Looking again
April 6th, 2013This side-by-side comparison of a fake Vermeer (right) and the detail of the Young Lady Seated at a Virginal (left) begs to be addressed. Notwithstanding that the latter has been accepted by important critics as an authentic work by Vermeer (it had languished in critical limbo for decades), many lay viewers find the Young Lady Seated at a Virginal a perplexing picture.
Had not a scientific committee established that the Young Lady Seated at a Virginal executed with materials and methods compatible with those used by Vermeer and some seventeenth-century Dutch painters, the work’s ideation might recall those of various twentieth-century Vermeer forgeries.
In these works, the forger reiterated a familiar Vermeer theme with a single figure surrounded by a few objects cherry picked from other pictures by the Delft master. In a sort of cat and mouse game, he occasionally flipped his copy-and-paste motifs left to right to make his plundering less evident. The final, uncomplicated whole was sprinkled with Vermeer’s mannerist touches which, however, fail to partake in the painting’s expressive fabric. No signature was added to the canvas knowing that it might raise more suspicion than approval. This reductionist strategy exploits the “simple” figure-against-blank-background motif of Vermeer’s authentic Lacemaker on a technically manageable scale contemporarily allowing the forger to evade direct competition with a genius on his favorite terrain: refined planimetric organization and the evocation of meaningful spatial depth.
The curious, naïve flavor—to post-Van Meegeren eyes at least—which characterizes these forgeries owes not to anything good in the forger’s heart but to the oversimplification to which he is constrained in order to mask his technical and organizational inadequacies. His malicious plan, then, was to cast a few tasty morsels of Vermeeresque bait and keep his bad cards as close to the vest as possible.
Do you think the Young Lady Seated at a Virginal is a Vermeer or or not, or just don’t know? Make your though known on the poll on the sidebar to the right.