Girl with a Pearl Earring

Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer’s work has often been examined in the context of light. His most famous work in respect to this is ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’.

Here a hard key light strikes the subjects face and headpiece while a well-matched fill light causes a subtle shadow roll-off on the nose and temple. The sharp reflections in the eyes and the earing betray that indeed it was quite a hard and concentrated light source that lit this scene.  The direction of this light is coming from a very shallow angle from the right of the subject while the background remains almost completely unlit.