Vermeers are guests of honor

LOS ANGELES - Guards accompany them when they travel. Crowds flock to them when they arrive.

Johannes Vermeer's exquisite paintings of young women in gleaming domestic settings are the vigilantly watched and amply insured celebrities of the museum world, promising not only a glimpse of extraordinary beauty, but big crowds as well.

Now, two of Vermeer's luminous women are making rare appearances in California.

Girl With a Pearl Earring from 1665, a popular painting even before the Tracy Chevalier novel and Scarlett Johansson movie of the same name, went on display last month at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, painted a year or two earlier, will be shown for six weeks at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, starting Saturday.

Both paintings are on loan from European museums that are completing major renovations and expansions. Both California museums are giving their 17th-century Dutch guests the full star treatment.

At the De Young, Girl With a Pearl Earring - whose subject's real-life identity is unknown and whose status is ambiguous (is she a servant or a lady?) - has been given its own gallery, with nothing else on the walls.

"What other picture could you possibly put in a room with her?" said Dede Wilsey, president of the De Young.

The De Young has used the title of the painting as the name of its current exhibition with 34 other works on loan from the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in the Hague. And its image - a close-up of a pale, wide-eyed woman with parted lips wearing a blue-and-yellow head scarf - is the face of its marketing campaign.

Describing the subject's appeal, Wilsey said, "The Mona Lisa is fascinating, but she's dark. This girl is full of light and youth, with such a compelling expression that you really do want to know what she's saying. It's hard to stay away from her."

"There is so much that doesn't translate in reproduction, like the way Vermeer painted the pearl," said Melissa Buron, an assistant curator who helped coordinate the show, which runs through June 2. "When you see it in person, you can see it's only three brushstrokes that he used to create one of the most exquisite pieces of jewelry in art history."

The Getty Museum has borrowed its Vermeer from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and plans to hang it in its 17th-century Dutch galleries surrounded by Vermeer contemporaries such as Frans Hals and Pieter de Hooch.

The painting shows a woman, who appears to be pregnant, standing at a table in a long skirt and bright blue jacket (made brighter by a recent restoration). A map of Holland hangs on the wall beside her, but she seems absorbed in another world: the one created by a letter in her hands whose contents are hidden from our view. (The Getty has an online contest in progress asking people to submit the first line of the letter she is reading.)

"This painting is one of the most beautiful and magical Vermeers - and his paintings do have a magical quality about them," said museum director Timothy Potts. "Their sense of light, reality, and immediacy - an almost-photographic realism - has never been achieved in that way before and, frankly, never since."

Even though the Getty's Woman won't have its own gallery, Potts says the museum will be leaving a lot of space around the Vermeer to accommodate sizable crowds. The museum is also replacing large benches nearby with smaller ones to create more standing room.

The popular clamor for Vermeer owes something to Chevalier's 1999 novel, a sort of will-she-or-won't-she romance dressed up in 17th-century period detail. It has sold about two million copies and has been translated into 39 languages.

Then there's the fact that Vermeer painted so few works during his lifetime. When he died, at 43, he had painted only 40 or 50 pieces, according to experts. And only 34 or so works are known today. The exact number is a matter of great debate, hinging on the authenticity of a few paintings.

Attendance at the De Young has been strong, with an average of 3,000 daily visitors during opening week, a representative said. That's more than twice the number for the previous show in the same space, the William S. Paley collection, rich with Cezannes and Picassos.

Before the De Young, the painting made two stops in Japan (the touring show will end this fall at the Frick Collection in New York), where roughly 1.2 million visitors turned out, according to Mauritshuis deputy director Victor Moussault.

One exhibition sponsor there was the high-end jeweler Mikimoto, which commissioned sets of pearl earrings inspired by the painting that were priced at about $135,000.

In San Francisco, the De Young reports strong sales for Girl-branded gift-shop merchandise, which includes the usual postcards and tote bags, but also pendant necklaces and a compact mirror.