The storyteller and her canvasses

London —  The signature brush strokes of the 17th century Dutch Master throw off their dazzling light and Tracy Chevalier, alone in front of the painting of the girl playing a guitar, reaches toward the portrait’s oval face as if she is trying to touch the magic.

“Oops,” says Chevalier, catching herself before her fingers actually graze the surface of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Guitar Player.” The Vermeer hangs in Kenwood House on London’s Hampstead Heath, an English manor-turned-art gallery well off the beaten path of London’s main art stops. And it is where Chevalier frequently came to stare at the only Vermeer in England while writing “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” her staggeringly successful novel about the painter’s masterpiece of the same name.

On this quiet Saturday morning after New Year’s Day, Chevalier is back at Kenwood, showing “The Guitar Player” to a first-time viewer. She has seen all but one of the world’s 35 known Vermeers but there is something special about this almost empty gallery, its stately rooms offering unobstructed views of such beguiling art, hung modestly on a side wall.

“This isn’t his best work -- it looks like he rushed it a little -- but it’s just amazing to be able to get this close to a Vermeer,” Chevalier says with a wary glance toward an oblivious security guard. “I’ve been to Vermeer exhibitions where people are standing 10 deep and everyone is jostling for position.” The writer simulates a body-check with her shoulders. “But these are intimate paintings,” she says. “They were never meant to be seen that way.”

Vermeer is plenty famous in his own right but if anyone else bears responsibility for the current surge in fascination with his work it is Chevalier. Her “Girl With a Pearl Earring” has sold more than 2 1/2 million copies worldwide, not bad for a book Chevalier says she thought “a couple thousand people would read and that would be it.” But readers responded to Chevalier’s imagined aura of creative and sexual tension that might have spawned Vermeer’s work of genius, so she ended up with one of those books that sells by the boatload and then says to its author: Top that.

A lighter tone

The 41-year-old Chevalier has published two novels since then, with her latest, “The Lady and the Unicorn” -- another invented tale about the making of a real artistic masterpiece -- beginning to creep onto bestseller lists. This time her subject was a tableau of six tapestries stitched on commission for an arriviste nobleman in medieval France. It’s an interesting choice of material for fiction, and the book is a much lighter romp than the repressed tone of “Girl.”

“Yeah, there’s more sex in this one; it’s deliberately lighter,” Chevalier says about “The Lady and the Unicorn.” “At the beginning of it I thought, ‘Right, I’m setting a book in medieval times and everybody’s going to expect the plague and death.’ And so I decided nobody’s going to die in this book ... just to confound them,” she says.

Chevalier is now on a book tour of the United States to promote “Unicorn.” But the recent release of the movie version of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” means she still finds herself talking about -- and occasionally defending -- her fictional account of what inspired Vermeer to paint a portrait of such disturbing intimacy. The film stars a brooding Colin Firth as the mysterious painter from Delft and, in a blessed bit of prescient casting, rising star-of-the-moment Scarlett Johansson as Griet, his 16-year-old maid and muse.

The film has been critically well-received, notably for the cinematography’s cool blue interiors that replicate in film what Vermeer did so well on the freeze-frame of a canvas, using light to convey drama. In the movie, even the dust glows.

Chevalier had nothing to do with the screenplay (“I can’t imagine writing anything by committee,” she says). But she did spend some time on the film set in Luxembourg, where designers tinkered to turn a set that was originally built as a mock Venice into a stand-in for 17th century Delft.

Turning the substance of “Girl” into a movie was not such a stretch, she says, because her historical novels are woven around descriptive imagery rather than the characters’ inner emotions.

“Because I’m writing historical novels I try to stay away from psychological analysis,” Chevalier says, braced against the winter chill on Hampstead Heath. “These people lived in a time that was pre-Freud. They did not think with such self-awareness. What my characters are thinking is what they see around them, and so the novel becomes very descriptive. That lends itself to cinema.”

Still, Chevalier professed alarm at the prospect of Hollywood getting its mitts on Vermeer. “I thought it was a book with a very European sensibility,” she says. “I didn’t want Hollywood to make the film because I just felt they would Americanize it too much.” And even though the object of Vermeer’s -- and the audience’s -- fascination is Griet, the New York-raised Johansson “doesn’t seem particularly American in it,” Chevalier says. “Her accent is a little bit wobbly but it doesn’t matter; she only says about 50 words.”

Happily away from America

Chevalier grew up in Washington, D.C., attending schools where the student body was overwhelmingly black. She got an English degree in Ohio, then moved to England in 1984 and was working as a reference book editor when she enrolled in a creative writing class at night -- just the kind of background that screams “civilian” to the snooty writer crowd. But she went on to get a master’s in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1993, and has been writing full time since.

Her British bonafides now include an English husband (the couple have a 5-year-old son) and a UK passport to go with her American one. Chevalier has set her computer’s spell check to English spellings, but her disconnection from America goes deeper than whether her character Nicholas des Innocents gets under the table to “plough” or “plow” the nubile young woman he lusts for in “Unicorn.”

“I feel like the America I left has changed a lot in 19 years,” Chevalier says. “It feels more paranoid there, more materialistic. And maybe I’ve changed a lot too. I do feel like I’m floating a bit, not quite an American, not quite British. I’m like this little boat in the middle of the ocean.”

What she does share with the British mainstream is an unease with current American foreign policy, which makes her all the happier to retreat into history in search of stories, she says. Yet even there she has found no place to hide from controversy, not in 17th century Delft, not among the looms and weavers of medieval Europe.

Take “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” The inferno of creativity which the fictional Griet stirred in Vermeer was heresy to some scholars and Vermeer aficionados, who point out there is no evidence that Griet or anyone like her ever existed. In fact, the weight of evidence suggests Vermeer was a happily married family man who, rather than express his enchantment with a housemaid by immortalizing her, may have been painting his eldest daughter.

Writing in the Times of London, Simon Jenkins, normally a political commentator but clearly also an aggrieved admirer of Vermeer, accused Chevalier of creating “a travesty of the Vermeer who dimly emerges from the documentary evidence.”

Chevalier happily acknowledges she’s in the business of entertainment, not academic history.

“I don’t feel I need to get in among all the archival records; I’d rather read a good social history of the time,” she says about her research habits. “And I think that’s what kind of gets up the noses of Vermeer scholars: I haven’t done the business. I haven’t studied the paintings up close with a magnifying glass. Instead, I’ve studied the reproductions of Vermeer.

“So they probably look at my book and say I do a good reproduction of Vermeer, but I don’t do a real Vermeer,” she says cheerfully. “And they’re right.”

But about the art

You can only get so wounded after selling so many books, but the Vermeer experience made Chevalier more cautious when writing “The Lady and the Unicorn.” The real Lady With Unicorn tapestries, weathered and frayed, hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris now.

“I wrote ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ in a state of virginal innocence,” she says. “I had to be much more knowing about ‘Unicorn,’ knowing that people might actually go look at the tapes- tries.

“You should really go see them, you know,” she continues, more animated now than when talking about her own work. “You should go to Paris and have a look. They’re beautiful.

“They say more about things than that book ever could.”