Girl with the Red Hat

Girl with the Red Hat, oil-on-panel painting (c. 1669) by Johannes Vermeer. The painting is from Vermeer’s later and most well-known period, during which he focused on depicting scenes of daily life in interior settings.

Although Girl with the Red Hat is Vermeer’s smallest painting (9 × 7.06 inches [22.8 × 18 cm]), it has great visual impact. As in Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), the subject looks over her shoulder at the viewer, with parted lips, and highlights glint off her face and earrings. However, the girl in this work looms larger, placed in the foreground of the picture, confronting the viewer more directly. Her extravagant red hat and luxuriant blue wrap contrast with the muted patterned backdrop, increasing the girl’s prominence and creating a forceful theatricality. Vermeer employed painstaking techniques—using opaque layers, thin glazes, wet-in-wet blending, and points of color—that help to explain why his output was so small and why both scholars and the public find him endlessly fascinating.