“Pearl Girl” Returns To Hague Home
The Mauritshuis, which reopens this week on Friday, after a $35 million renovation and expansion project begun in 2008, has a something of an image problem, which the director of this picture gallery, in The Hague, hopes to finally put to rest. Emilie Gordenker, the director of the Mauritshuis, says that, although it is home to Johannes Vermeer’s most famous and most reproduced portrait, “the number one question asked in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is: ‘Where is the Girl with a Pearl Earring?’†She hopes that after the reopening, and the preceeding world tour of the picture, painted by Vermeer around 1665, along with other works from the collection, many more people will associate the portrait with The Hague than with Amsterdam.