Girl with a Pearl Earring, No Name

Johannes Vermeer painted her around 1665 and never wrote down her name. She may not have been anyone in particular, only a girl he asked to sit in a costume he owned. He finished barely thirty paintings in his whole life and died in debt at forty-three. One window in the room while he worked, no other light.

What hangs here is that same turn of the head, three hundred and fifty years later, and she is still not telling anyone who she is.