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One night in March, Sasha Suda, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, attended a dinner party and played a game. If you could wake up with one artist’s work in the PMA collection, who would you want? Knowing about the recent attention surrounding the Dutch painter, one person named Johannes Vermeer.
“We all had a laugh,” said Suda. The next morning, she woke up to an email from a curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam who said the PMA might actually have an original Vermeer in its collection. “I had to do a double take, because it was just so bizarre,” she said.
Lady with a Guitar has been in PMA storage for almost a century. It is officially labeled a copy of Vermeer, but the painting has long been considered a mystery; dozens of art specialists have examined it over the years, eager to learn more. Now Arie Wallert, a scholar who studies the chemistry and technique of artworks, argues that the work is a rare original by the 17th-century artist.
In response, Suda has decided to put the painting on public display as the investigation into its authorship continues to develop. Beginning June 10, Philadelphians can view Lady with a Guitar without restoration and out of its frame. “It will be an amazing way for people to get a look behind the curtain,” said Suda. “It’s going to be a conversation that we’re having with our public at the same time as we’re having it with experts.”
The condition
The PMA acquired Lady with a Guitar in 1933 as part of the John G. Johnson collection. Johnson was told it was an original Vermeer, but when news broke about a nearly identical painting in Britain that was in much better condition, The Guitar Player, experts concluded that the Johnson painting was a copy.
Before arriving at PMA, the painting’s canvas was torn on the right bottom section. Due to harsh cleaning, the colors are muted and the careful details that signal Vermeer’s paintbrush strokes aren’t visible. The paint on the guitar’s head and hole appears cracked, and the subject’s nose looks as if it’s been powdered white due to the different paint layers.
“It’s gone through a life that has shed it of any really clear-to-the-naked-eye evidence that it’s a work of Vermeer,” said Suda. “The painting really feels flat.” The confusion or disappointment that viewers may feel upon seeing it up close is understandable, but Suda says the work is “sort of magical” because it prompts an avalanche of questions about the artwork’s journey.
Wallert said that if his seismic theory is correct, proving Vermeer was its true creator makes the wonderful discovery more of an unfortunate tragedy.
“I would not know whether to congratulate the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the ownership of a real Vermeer, or to offer my condolences with the serious problem that they now have,” he said in an email to The Inquirer.
‘A nasty sort of grayish-ness’
In early 2016, Wallert and his colleague, Pieter Roelofs, the head of fine arts at the Rijksmuseum, were traveling between Boston and Washington for research on the Dutch painter Hercules Seghers. “Pieter only had a rather vague notion of doing ‘something’ on Vermeer, and stopping halfway in Philadelphia provided the opportunity to take a closer look at a ‘Vermeer-associated’ painting that almost nobody has ever seen ‘in the flesh,’ ” wrote Wallert.
“Both of us were not very much impressed with the painting. It had a nasty sort of grayish-ness about it, and a rather chafed surface,” Wallert said.
Though the initial viewing was underwhelming, Wallert revisited the work a few months later, when he was in Philadelphia visiting the Science History Institute. This time, he took microscopic paint samples to study in his own lab.
When Wallert examined the chemical properties of the blue and yellow paints, he saw evidence of Prussian Blue, a pigment invented after Vermeer’s 1675 death, which ruled out the possibility that Vermeer painted the work.
He moved on to other projects, essentially forgetting Lady with a Guitar.
A closer look at the blues
Five years later, the Rijksmuseum, where Wallert once worked as a specialist, was in the midst of producing a major exhibit on Vermeer. They invited scholars from around the world to participate in a symposium and Wallert revisited the Philadelphia painting. This time, using more sophisticated analysis, he found that the yellow was lead-tin yellow, which went out of use around 1700.
Lead-tin yellow and Prussian Blue, Wallert said, mutually exclude each other. “If there really is Prussian Blue, then there should not be lead-tin yellow. If there is lead-tin yellow, there should be no Prussian Blue.”
Wallert performed some “micro-chemical tests” that showed the blue was indigo, not Prussian Blue.
This pigment, Wallert said, ”turned out to be quite consistent with the materials that Vermeer had used in the later part of his career.”
One other notable pigment was green earth, which Wallert said Vermeer used on skin tones.
Seeing double
Since 1927, experts have considered Lady with a Guitar to be a copy of The Guitar Player, which is in the collection at London’s Kenwood House. Wallert believes both paintings are original works by Vermeer.
The researcher explained that 17th-century masters would create meticulous drawings that they then transferred to canvases before beginning to paint. These drawings could be used multiple times to create various identical artworks. “The striking similarity between the Philadelphia version and the Kenwood version ... strongly suggested to me that in this case Vermeer did the same,” he wrote.
In Wallert’s presentation at the Rijksmuseum in March, he shared a 1676 legal document explaining how Vermeer’s widow, Catharina Bolnes, sold two of her husband’s paintings to settle a debt. The letter mentioned one artwork showed a guitar player.
“Any hypothetical copyist could only have done so with the exemplar very closely at hand [with] the same working drawing, and intimate knowledge of Vermeer’s idiosyncratic methods and materials,” Wallert said. “There is no other option: The Philadelphia Guitar Player must have been made before 1676, with Vermeer’s methods and materials. And there is only one painter who could have done that.”
The investigation
Wallert’s findings have caught many Vermeer experts and art historians by surprise.
“It’s a little bit like a crime scene,” said Larry Silver, a retired art history professor from Penn who serves on the PMA’s conservation committee. “It still remains to to be adjudicated whether the surface damage of the picture makes it difficult to assess its authenticity.”
“Technical art history can be misleading,” said Shira Brisman, the art history professor who replaced Silver at Penn. “To say that this is a Vermeer because these pigments point to a combination that only he used, to me, that is not evidence ... that isn’t the endpoint.” Brisman believes Wallert’s work should be the start of additional research beyond the chemical analysis.
Mark Tucker, the PMA’s director of conservation, says he’s in conversation with Wallert and putting together a “research consortium” to pursue whether Lady with a Guitar was painted by Vermeer. “The more minds, the more eyes you can have focused on something like this — it’s exhilarating, really,” he said.
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A damaged painting at PMA may be an original Vermeer. See it for yourself this weekend. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
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