THE HAGUE.- Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is returning home to the Mauritshuis after a five-week stay in Japan, where the celebrated painting drew some 280,000 visitors during a special exhibition at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka.

The painting will go back on view at the Mauritshuis on Monday, October 5, bringing to a close one of the rare occasions on which the museum has allowed its most famous work to travel abroad.

To mark its return, the Mauritshuis will hold a brief press event attended by Martine Gosselink, the museum’s General Director, Jan van Zanen, Mayor of The Hague, and Rokuichiro Michii, Japan’s ambassador to the Netherlands. During the event, Girl with a Pearl Earring will be rehung in Gallery 15, where visitors will once again be able to encounter Vermeer’s enigmatic figure in its familiar setting.

The museum noted that the painting is lent only under exceptional circumstances. The recent opportunity arose because the Mauritshuis was closed during August and September for renovation work. That temporary closure made it possible to respond to a request from Japan, where Vermeer — and Girl with a Pearl Earring in particular — enjoys enormous popularity.

The Osaka presentation was organized by The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest media organizations and a longtime collaborator of the Mauritshuis. The newspaper group will continue its relationship with the museum as a project partner for the next four years.

Part of that support will help fund renovation work and the development of the planned Mauritshuis Education Center at Korte Vijverberg 4 in The Hague. The museum said it is continuing to seek benefactors and corporate partners for the center.





For Gosselink, the painting’s international reception is a reminder of the enduring power of Dutch art.

“If only Johannes Vermeer could know that his painting, with that beautiful Dutch face — including the headscarf — is so widely praised around the world, even revered,” she said. “Centuries later, we are still drawing on the phenomenal legacy of Dutch painting.”

The recent journey was not the first international tour for Vermeer’s famous painting. During the major renovation and expansion of the Mauritshuis between 2012 and 2014, Girl with a Pearl Earring traveled with other highlights from the collection to Japan, the United States and Italy.

That tour took the works to Tokyo, Kobe, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Bologna and attracted a combined audience of approximately 2.2 million visitors.

Now, after another high-profile journey abroad, Vermeer’s Girl is returning to the gallery with which she has become inseparably associated — and to the city that continues to claim her as one of its most recognizable residents.