A Young Woman Reading

A small oil on canvas showing a young woman absorbed in reading, painted in the manner of Johannes Vermeer but now recognized as a modern forgery. It openly borrows from Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and from The Love Letter, the very resemblances that first recommended it as a Vermeer and that later helped expose it.

Accepted as a Vermeer

The picture surfaced in the late 1920s, when newly discovered Vermeers were appearing with a frequency that ought to have invited caution. In 1928 the Dutch connoisseur Vitale Bloch published it as an authentic work, pointing to its kinship with the two known Vermeers as proof of its pedigree. That same kinship troubled the art historian W. R. Valentiner, who warned that hearing of a freshly found Vermeer almost every year was itself grounds for suspicion.

Bache, Wildenstein, and the Met

The panel had reportedly come from Dr. G. A. Rademaker of The Hague to the New York dealer Wildenstein, who in 1928 sold it to the financier Jules S. Bache for $134,800 as an autograph Vermeer. Bache bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1949 as part of the Jules Bache Collection, still under Vermeer’s name. The museum now catalogues it as the work of an Imitator of Johannes Vermeer rather than the master himself.

An uncertain forger

The attribution to Han van Meegeren, the most notorious of the twentieth-century Vermeer forgers, has been proposed but never secured. The painting belongs to the same wave of false Vermeers as The Smiling Girl, produced in the circle of van Meegeren and his associates and absorbed, for a time, into major American collections.