Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue
Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck (About 1600 to 1662) · 1641
A girl of perhaps ten stands very straight in a dress of blue silk brocade with a wide lace collar and cuffs, a pearl necklace, gold bracelets and a fan of ostrich feathers in her hand. Her hair is drawn back under a cap trimmed with lace and her face is calm, serious and a little shy. She is dressed as a grown woman of the Haarlem elite, and the painter has given her the poise to carry it. We do not know her name.
Johannes Verspronck was a Haarlem portraitist in the shadow of Frans Hals, and where Hals was quick and loose, Verspronck was smooth and exact. Look at the lace, painted thread by thread, at the pattern of the brocade caught in the folds of the skirt, and at the grey background that gives nothing away and makes the blue sing. The face is modelled with tiny gradations of pink and grey, and the eyes look directly at us with a self possession that is unusual in portraits of children. The painting is dated 1641 on the canvas, and the fashion of the dress confirms it.
The portrait entered the Rijksmuseum in 1928 and became one of its best loved pictures, reproduced on chocolate boxes and stamps. In Dutch it is simply het meisje in het blauw, the girl in blue, and she is a favourite with children, who recognise something of themselves in a child being made to stand still in her best clothes. She hangs in the Gallery of Honour among the works of Hals and Rembrandt, which is a measure of how highly the museum rates her.
Did You Know? The girl's blue dress is painted with ultramarine made from lapis lazuli, so the portrait cost her parents a great deal even before the painter's fee.
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