Lady Playing Music

A trial piece painted by the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren around 1935–1936, closely following Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute. It is sometimes catalogued as “Lady playing a lute looking out the window” or under the Dutch title Cisterspelende vrouw. Unlike the pictures Van Meegeren sold as autograph Vermeers, this canvas was an experiment that he never put on the market.

A practice piece

Before producing the forgery that made him famous, Van Meegeren spent years perfecting a method for imitating seventeenth-century painting. Among the works left over from this period are two unsold Vermeer pastiches now in the Rijksmuseum: this Lady Playing Music, after the Woman with a Lute, and a companion Lady Reading Music based on Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Both are closer to copies of known compositions than the invented religious scenes he would later pass off as lost Vermeers.

Faking the look of age

Van Meegeren’s technique was built around making fresh paint read as three centuries old. He bound his pigments with phenol formaldehyde, the synthetic resin known as Bakelite, rather than ordinary oil, then baked the canvas at roughly 100 to 120 degrees Celsius to harden the film and rolled it to force a network of cracks, finishing by washing India ink into the craquelure to mimic ingrained dirt. It was exactly these modern materials that later betrayed him: after the war the chemist Paul Coremans showed that his “Vermeers” contained twentieth-century ingredients, and Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery in 1947, having staged his defence by painting another fake under guard. His best-known fabrication, the Supper at Emmaus, had been hailed in 1937 as a masterpiece by the Vermeer authority Abraham Bredius.