"Girl with a Pearl Earring" will go on show in Osaka this week, on a rare trip abroad for the 17th-century Johannes Vermeer masterpiece and potentially its last to Japan.
The work will be displayed from Friday at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka while its home museum, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, closes until September 20 for maintenance.
"For the Mauritshuis, the Girl's journey is a special opportunity to share her with the Japanese public, perhaps for the very last time," said Mauritshuis' director Martine Gosselink.
The museum generally does not loan the painting "because she is our most important and precious painting", but the renovations allowed it to travel, Gosselink told AFP.
The Dutch institution is frequently visited by enthusiastic Japanese fans, and other nations like China, Singapore and South Korea also have asked about loaning it, she said.
"But we chose Japan, for Japan has a huge number of fans. And they really love Vermeer. They love 'Girl with a Pearl Earring,'" Gosselink said.
"And the amount of visitors coming from Japan every year to the Mauritshuis is so large. So we thought, if one country deserves the girl, it should be Japan," she said.
The Osaka exhibition, running through September 27, will feature a total dozen paintings from the Mauritshuis collection, including Vermeer's "Diana and her Nymphs" and "The Laughing Man" by Rembrandt.
Dubbed the "Mona Lisa of the North" for the inscrutable expression of its subject, which recalls Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait, the painting attained global fame after inspiring a best-selling novel that was turned into a Hollywood film.
The small canvas shows a young woman set on a dark background, her head turned towards the viewer and a pearl earring glinting from beneath her blue and cream turban.
The last time the portrait was out on loan was in 2023 for a less exotic trip to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
It went on a world tour in 2012-2014 while previous works were ongoing at the Mauritshuis.
The Osaka show will be the fourth visit to Japan.
Following a 1984 show in Tokyo, the painting came to Osaka to mark the 400th anniversary of Japan-Netherlands relations, drawing 600,000 viewers, said the Asahi Shimbun, which organised the latest show.
It also came to Tokyo and Kobe in 2012 and drew 1.2 million fans, the Asahi said.
The Mauritshuis will be closed from August 24 to September 20 for maintenance work and "Girl with a Pearl Earring" will be back on display at the Mauritshuis from early October.
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