole of a photo stand-in of a funny dinosaur or a old western jail.