Could this Be a Vermeer Painting?

Could this Be a Vermeer Painting?

Sometime in the 1990s, Arthur Wheelock, a leading expert on the art of Johannes Vermeer, flew from Washington, D.C., to England to stare at two of the Dutch master's paintings alongside a possible third.

He and a few other experts examined the paintings for hours in the bright, white light of a laboratory inside London's National Gallery, which owns the two sure canvases. Dating from the 1670s, each of those paintings shows a woman with a harpsichord-like instrument from that period called a virginal, as in the poster below.








A Young Lady Seated at a Virginal, circa 1670

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The third painting also shows a woman at a virginal. Scholars had questioned the work since the 1940s, after a notorious Dutch forger specializing in Vermeers was caught.

Wheelock had never believed "Young Woman Seated at a Virginal" was entirely from Vermeer's hand, if it was his work at all.

The painting's satiny yellow skirt reflected the artist's skill in rendering fabrics and was Vermeer's favored hue for women's clothing. But the folds and shadows on her gold-colored wrap were all wrong. Too much of her was covered, and in a ham-handed fashion.

"I looked at the paint handling, the brush strokes," Wheelock recalled last month. He peered at the canvas under a microscope.

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