LOS ANGELES -- Guards accompany them when they travel. Crowds flock to them when they arrive.

Johannes Vermeer's exquisite paintings of young women in gleaming domestic settings are the vigilantly watched and amply insured celebrities of the museum world, promising not only a glimpse of extraordinary beauty but big crowds as well.

Now two of Vermeer's luminous women are making rare appearances in California.

"Girl With a Pearl Earring," from 1665, a popular painting even before the Tracy Chevalier novel and Scarlett Johansson movie of the same name, went on display last month at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter," painted a year or two earlier, will be shown for six weeks at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, starting Feb. 16.

Both paintings are on loan from European museums in the process of completing major renovations and expansions. And both California museums are giving their 17th-century Dutch guests the full star treatment.

At the De Young, "Girl With a Pearl Earring" -- whose real-life identity is unknown and status ambiguous (is she a servant or a lady?) -- has been given its own gallery, with no other works on the wall.

"What other picture could you possibly put in a room with her?" said Dede Wilsey, president of the De Young. "Nothing could compete with her."

The De Young has used the title of the painting as the name of its current exhibition with 34 other works on loan from the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. And its image -- a close-up of a pale, wide-eyed woman with parted lips wearing a blue and yellow headscarf -- is the face of its citywide marketing campaign.

Wilsey described the subject's appeal as very contemporary. "The 'Mona Lisa' is fascinating, but she's dark," Wilsey said. "This girl is full of light and youth, with such a compelling expression that you really do want to know what she's saying. It's hard to stay away from her."

"There is so much that doesn't translate in reproduction, like the way Vermeer painted the pearl," said Melissa Buron, a De Young assistant curator who helped coordinate the show, which runs through June 2. "When you see it in person, you can see it's only three brushstrokes that he used to create one of the most exquisite pieces of jewelry in art history."

The Getty Museum has borrowed its Vermeer from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and plans to hang it in its 17th-century Dutch galleries surrounded by Vermeer's contemporaries like Frans Hals and Pieter de Hooch.

The painting shows a woman, who appears to be pregnant, standing at a table in a long skirt and bright blue jacket (made brighter by a recent restoration). A map of Holland hangs on the wall beside her, but she seems absorbed in another world: the one created by a letter in her hands whose contents are hidden from our view. (The Getty has an online contest in progress asking people to submit the first line of the letter she is reading.)

"This painting is one of the most beautiful and magical Vermeers -- and his paintings do have a magical quality about them," said museum director Timothy Potts. "Their sense of light, reality and immediacy -- an almost photographic realism -- has never been achieved in that way before and frankly never since."

Even though the Getty's "Woman" won't have its own gallery, Potts says the museum will be leaving a lot of space around the Vermeer to accommodate sizable crowds. The museum is also replacing large benches nearby with smaller ones to create more standing room.

The popular clamor for Vermeer owes something to Chevalier's 1999 novel, a sort of will-she-or-won't-she romance dressed up in 17th-century period detail. It has sold about 2 million copies and been translated into 39 languages.

Then there's the fact that Vermeer painted so few works during his lifetime.

When he died, at 43, he had painted only 40 or 50 pieces, according to experts. And only 34 or so works are known today. The exact number is a matter of great debate, hinging on the authenticity of a few paintings.

What is known is that no Vermeer makes its home on the West Coast. The majority belong to European collections. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns five Vermeer paintings, plus one now established as a forgery. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has four, as well as two considered fake. The Frick Collection in New York has three. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston had one, "The Concert," but it was stolen as part of a legendary art heist in 1990 and never recovered.

The Frick Collection will be the final stop for "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" in the fall.