Identity of Girl with a Pearl Earring ‘discovered after 360 years’

The identity of the muse in the Girl with a Pearl Earring has been revealed for the first time in 360 years.

A historian believes he has uncovered the name of the girl in the artwork painted by Johannes Vermeer in the 1660s.

Her identity has long been a mystery and cause of debate, with relatively little known even about the Dutch master who painted her.

But Andrew Graham-Dixon, the art historian and TV presenter, found that Vermeer worked almost exclusively for Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, a Dutch husband and wife in Delft.

The girl wearing the pearl earring in the renowned oil painting is likely to be their daughter Magdalene, he claims.

The wealthy family were members of a rebellious religious sect called the Remonstrants, with the wife a member of the Collegiants, who were even more extreme.

The evangelical Christians were a proscribed organisation and had Quaker-like beliefs such as in pacifism and an egalitarian society. They were also believers in feminism and the absolute equality of men and women.

Maria was Vermeer’s principal patron, a new book on the artist’s life by Graham-Dixon claims, and her house was close to a church of the Remonstrants.

“Research into Vermeer’s family background shows that he was born and brought up a Remonstrant, and that he too participated in the gatherings of the Collegiants,” the historian wrote in the Sunday Times Culture magazine.

“The same is true of his mother and father, sister and brother-in-law, indeed of almost everyone in his immediate circle.

“His wife was a Catholic, but she too must have been in sympathy with the Remonstrants, or she could not have married a man so committed to their cause.”

The group, including Vermeer, revered Christ’s apostles and Mary Magdalene in particular.