A Lady Playing the Guitar

A young woman in a white silk dress and ermine-trimmed yellow jacket sits with a guitar, smiling and glancing upward as if mid-song, lit by a window screened with a dark blue curtain and backed by a landscape on the wall. The scene repeats, almost line for line, the composition of Vermeer’s The Guitar Player at Kenwood House, and for most of the twentieth century it was understood as a copy after that picture by a follower rather than as Vermeer’s own work.

A Vermeer that became a copy

The painting was once taken for an autograph Vermeer. The connoisseur Cornelis Hofstede de Groot catalogued it as an original in 1908, and even after the Kenwood version was known he held the Philadelphia canvas to be the finer of the two. That confidence helped it pass as a Vermeer to collectors during the turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for the artist, among them the Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson, who bought it as a Vermeer. In time scholarship reclassified the work as a copy, and the museum lists it today simply with the maker unknown.

The 2023 reappraisal

The question reopened around the 2023 Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition, when the paint specialist Arie Wallert argued from technical analysis that the Philadelphia picture might be autograph after all. No scholarly consensus has followed. Past over-cleaning has left the surface heavily abraded, which both clouds the comparison with secure Vermeers and stands in the way of any firm conclusion.

Two pictures reunited

In the autumn of 2025 the Philadelphia canvas travelled to London, where Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood hung it beside the signed Kenwood Guitar Player, the first time the two versions had been shown together in more than three hundred years. The painting belongs to the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequeathed with that collection in 1917.