At a press conference on Friday, the museum said a multidisciplinary team of curators, conservators and scientists had determined that the painting was created “by Vermeer’s associates and not by the Dutch artist himself.” I shared my findings.
Vermeer (1632-1675) is one of the world’s most beloved painters. People usually come to the National Gallery expecting to see all of Vermeer’s works. It’s hard to justify taking them out to the conservation lab for more than a day or two. But the pandemic changed that.
according to the curator Marjorie (Betsy) WisemanAs director of the National Gallery’s Northern European Paintings department, she said the museum’s long closure meant she had “a unique opportunity to remove all four paintings from the walls and simultaneously place them in the preservation lab.” did.
“Others have learned to stick needles and bake bread,” she joked in an interview Thursday. “This was our pandemic project.”
The exceptional halo around Vermeer’s name is made all the more brilliant by the fact that his work was minimal.there is only About 35 paintings by Vermeer in the world. This partly explains why Vermeer, though revered during his lifetime, was largely forgotten over his two centuries until he was rediscovered in the 19th century. (“Girl with a Flute” was rediscovered in her 1906 and donated by Joseph Widener to his NGA in 1942.)
Today, Vermeer is not only admired, but loved. His little-known life has been the subject of a best-selling novel, movieBut the painting itself floats above the noise and hype. Incredibly quiet, exquisitely hued, and breathtakingly intimate, it’s a rebuke to the noise and mayhem of modern life and a salvation to hasty Information Age sensibilities.
With time and space in the lab, NGA researchers, scientifically led by senior imaging scientist John Delaney, applied sophisticated imaging to the painting. They were based on his rich history of Vermeer studies at the NGA, especially by Melanie Gifford, a now retired research guardian of painting techniques. It wasn’t clear at first if they would come up with anything new.
However, according to Wiesemann, the result was “an exponential increase in our understanding of Vermeer’s work process.” Due to the leaps in knowledge, [‘Girl With a Flute’] Not by Vermeer. ”
Delaney said Gifford had analyzed a very small sample taken from NGA’s Vermeers, so a lot of data about the painting already existed. Now, by combining microscopy with advanced imaging, Delaney and his fellow imaging scientist Kathryn Dooley were able to map the material Vermeer used. The techniques included X-ray fluorescence imaging spectroscopy and reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which uses a light scattering spectrometer to collect and process information from across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Visitors to the new NGA exhibition, “Vermeer’s secret(October 8-January 8), you can see some of what the research team uncovered before work. It will be sent to the largest ever Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum (February 10th to June 4th). The exhibition includes four of his Vermeer paintings from the NGA (now his three) and two of his 20th-century forgeries that remain in the gallery’s collection. (It’s hard for Vermeer to say how seriously these grotesque parodies were taken.)
A research team including Alexandra Libby, Dina Anchin, Lisha Deming Glinsman, and Gifford began by examining two masterpieces whose attribution to Vermeer had never been questioned. study “lady writing” When “woman with scalesFirst, Delaney said, “It was a great way to establish a baseline for his practice.”
Among the discoveries is that Vermeer was more active in some parts of the production process than previously thought. He brushed on the first layer with amazing speed and freedom. At one point, as if in a hurry to move on to the next step, he even applied a layer of a copper-containing material known to hasten the drying process.
“Vermeer gives the impression of being a master of smooth, satiny surfaces where individual handwriting cannot be discerned,” says Wieseman. “But then look how he set that glow on the background wall. [depicted in “Woman Holding a Balance”] Stimulating and powerful writing. You get the feeling that the artist is actually working on it. ”
Next, the research team turned to two smaller, more problematic works: Girl with the Red Hat and Girl with the Flute. These two paintings of him have long been considered a pair. Both are “tronies”. It is a Dutch word for head painting, which is often an idealized or particularly expressive type study, rather than a portrait of a particular person. (Vermeer’s “girl with a pearl earring” is the most famous example. )
There are two main points. “Girl with a Flute” was created by an artist. Perhaps a student, an apprentice in training, or an amateur taking lessons from a master. in executing it.
The researchers also found that Vermeer painted Girl with the Red Hat a few years later than previously thought, in 1669 instead of 1666-67, with new colors and slightly bolder paints. I concluded that it was time to try.
Both NGA tronies show young women with similar faces and expressions.Both subjects wear unusual hats and large pearl earrings. Both backgrounds are rather succinctly sketched. Both show a tapestry hanging on the wall and a chair with a lion’s head finial. Both are painted on wooden panels, which is very unusual for Vermeer.
Nevertheless, scholars have long doubted whether Vermeer painted “Girl with a Flute”. She didn’t look good enough. The transition from light to dark, especially around her face, seemed awkward and abrupt. Green shadows were applied in abundance, creating what the “Vermeer’s Secret” wall label calls “a blotchy look under her nose and along the jawline.”
In the 1990s, NGA curator and recognized Vermeer expert and recently retired Arthur Wheelock designated Girl with a Flute as “By Vermeer”. According to Wieseman, the designation was Wheellock’s “method of explaining why he is generally Vermeer-like, but qualitatively not up to par.”
Most scholars agreed, but Wheelock’s colleague at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the late Walter Riedtkeclaiming that it was probably Vermeer, and Wheelock himself later changed his position, stating that “Given the complex conservation issues surrounding this image, ‘Girl with Flute’ has been removed from Vermeer’s oeuvre.” I concluded that removing it would be too extreme.
A new analysis seems to confirm the skeptics. “At almost every level of construction of the picture,” he said Wieseman. ”
The research team found that although some of the same material is present in both paintings, the handling of the paint is very different, as Gifford had previously established. The technique of “Girl with the Red Hat” is delicate and skillful, but the paint of “Girl with the Flute” is relatively clumsy and rough.
Instead of using coarsely ground pigment in the bottom layer and finely ground pigment in the final layer, as Vermeer did, whoever painted ‘Girl with a Flute’ did the opposite. There are even fragments of bristles on the surface of the painting, suggesting that the artist used an old or crude brush.
“This artist has a conceptual understanding of how Vermeer crafted his paintings, but he has no control over the subtleties,” says Wieseman.
The undercoat is also missing. For example, some of the blue areas have “traction crackles” indicating that the surface paint dried before the underlying layer. “Experienced artists know how to mix pigments, so it didn’t,” he says Wieseman.
Similarly, in areas where white pigment was applied, the artist used too much medium (oil) in the underlayer, causing it to wrinkle and dry out. The artist had to scrape away that wrinkle to get a smooth surface for applying the final layer of paint.
“These are beginner mistakes,” says Wieseman. “Vermeer, he knows why he’s doing something. He knows what the end result will be, but with this artist, he has no sense of understanding.”
If all this is true, it changes our understanding of Vermeer, who has long been thought of as a lone wolf working without assistants or students. Here’s the problem: Who was this artist who visited Vermeer’s studio and used much of the same material, and what might one day discover about their relationship?
New discoveries are amazing, but there is always an air of mystery around Vermeer.