Johannes Vermeer · c. 1665
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A warm, almost monochrome ground interrupted by one blue that cost more than gold.
Mauritshuis, The Hague
Tap any swatch to copy. Ground colours are the three largest areas of the canvas; accent colours are chosen for intensity and may cover very little — which is exactly why they carry the painting. Percentages are each colour's share of the whole canvas, so these six will not add up to 100%: they are six of the 26 distinct colour regions measured, not a division of the surface. How these were sampled
Nearly the whole surface is warm: skin, ochre jacket, and a background so dark it reads as near-black. The blue of the headscarf occupies very little of the canvas, and it is the only cool note in the scheme. That imbalance is the design lesson — a single small cool accent against a large warm field will always dominate attention, regardless of how little space it occupies.
The blue is natural ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli mined in what is now Afghanistan. In the seventeenth century the prepared pigment was more valuable than gold by weight, which makes its use on a scarf rather than a Virgin's robe a genuinely extravagant choice.
What the artist actually used
- Natural ultramarine (lazurite, from lapis lazuli)
- The headscarf. Analysis found a high proportion of bright lazurite particles — a high-quality grade.
- Lead white, ochres and earths
- The flesh tones and jacket.
Has the colour changed?
The Girl in the Spotlight project (2018) examined the painting with SEM-EDX, FTIR-ATR and synchrotron sulfur K-edge XANES. One finding was that the lapis appears to have been heat-treated before grinding, which made the stone easier to work and yielded a more intense blue. Ultramarine is chemically stable, so this blue is close to what Vermeer laid down.
Sources
Accessibility
WCAG contrast ratios between every color pair. Use the strongest combinations for text; the weakest ones make good decorative backgrounds.
Strongest pair: #CDA264 on #231B0E — 7.25:1 (AAA)
- #CDA264·#A66452
- #CDA264·#587893
- #CDA264·#332E23
- #CDA264·#26231F
- #CDA264·#231B0E
- #A66452·#587893
- #A66452·#332E23
- #A66452·#26231F
- #A66452·#231B0E
- #587893·#332E23
- #587893·#26231F
- #587893·#231B0E
- #332E23·#26231F
- #332E23·#231B0E
- #26231F·#231B0E
How to read this
- AAA
- Passes WCAG 2.1 AAA for normal text — the highest accessibility bar.
- AA
- Passes WCAG 2.1 AA for normal text. Standard production requirement.
- AA Large
- Passes WCAG 2.1 AA for large text only (18pt+ or 14pt+ bold). Avoid for body copy.
- Fail
- Below WCAG 2.1 AA. Fine for decorative use — not for text.
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Studio
Paint this palette
These are the materials a colour study actually gets made with.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 36
The larger pan set. More range means mixing toward a specific plate rather than approximating it from six colours.
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Strathmore
300 Series watercolour pad, 140 lb cold press
140 lb cold press is the weight that takes a wet wash without buckling — the paper most colour studies end up on.
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Pentel
Fude Touch brush sign pen
A felt brush tip for the labelling and linework around a swatch study — the annotation half of a colour notebook.
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Pantone
Formula Guide — coated & uncoated
When a palette leaves the screen, this is the shared vocabulary between you and the press. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 24 — Art Nouveau
Gansai are traditional Japanese watercolour pans — dense, matte and easy to mix, the closest everyday medium to the flat printed colour Wada's plates were made in. This is the Art Nouveau-themed 'II' edition, a different 24 to the standard set.
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Library
Further reading
Torn between the two Wada dictionaries? Vol 1 vs Vol 2, compared plate by plate →
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