National Gallery confirms one of its Vermeers is actually not a Vermeer

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Last edited Sat Oct 8, 2022, 08:00 AM - Edit history (1)

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ART

National Gallery confirms one of its Vermeers is actually not a Vermeer

Experts had long wondered whether “Girl With a Flute” was really one of the world’s few paintings by the Dutch master. The pandemic gave the museum a chance to investigate.

By Sebastian Smee
October 7, 2022 at 2:00 p.m. EDT



“Girl With a Flute,” one of four paintings in the National Gallery's collection attributed to Vermeer, has been determined to have been painted by someone else. (National Gallery of Art)

It has long been designated as dubious. Now it’s official: Girl With a Flute,” one of the National Gallery of Art’s four paintings attributed to Johannes Vermeer, is not, in fact, by Vermeer. Four are now three, and thanks to new combinations of scientific analysis, art historical insight and informed looking, a vexing, long-standing problem has been resolved.

In a news conference Friday, the museum shared the finding that an interdisciplinary team of curators, conservators and scientists has determined that the painting was made “by an associate of Vermeer — not by the Dutch artist himself.”

[So Vermeer didn’t paint ‘Girl With a Flute.’ Why think less of it?]

Vermeer (1632-1675) is one of the world’s most beloved painters. In normal times, people come to the National Gallery expecting to see all its Vermeers on display. It’s hard to justify removing them to the conservation lab for more than a day or two. But the pandemic changed that.

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Imaging scientists Kathryn Dooley and John Delaney conducting tests on Vermeer’s “Girl With the Red Hat.” (National Gallery of Art)

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By Sebastian Smee
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Twitter https://twitter.com/SebastianSmee