Erroneously Attributed Vermeer's and Fakes

(part one)

Photograph of Thoré-Bürger from
the sales catalogue of the
Thoré-Bürger collection, 1892

"For nearly 200 years after his death in 1675, no one knew the extent of Vermeer’s oeuvre. A few connoisseurs in the Netherlands maintained continuous contact with some of his flagship paintings but, by the end of the 18th century, many of Vermeer’s other works remained hidden or were attributed to another painter. By the 1850s, however, the French art critic, Etienne J. Theophilè Thorè (more publicly known as William Burger, the pseudonym he adopted in 1855 during his political exile from France and retained until the end of his life) had launched a formidable campaign to locate Vermeer’s work. Despite an obsessive desire to establish the artistic identity of what he dubbed the "Sphinx of Delft,"Thorè-Burger’s search was especially hindered by the moveable traverse of Vermeer’s style. All of these factors, combined with the dispersal of Vermeer’s paintings over time after his death and a rather wide range of techniques that the artist employed, presented experts with a most difficult task of attempting to authenticate (and date) Vermeer’s work. Consequently, by 1866, when Thorè-Burger formally brought Vermeer to the attention of readers of Paris’ Gazette des Beaux Arts in three articles which later became a book, he gave Vermeer credit for more than seventy paintings. Clearly, in an effort to be inclusive, he had cast his net far too widely, though Thorè-Burger did succeed in defining the stylistic, thematic contours of Vermeer’s oeuvre."¹ Although Thorè-Burger himself wrongly attributed many paintings to Vermeer, the importance of his pioneer effort is of pivotal importance to scholars today. Dutch painting at the time had not been studied systematically and few of today’s indispensable analytical methods for determining the authenticity of dubious works of art existed. Far less comprehensible were the false attributions which came later.

"By the end of the nineteenth-century Vermeer [paintings] were beginning to fetch big money. American millionaires, including Henry Marquand, J. Piermont Morgan, Henry Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner, had joined the Vermeer owner's club, and the great American museums were discreetly lobbying for the pictures to be given to them or at least lent to them and later given as bequests. The Dutch museum director and art historian Abraham Bredius did well in this process. He had bought the Allegory of Faith in 1899 for roughly 700 guilders, loaned it to the Mauritshuis and the Boijmans Museum for many years, and then sold it for $300,000 to the American collector Michael Friedsam. Friedsam later left it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vermeer prices were also affected by shortage: there just weren't enough of them to go around. With hindsight, we can see that the conditions were becoming ripe for new "Vermeer’s" to turn up, whether as result of generous attribution or from counterfeiting...as entrepreneurs thought there should be more of them to fulfill the demand."²

"In 1928 the art historian, museum director and optimist W.R. Valentiner wrote: "It is still quite possible that for a number of years to come new Vermeer’s may now and then appear." Valentiner went on: "Vermeer used a very small number of models and repeated certain details like costumes, curtains, pillows, windows, mantelpieces and even paintings hanging on the walls so often that newly discovered works by him frequently seem like puzzle pictures taken from different groupings in known pictures by him. Almost a description of how to forger a Vermeer."³

Vermeer's name had clearly become well known in the 1920's and 1930's as enthusiastic collectors, in competition with one another, were willing to pay high prices for what a greedy art trade was able to establish as authentic Vermeer's, often with the complicity of experienced scholars. Although the "Vermeer craze" assumed international proportions, it had yet to reach its sad climax.