The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [173]
* Dirck van Baburen’s Procuress now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Vermeer’s Procuress is in Dresden’s Staatliche Kunstsammlungen.
* One victim of the blast was thirty-two-year-old Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt’s star pupil and Vermeer’s neighbor. Fabritius was crushed to death when his house collapsed, as was the man whose portrait he happened to be painting.
* The Mauritshuis treats its masterpiece as the star it is. In the summer of 2005, a giant banner depicting the Girl with a Pearl Earring hung outside the museum, beckoning tourists. The banner stretched perhaps ten feet across and extended from the roof to the ground. Inside, the giftshop sold Girl with a Pearl Earring jigsaw puzzles, drink coasters, playing cards, nut dishes, key rings, bookmarks, matchboxes, and, for three hundred euros, full-size reproductions of the painting itself.
At the same time, and in yet another sign of Vermeer’s popularity, three similarly colossal banners flapped outside the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, each showing a detail from The Milkmaid.
* The painting was stolen in 1990, along with eleven other paintings and drawings, in the biggest art theft ever. The total value of the stolen artwork was perhaps $300 million. “Tell them you’ll be hearing from us,” the thieves called to the guards as they left, but no one ever has.
* J. P. Morgan owned three of the Rembrandts in the show, four of the Halses, and one Vermeer, as well as many of the other pictures.
* Unless we side with the historians mentioned in chapter 14, who believe that Vermeer painted himself in The Procuress and (from the back) in The Art of Painting.
* In July 2004, a buyer at a Sotheby’s auction in London paid $30 million for what many believe to be the thirty-sixth known painting by Vermeer, Young Woman at a Virginal. The painting had been attributed to Vermeer at least since 1904, but if it is by Vermeer at all, it is not one of his best. In 1948, just after the Van Meegeren revelation, the highly regarded art historian A. B. de Vries dropped Young Woman at a Virginal from the list of definite Vermeers. The work lingered in limbo until the 2004 sale.
The painting is not by Van Meegeren—the 1904 date rules out that possibility—but the experts disagree vehemently as to whether it is by Vermeer. On the one hand, extensive scientific tests show that several of the paints match those used by Vermeer, and the canvas matches that of the Louvre’s Lacemaker so closely that the two may have come from the same bolt of cloth. Those observations do not rule out forgery, since forgers can obtain authentic materials, but they seem to point to a seventeenth-century artist.
Even so, the experts are divided. Albert Blankert is one of the most forceful skeptics. “It has elements taken from Vermeer’s pictures,” Blankert says, “but the anatomy of the woman is wrong and the hands look more like pigs’ trotters. It is an imitation.”
†† To pay off a debt she owed the baker, Vermeer’s widow gave him Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and The Guitar Player. Today Lady Writing a Letter is especially revered. “Everything of Vermeer” is in that painting, in the judgment of the art historian Lawrence Gowing. Nowadays any Vermeer would command a fortune, but the price for Lady Writing a Letter would be astronomical. Vermeer owed the baker 617 florins, not quite $80 in today’s currency.
* It was at an auction of Thoré-Bürger’s paintings, after his death, that Isabella Stewart Gardner bought The Concert.
* The “girl doing lacework” that Duveen found in 1927 is not the tiny, exquisite Lacemaker in the Louvre. That painting, which is indisputably a genuine Vermeer, had been in the Louvre since 1870.
* Arthur Wheelock points out one especially silly borrowing—the forger who painted The Lacemaker copied the basin from Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug, now in the Met. No one asked why a basin had turned up in a depiction of lacemaking.