Kasey Wehrum
06/01/2004
For the first time in more than 80 years, a painting by legendary Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer will soon come to auction. Long thought to be a forgery, Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, will go on the block in July at Sotheby’s in London, the climax to a story packed with enough mystery and intrigue to make The Da Vinci Code seem dull by comparison.
The diminutive work, measuring 8
inches by 10 inches, was the subject of an intense forensic art investigation
that lasted more than a decade. Dating to 1670, Young Woman passed through the
hands of many collectors over three centuries, and all rightly believed that it
was authentic. It was not until the mid-20th century that the painting’s
legitimacy came into question. The 1947 trial of master forger Han van Meegeren
revealed that, between 1937 and 1943, he had sold no fewer than seven fake
“Vermeers” to unwitting museums and collectors. As a result, a number of works
previously thought to be from Vermeer’s brush were deattributed, including Young
Woman.Gregory Rubinstein, the Sotheby’s Old Masters specialist who led efforts to reexamine the discredited masterpiece, expects it to sell for upward of $5.5 million. “I was intrigued by the painting,” he says. “There was something magical about it, and there were areas, particularly the white skirt, that looked exactly like Vermeer. It wasn’t clear to me whether this was a real Vermeer—but that certainly seemed to be a possibility; and one I felt needed to be properly explored.”
Formal investigation of the work began in 1993, when
the painting’s current owner, Belgian art dealer and collector Baron Frederic
Rolin, brought the painting to Rubinstein’s attention. Since then, the painting
has been scrutinized by an elite team of eight conservators and academics who
revealed that the paint and pigment used on the piece matched exactly with the
paint and pigment on similar works from Vermeer. Microscopic examinations of the
canvas showed that the thread count was consistent with the thread count of a
similarly sized Vermeer, The Lacemaker, now hanging in the Louvre. Scientists
concluded that the two canvases were most likely cut from the same bolt of
cloth. Slightly less scientific methods of dating the painting included the
determination that the subject’s hairstyle was in vogue for only a few short
years around 1670.
| Microscopic examinations of the canvas showed that the thread count was consistent with the thread count of a similarly sized Vermeer. |
The Sotheby’s auction takes place July 8. Sotheby’s currently holds the record for the most expensive Old Master painting ever sold. Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens was auctioned for $76.7 million in July 2002.