A Lady Playing the Guitar

For most of the twentieth century the painting was accepted without controversy as a period copy, its close compositional dependence on The Guitar Player at Kenwood House taken as evidence of workshop or follower origin rather than Vermeer’s own hand.

Paint analysis conducted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and published in 2023 identified pigments and ground preparation consistent with seventeenth-century Dutch practice and raised the possibility that the picture is autograph rather than a copy. No scholarly consensus has formed around this hypothesis. The work remains unrestored, which complicates technical comparison with accepted Vermeers, and the museum continues to display it as part of the John G. Johnson Collection without committing to a revised attribution.