Museum Invites Public to Reinvent a Classic Painting, With Wild Results

A girl with pearl earrings? Similar to Guy With Apple AirPod.

The Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague has commissioned a re-creation of Johannes Vermeer’s famous 17th-century painting, with surprising and delightful results.

Scroll through posts tagged #mygirlwithapearl on Instagram and you’ll see more than 4,700 interpretations of the famous oil painting of a young girl in a headscarf, a large earring dangling from her left ear. The homages range from the beautiful to the whimsical to the whimsical, from classic to abstract to steampunk. You will see girls in photos, digital paintings and oil paintings, and recreated in sculptures made from embroidery thread, toys, learning materials and multicolored beads and buttons.

She appears as a child, an old bearded man, a duck, a dog, a rabbit and a blue Na’vi from Avatar. In more than one photo, she is decidedly 21st century, wearing a face mask or headphones or holding a cell phone. An artist has superimposed Vermeer’s painting on a Tinder screen, calling the creation a “right swipe.”

are some digital versions created with AI art creation tools Like Dall-E Or outdoors? You can bet.

The Mauritshuis is usually home to famous paintings, but for eight weeks starting in February, the works will be on loan for a Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Instead of leaving the girl’s walls empty, the Mauritshuis plans to rotate some of the crowd-sourced interpretations through digital displays.

“The room where the girl temporarily hangs will become a place of inspiration to as many girls as possible, from home and abroad,” the museum said.

As the submission confirms, the museum does not place any restrictions on creativity here. It says: “Self-portrait with a towel as a curtain, a painted iron or even a dish,” it says. “A little is too crazy for us.” Contest registration closed on January 15.

Vermeer, one of the most famous Dutch painters of the 17th century, is known for his intimate domestic scenes and surprising use of light.

His symbol of the girl with the pearl earring has appeared in a number of literature and films, including in the 1999 historical novel of the same name that tells the fictional story of the painting’s creation. That book led to a 2003 film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson as a young servant in Vermeer’s house, played by Colin Firth.

If you want to explore the original painting in more detail to better understand its re-imagining, an augmented reality feature called Pocket Gallery in Google’s Arts & Culture app provides a virtual gallery space where you can see and learn about all 36 of Vermeer’s paintings. . None of them have robots.