What Does the National Gallery’s Vermeer Exhibition Teach Us About Connoisseurship?
Or, how much should we trust the experts about art attribution?
In October of 2022 the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC opened their show Vermeer’s Secrets in which they revealed that Girl with a Flute, a painting that has been in the museum’s collection for eighty years, is not, as has long been thought, a painting by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. Instead, they’re attributing it to “Studio of Johannes Vermeer.”
Johannes Vermeer, most well known for Girl with the Pearl Earring, was not a prolific artist. These days we are down to about 33 universally-agreed-upon Vermeer paintings. He also has a long history of being copied by other artists, from the legendary forgeries of Han Van Meegeren to this bizarre painting that fooled the National Gallery of Art back in the 1930s:
This exhibition is a great chance to discuss some of the thorny issues that arise with art attribution, and the pitfalls of relying on connoisseurship.
Art attribution is the process by which Art Historians determine the authorship of a…
