When is a Portrait not a Portrait?

When is a portrait not a portrait? When it is a ''tronie''! And this is my sketch of one of the best known ''tronies'', Vermeer's Girl With the Pearl Earring. 

I've been having a bit of a Vermeer week, looking through his paintings and learning a lot! Not that I want to start doing portrait paintings or interiors but I wanted to try out sketching some figures and decided that Vermeer was a good place to start. 

So back to the Tronie or Tronje, this was a new genre in painting showing ''character heads', or mugshots, the word tronie is believed to have come from the French word ''tronche'', slang for mug. Up until the 15th or 16th century portraits were of course commissioned by the A-listers; princes, kings, queens, politicians, bishops, popes! The who's who, those with enough money to finance having a portrait done, the likeness of the sitter was important, the viewer was supposed to know exactly who the sitter was. Tronies were something new, it was not who the person was but about their character. Exaggerated facial expressions for example, or exotic clothing, an interesting face, the sitter is generally not known as in the case of Vermeer's Girl With the Pearl Earring. A typical Dutch/Flemish genre also painted by artists like Frans Hals or Rembrandt, and although the term Tronie has gone out of use it wasn’t always just used for mugshots, sometimes florals or statues are described as Tronies. 

Painters sold them on the open art market just because they were decorative or fun and of course had a free hand at painting them. No client had to be pleased or appeased, you could just please yourself! 

The Girl With the Pearl Earring was sold at an art market in 1696 along with two other known Tronies by Vermeer, I have to say she really is my favourite of this genre and on my must see paintings bucket list. 

What started out as a sketch has taken a rather humorous turn and has become a ''cARToon'', a completely new genre but more about that on Wednesday, when I'll be premiering ''Saturday Night at Vermeer’s Studio'' , just watch this space!