by Jon Lackman | 16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes:
What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look:
Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection
… Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of a committee assembled to study and restore the work, many experts had regarded this painting as a “near-Vermeer”—an imitation by a less gifted artist. A new book by Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, theorizes that it (along with six other generally accepted Vermeers) was painted by the master’s eldest daughter—a hypothesis that Martin Bailey, in his review (not online) for this month’s Art Newspaper of five recent books on Dutch old masters, derided as a “wild assumption based on limited information.”
Although Walter Liedtke, the Met’s curator specializing in Dutch 17th-century art, now accepts the painting as a Vermeer (and includes it in his new monograph on the artist’s oeuvre), he balks at the yellow shawl.
According to the Met’s label … “another hand may have painted the yellow shawl, under which are traces of less voluminous attire.”
