Lady Reading Music

A trial-piece forgery by Han van Meegeren, painted in close imitation of Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. The picture shows a woman in a blue jacket bent over sheet music, her lips slightly parted, lit by daylight from a window at the left, in the steady, frontal manner Vermeer made his own. It is one of the practice pieces Van Meegeren never put on the market, and it survives today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

A warm-up for the forgeries to come

Van Meegeren turned to forgery after the critics dismissed his own paintings as derivative, and he set out to prove he could pass for a Dutch master. This canvas belongs to a small group of early imitations that copied existing, well-known Vermeer interiors, alongside a companion piece often called Lady Playing Music, modelled on Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute. Because such subjects could be set beside the real thing in a museum, they were too risky to sell, and Van Meegeren soon abandoned the approach for invented “early Vermeers” on religious themes that had no original to be compared against.

From experiment to deception

The lessons rehearsed here fed directly into the celebrated frauds that followed, beginning with the Supper at Emmaus of 1936–1937, which the connoisseur Abraham Bredius hailed as a masterpiece by Vermeer. To make his pictures read as three centuries old, Van Meegeren ground his own pigments to old recipes, bound them with the synthetic resin Bakelite in place of oil, and baked the canvas in an oven so the paint hardened as if it had aged for fifty years, then worked ink into the cracked surface to fake a network of age. Its survival among the documented Van Meegeren material, kept with the evidence assembled for the case against him, makes this modest panel a record of how one of the twentieth century’s most successful forgers taught himself his trade.