Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring"

Girl with a Pearl Earring returned to Japan for the first time in fourteen years as the centrepiece of a Mauritshuis exhibition at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, on view from 21 August to 27 September 2026. The loan was made possible by the Mauritshuis's temporary closure for renovation, which the museum itself presented as the reason this rare journey could take place.

The exhibition was organised by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, The Asahi Shimbun, and Asahi Television Broadcasting Corporation, and was framed as a twelve-work introduction to seventeenth-century Dutch painting drawn entirely from the Mauritshuis. The official highlights page described the display as a tour through six themes: history painting, portraiture and tronies, genre scenes, church interiors, landscape, and still life.

At the centre was a dedicated Vermeer room pairing Girl with a Pearl Earring with Vermeer's early Diana and her Companions. Asahi noted that the Mauritshuis owns only three Vermeers, so Osaka was receiving two of them at once: the celebrated late tronie and a much earlier history painting from the artist's twenties.

The official works page used Girl with a Pearl Earring to represent Vermeer at his most distilled: a tronie rather than a portrait, set against a dark ground, with a blue turban, a large pearl, and a palette reduced largely to blue and yellow. The same page also stresses the technical richness of the picture, especially the costly ultramarine used in the turban and the economy with which the pearl is painted.

Diana and her Companions served as the counterweight: an early Vermeer made around 1653 to 1654, before he established his reputation with domestic genre scenes. According to the official exhibition text and Asahi's February report, it is his only mythological subject, and its modern history is unusually eventful, with Vermeer's monogram found beneath a forged signature in 1885 and the 1999 to 2000 restoration reversing later overpaint that had once made the scene look like bright midday rather than a darker, evening-toned setting.

The ten supporting Mauritshuis loans broadened the show beyond Vermeer without losing focus. Officially highlighted works included Rembrandt's Laughing Man, Jan Steen's As the Old Sing, so Pipe the Young, Emanuel de Witte's Imaginary Interior of a Catholic Church, Paulus Potter's Cows Reflected in the Water, and Maria van Oosterwijck's Flowers in an Ornamental Vase; the organisers supplemented these loans with a twenty-metre digital installation tracing Vermeer's life, motifs, and all of his works at their actual proportions, while entry to the exhibition itself was managed by timed-ticket admission.