Mark Megahan
The National Gallery of Art is not pleased to announce that one of it’s Vermeer paintings is bogus. They advertised four but now the count is three, plus one real good try. Experts have had doubts for a long time. “Girl With a Flute” has managed to convince the experts she’s authentic but they always considered it one of his worst pieces. They’re actually glad to know that it’s not authentic.
A close but bogus Vermeer
Forgeries and works of assistants don’t usually get hung in major metropolitan art museums but one painting attributed to Johannes Vermeer made the grade and has been on display for ages.
While everyone had their doubts, the paintings were far too popular to take out of circulation long enough to do a thorough work-up with modern technology. Then COVID-19 came along and so did an opportunity.
On Friday, October 7, the National Gallery of Art held a press conference to admit that “an interdisciplinary team of curators, conservators and scientists has determined that the painting was made by an associate of Vermeer. Not by the Dutch artist himself.” He led a short life between 1632 and 1675, dying at the age of 43.
He’s also “one of the world’s most beloved painters.” Curator Marjorie (Betsy) Wieseman heads up the Gallery’s department of northern European paintings. She explains that the museum’s extended closure meant that she and her colleagues had “a unique opportunity to take all four paintings off the wall and have them in the conservation lab at the same time.”
While the adoring fans of Vermeer were doing needlepoint and learning to bake bread, “this was our pandemic project.” The artist wasn’t very prolific which makes the demand for his work even greater. There are only about 35 of his paintings in the entire world.
That’s why he was popular and esteemed in his lifetime, but forgotten until rediscovered by the art world at the opening of the 20th century. His masterpiece “Girl With a Flute” popped up like a mushroom in 1906. The NGA got their hands on it in 1942.
The paintings float above
Today, Vermeer is a rock star in the art world, “not just admired but adored.” Nobody knows a thing about him but that didn’t stop all the “best-selling novels and movies.” His paintings speak for themselves. seeming to “float above the noise and the hype.”
That’s because they’re so “incredibly quiet, exquisitely colored” and “breathtakingly intimate.” Girl With a Flute finally got the thorough investigation she deserved.
Senior imaging scientist John Delaney was joined by a crack team of the gallery’s researchers. They took all sorts of advanced imaging studies meant to build on “a rich history of Vermeer research at the NGA, notably by Melanie Gifford, now-retired research conservator of painting technologies.”
They weren’t expecting to find anything new, but they did. The mystery of whether it was an authentic masterpiece was solved almost by accident.
Their advanced techniques allowed the team to “map the materials Vermeer had used.” They studied “A Lady Writing” and “Woman Holding a Balance” first to “establish a baseline for his practice.” They studied his technique and realized some of their assumptions were wrong. “He brushed on his first layers with surprising speed and freedom, at one point even applying a layer of copper-containing material known to hasten the drying process, as if he were in a hurry to move on to the next stage.”
Bottom line after looking at the four paintings side-by-side is that “Girl With a Flute” was “made by an artist — perhaps a student, an apprentice in training or an amateur taking lessons from the master — who, in Delaney’s words, ‘understands the technique but has very limited skill in executing it.’” Still, it was close enough to fool everyone until now.
