Who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Vermeer, around 1665, and it is not a portrait. It is a tronie - a Dutch genre of studies of a face in exotic dress, not intended to depict a particular person - which is why nobody has ever identified the sitter and why the search for her is probably looking for something that never existed.

Vermeer left about 34 paintings, worked slowly, and was thoroughly forgotten for two centuries. He was rediscovered in the 1860s by a French critic, and the resulting scarcity plus quality is why he now sits where he does. He had eleven surviving children, was chronically in debt, and his widow attributed his death at 43 to the financial ruin of the French invasion of 1672.

The earring is probably not a pearl. Recent examination suggests it is too large for a natural pearl of the period and shows no drill hole, and the highlight is painted as two strokes of lead white over a translucent glaze - it may be glass or polished tin. A 2018 technical study also found the background, now a flat dark space, was originally a green curtain whose pigment has degraded, so the painting's most striking feature is partly an accident of chemistry.