Vermeer cannot be genuine

the controversial painting A Young Woman Seated At The Virginals, attributed to Vermeer
11 April 2012
The Weekender

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If, among Dutch painters of the 17th century, Rembrandt has a rival for the affections of the general public, he is Johannes Vermeer, the contrast quite extreme.


On the one hand, we have a painter with a taste for the big, blowsy and baroque, a man who matched the fatness of his paint to the barmaid bulk of the female nudes who took his eye, and whose biblical dramas came straight from the theatre of his day, with lighting taken from a stage then technically far more advanced than we might think and the expansive gestures of Belshazzar and his ilk borrowed from the actors.

On the other hand we have a man whose paintings we see as utterly still, the ordinary existence of the ordinary figures in them elevated into art by freezing all in the silent harmony of mathematics, their ordinary activities made mysterious by the passionate intensity with which they are observed.

Nothing of Rembrandt's sound and fury echoes in Vermeer's silent rooms, nor in his street, nor in his city, and the whole of Delft is seized in mute tranquillity. We are excluded: Rembrandt invites us to his feast, but Vermeer turns us into peepers at the door.

Rembrandt was both heir to the then ancestral traditions of European painting as observer, theologian, classicist, philosopher and storyteller, and the innovator who, like Titian, made new ways of painting possible, his influence profound, immediate and lasting over centuries.

With Vermeer, however, we are lost for words, can find few roots and, emphatically, no followers; fumbling, we match his mood to Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa, or look still further back to the hushed composure of Piero della Francesca's sacred conversations, sensing the same enigma in artists far apart in time and place.

To look forward for his influence is a pointless exercise, for, unlike Rembrandt, Vermeer had no pupils or acolytes to help unlock the still mysteries that still us too.

We know very little of the man: born in Delft in 1632, at 21 a master joining the Painter's Guild of St Luke, father of 15 children and dead at 43, deep in debt rather than poverty.

A document of 1672 described him as an expert on Italian paintings and, from a posthumous petition, we know that he bought and sold them. We know that, as a painter, he had the respect of his peers, for, in four years, they appointed him head of their guild, the first time when he was only 30.

From a working life of 22 years, only some 35 paintings survive that are signed or reasonably attributed to him, and on the two that are unarguably dated - 1656 and 1668 - art historians have constructed a dozen contentious chronologies.

With so few authentic paintings to his name, the addition of one more is far more important than, say, the discovery of yet another Rembrandt. One, which has been touted for sale by Sotheby's for the past three months, sold two days ago for £16.2 million.

Many of us saw Young Woman Seated at the Virginals hanging in the National Gallery three summers past with a dozen indisputable Vermeers (and one disputed) in the exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School.

It was there as an addendum, not catalogued, inviting comparison and comment; mine was that only a glance was required to identify it as an "irredeemable dud" and an outspoken Dutch art historian, thinking it a forgery, described it as a "tasteless mishmash" of the two paintings by Vermeer in the gallery's permanent collection.

Since 2001, however, six Dutch "experts", one English and one from Sotheby's, have formed a research committee and given it their support; for the moment it is, perhaps, more Vermeer than not.

It has been "lightly cleaned". Records of this procedure suggest that what we could see in 2001 was a skin of dirt and distorting restoration virtually concealing what is, or may be, a worn and damaged painting of the 17th century.

With this skin removed, the condition of the image was so ruinous that it required a "light" restoration sufficient to all but conceal the original once more.

The claim now made by the research committee that this enables them to state, unanimously, that "the artist in question is Vermeer" and date the picture to circa 1670 is patently absurd, for what is visible on the surface of the canvas and what makes sense of the damaged image beneath, is entirely the intervention of a restorer in the infant years of this young century. An old restoration has been replaced by a new, and, if Vermeer ever had anything to do with the canvas, his contribution is sandwiched between it and the surface.

Nothing is known of the picture before 1904 - its earlier ownerships and whereabouts are matters of possibly, probably, if and but. Scientific analysis revealed that the painter made extravagant use of ultramarine (lapis lazuli), the most expensive pigment available to 17th century Dutch painters - but, as the painting is very small, this can hardly be a matter of phenomenal significance.

Analysis also identified extensive use of lead-tin yellow, a pigment that the committee asserts was obsolete by the end of the 17th century; it was not - the recipe for making it was included in CP Pranger's Farben Lexikon published in Germany in 1782.

The canvas, all 70 square inches of it, is, says the committee, "almost certain" to have been cut from the same bolt as the 80 square inches of The Lacemaker in the Louvre and must therefore have been painted at much the same time, c. 1670.

But they do not ask themselves the dimensions of a bolt - many yards long and perhaps more than two in width, and canvas from it thus sold in shorter lengths to perhaps a dozen painters of the day.

If Vermeer's lifetime's work on canvas were measured against a single bolt, I suspect that 90 per cent of it would not have to be unrolled; averaging one picture every eight months or so, Vermeer is unlikely ever to have bought a bolt.

Then the costume expert on the committee had her say. The hairstyle was in fashion, it seems, only from 1669 until 1671. Good heavens, even the hideous wet-ringlet look of the 1990s stayed in fashion with the women of south Essex longer than that; were the women of 17th-century Delft faster off the mark than they? If they were, then surely four other paintings must be redated and much else of Vermeer's chronology recast.

As for the costume, is any other of Vermeer's players of musical instruments as hampered by a heavy wrap-round shawl? He was so extraordinarily scrupulous and delicate in his descriptions of shoulders, sleeves, forearms, jackets, ermine, lawn and lace, always communicating the physical forms within them, that the yellow blanket muffle about this girl's shoulders seems totally improbable, both as a garment and as an element of interest to Vermeer.

It is as crude a nonsense as the pig's trotters with which she plays her instrument. It is on these and other half-truths and suppositions that the authenticity of this nasty little picture depends.

Far from representing "an extremely important addition to our understanding of Vermeer's artistic development", this picture, if we accept it as genuine, distorts it.

I must argue that in no genuine Vermeer are the fold-forms of the costume so unrelatedto the figure within, that shadow is never so impenetrably deep and destructive of the field of colour, nor so heavy and unrelieved by reflected light as down the sitter's back, silhouetted against the wall behind.

Above all, I must argue that the most profound difference between this picture and genuine Vermeers lies in its composition: too facile and intellectually undemanding, the figure posed too easily parallel to the picture plane, pictorial space too cursorily defined, the whole deprived of the tensions that Vermeer so skilfully introduces in other compositions.

Unlike these, nothing is cut by or abuts the frame, no elbow is lost, no chair back chopped and there is no foreground clutter to act as a repoussoir and define the space.

A moment's comparison with the Guitar Player in Kenwood, usually dated to the late 1660s and in remarkably good condition, demonstrates the complexity of Vermeer's pictorial construction even in small paintings, and the fraudulent simplicity of the Sotheby picture.

It entirely lacks the exceptional spirit of Vermeer's art, his ability to take a plainfaced serving wench, rotate her away from the spectator and then call her to respond with a turn of the head and casting of the eyes, and, from this very ordinary stock of features, make a masterpiece.

This is the simplicity that sets Vermeer apart, yet it is not constant; the sequence of domestic interiors includes some of great complexity and detail, and it is broken by two pictures of operatic grandeur in which he proclaims his Catholic faith and his credo as a painter, staging his figures in set pieces rich with allegory.

Such works, creaking under the weight of a significance that we now cannot fully understand, suggest that Vermeer was, as Gainsborough might have put it, more "various" than we suppose.

Certainly his studio props seem to have been few in type and number, but they were as often palacerich as kitchen-poor and far from mundane, the subtle marvels that he performed with them addressed to a more educated, more intuitive public than that satisfied with pictures of jolly peasants in a tavern with dogs defecating at the door.

Vermeer not only transcended the commonplace business of daily life, but ignored and evaded it. Nothing of this superiority is to be found in the Sotheby picture.

Sotheby's, to those who know how to recognise a caveat in an auctioneer's catalogue, has not been deceitful: "Almost certain ... to some extent reworked by another hand ... part of the picture was brought to completion after the rest of the composition, perhaps as much as a few years later" are phrases that suggest hesitation.

But, advised by "experts" unanimous in their assertion that the picture is "unquestionably 17th century" and by Vermeer, Sotheby's could hardly refuse to catalogue it as genuine and sing its praises - and yet its estimated price when the sale was announced last April was a mere £3 million, far too little for the real thing and far too much for an uncomely dud.

In the event it seems that two men, rich and credulous, were gulled by the committee of experts, one of them the winning bidder, the other the unsuccessful underbidder dropping out of competition at the bid below.

For the moment, the enormous sum of £16.2 million for a painting so damaged and abraded that only modern restoration makes it fit to see, will be interpreted by ingenuous journalists as corroboration of the proofs offered by the experts.

But the history of Vermeer in the 20th century is littered with false attributions and downright forgeries enthusiastically attested by the experts of the day, and I confidently predict that the Sotheby picture will join them as an object of derision - £16.2 million is monumental proof of folly, not authenticity.

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