A black-and-white reproduction ofLady with a Guitar, which has long been billed as a copy of a Vermeer painting by the same name.PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
According to one scholar, thePhiladelphia Museum of Artmay have in its collection a true Vermeer painting that has long gone unattributed to the Dutch master.
TheArt Newspaperɾєρօɾτsthat, at a recent symposium, Arie Wallert averred that the late 17th-century paintingLady with a Guitaris “a painting by Vermeer.” This contradicts the museum’s own information about the work, which clearly states that the work is a copy of another similar painting from ca. 1672 that’s held by the Kenwood House in London.
The Kenwood painting also features a female sitter strumming an instrument. Save for one noticeable alteration (that of the woman’s hairstyle), this painting’s composition and subject matter look nearly identical to those in the Philadelphia Museum one.
“The Philadelphia Museum of Art is grateful for past and continuing contributions of scholarship to the discourse aroundLady with a Guitar, which has been identified in the John G. Johnson Collection as a copy after Vermeer,” Sasha Suda, the museum’s director, said in a ȿτɑτємєɴτ. “Our conversation at the museum now is focused on the wonderful impossibility that this work of art remains on earth, in our care, and that historic works of art connect people and ideas thɾօυɢҺ time.The future ofLady with a Guitarat PMA will be to inspire discussion, embracing scholarship, and to seek more knowledge and enlightenment from this mysterious painting nearly 350 years after its creation.”
Wallert, who was formerly a specialist with the Rijksmuseum, the Amsterdam institution now mounting aonce-in-a-lifetime Vermeer retrospective, ɾєρօɾτedly said that the Philadelphia artwork is in a “shocking” condition. In her ȿτɑτємєɴτ, Suda said the painting, which entered the collection in the 1930s, is currently “in a highly compromised state” after “prior conservation efforts.” By comparison, the Kenwood House picture is well-known, but it does not figure in the Rijksmuseum show on view now.
There are only 37 paintings that scholars agree can be attributed to Vermeer. Some 28 of them are currently in thesold-out Rijksmuseum show. Recently, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. made headlines when experts with the museumstripped the Vermeer attributionfrom a painting in its collection. Somewhat controversially, the Rijksmuseum curators chose to treat that work as a bona fide Vermeer anyway.
