Girl with the Pearl Earring draws crowds to Osaka museum; On loan to Japan until October

The Mauritshuis has loaned Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting Girl with the Pearl Earring to the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka until October. Vermeer, and this painting of his in particular, is enormously popular in Japan, and the rush for tickets was so great that the ticket system crashed.

The Osaka museum displayed Girl with the Pearl Earring to catch all the light in its darkened main hall, hanging alone against a deep blue wall, next to a giant Nintje dressed like the girl in the painting. A meters-long line of visitors shuffle forward for their chance to stand face to face with Vermeer’s masterpiece for a few seconds, before being moved along, NRC reports.

It is the fourth time the painting has traveled to Japan, but the first time in 14 years. “We almost never lend it out,” Mauritshuis director Martine Gosselink, who traveled to Japan with the painting, told the newspaper. Osaka is “perhaps the very last” foreign destination, she said.

Vermeer has long been immensely popular in Japan. When Girl with a Pearl Earring was on display in Tokyo and Kobe in 2012, 1.2 million people flocked to see it. That amounts to almost 1 percent of the Japanese population.

This time too, the run on tickets crashed the sales system. “That is why we are raffling off tickets for fixed days and times, and admitting a limited number of visitors,” Reiko Horikoshi of media company Asahi, the co-organizer of the exhibit, told NRC. “That way, everyone can have a look in peace.”

According to art critic On Takami, Vermeer is popular in Japan because he provides a calm and quiet alternative to the harshness, blood, and suffering depicted in much other Western art. “When I first saw a Vermeer, it hung among religious paintings full of muscular bodies and nudes,” he told NRC. “In between, Vermeer was restrained and refined.”

There is also a practical explanation for the 17th-century artist's popularity. “For over 20 years, a work by Vermeer has been on display in Japan almost every year. Because of that, it feels familiar.”

In addition to The Girl with the Pearl Earring, another Vermeer Painting, Diana and her Nymphs, is also part of the exhibition. It also includes works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Steen, and Frans Hals, among others.

The Girl with the Pearl Earring will return to the Mauritshuis in The Hague in October.