That Head Turner's Back, With an Old-School Posse After almost 30 years, she's back in town, that gal with the turban, the Christmas-bulb gem, and the over-the-shoulder, did-you-say-something glance. Johannes Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" last visited New York in 1984, and much has happened since to burnish her allure. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" is included in this exhibition, which opens on Tuesday at the Frick Collection. Rembrandts in "Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis" at the Frick Collection. In the 1990s, art conservators cleaned her up and smoothed out cracks that had come to mar her flawless skin, leaving her looking fresh-minted. More important, after being the subject of a hot novel, a tony film and, most recently, a stage play, she's now a media sensation, one of the most famous faces in Western art. So she's certain to pull a crowd when she goes on view, starting on Tuesday, at the Frick Collection as part of a traveling loan show, "Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis." Anticipating a crush, the Frick has placed her alone in its Oval Room. But as the exhibition title implies, she comes from her home in The Hague with celebrity company, 14 other fabulous pictures, all installed in an adjoining gallery. Taken together, they are a gold-standard remnant of the Dutch Golden Age. And I do mean a remnant. Historians estimate that during the 17th century, the Northern Netherlands turned out in excess of five million paintings, of which a tiny fraction - between 1 and 10 percent - survive. And this heavy production was in part due to the existence of a new art-hungry audience. In 1648, after a protracted war of rebellion, the Dutch Republic was finally free of Spanish rule, which meant it was free of monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. This might have posed a financial crisis for art. But a different clientele had developed: a population of merchants and burghers, dedicated venture capitalists who had scads of discretionary cash and were looking for somewhere classy to park it. Art was the place. And it was a new kind of art, the opposite of king size, scaled to bourgeois parlors. No longer faith bound, it had secular subjects: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, domestic scenes. Even religious paintings were religious in a changed way. No more rosy celestial fantasies; cherubs and Calvin didn't mix. Heaven looked like earth, and the other way around. A fall of light on a face, a spill of flowers in a vase, embroidery thick on a gown were acceptable miracles in art. There are many in the paintings that the Mauritshuis has sent out on the road while its own quarters in The Hague are under expansion. New York is the last stop on a three-city American tour that included San Francisco and Atlanta. And although the Frick show, organized by Margaret Iacono, is smaller than that seen elsewhere, the selection is still beyond choice. Even in a city as rich with Rembrandts as New York, the four Mauritshuis examples are worth lining up for, particularly for two narrative pictures that illustrate his Shakespearean gifts as a dramatist. The small picture called "Simeon's Song of Praise," dating from 1631, before he had left his native Leiden for Amsterdam, depicts an episode from the Gospel of Luke. An old priest named Simeon had been assured by God that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. In the picture, this moment has come. Simeon holds the infant Jesus in his arms and howls out a hymn of thanks. The child's parents and other worshipers in the temple look on, baffled. But another aged devotee, the prophetess named Anna, understands what's happening. Dark robed, her face shadowed, she looms over Simeon like Death finally arrived. A second biblical painting, titled "Susanna," done five years later, is psychologically more troubling. Taken from the Book of Daniel, Rembrandt depicts the story of the sexual harassment of a young woman by older men, community elders, who spy on her as she bathes and publicly accuse her of adultery after she rejects their advances. Susanna's virtue will eventually win the day, though Rembrandt doesn't tell us so. He shows her at the instant she first senses that she is being watched. Terrified, she awkwardly, self-protectively, clutches a towel to her nude body. She's an image of stricken innocence. We see it in news photos every day. "Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis" opens at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, on Tuesday and remains on view through Jan. 19. Admission is by timed tickets; (212) 288-0700, frick.org.