She glances back over her shoulder with a faint, closed-mouth smile, as if she had just turned at the sound of her name. Johannes Vermeer painted this young woman around 1665 to 1667, in the same years as Girl with a Pearl Earring, and it belongs to the same Dutch type: a tronie.
A tronie was a study of a face, an expression or a costume. It was not a commissioned portrait of a named sitter, and artists often kept such pictures as models for larger works or sold them as character studies. The model here is unknown, and the painting does not tell a story. What interests Vermeer is the face in light, the softness of the skin, the shine of the eyes and the small pearl at her ear.
The background is dark and plain, which makes the head stand out against it. A pale blue wrap falls in heavy folds around her shoulders, and a long lock of hair hangs down behind. The paint is laid thinly and carefully, with small touches of highlight, and the effect is both intimate and distant.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has owned the painting since 1979, when it came by bequest. The museum owns five Vermeers in all, and this is the one that most resembles the famous Mauritshuis portrait.
Vermeer's Study of a Young Woman appears on our: