Lady with a Blue Hat

A small picture in the manner of Vermeer that was sold in 1930 to the steel magnate Baron Heinrich Thyssen as a genuine seventeenth-century work. It is usually counted among the forgeries of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch painter who spent the 1920s and 1930s manufacturing “old masters” and who would later become notorious for selling fake Vermeers, among them the celebrated Supper at Emmaus of 1937. For its cool, withdrawn expression the painting acquired the nickname the “Greta Garbo” Vermeer.

An early trial in the Vermeer style

If the attribution holds, the Lady with a Blue Hat belongs to Van Meegeren’s experimental phase rather than to the biblical compositions that made his fortune. Through the late 1920s and 1930s he worked his way toward a convincing imitation of the old masters, copying Frans Hals and producing trial Vermeers such as Man and Woman at a Spinet and a pair of unsold music pieces, Lady Reading Music and Lady Playing Music. Over roughly six years he assembled a method for faking age, mixing his own pigments from raw materials, hardening the paint film with phenol formaldehyde and baking it, then rolling the canvas to produce a network of cracks that he worked over with India ink.

A lost picture

Unlike the forgeries that surfaced at Van Meegeren’s 1945 trial, the Lady with a Blue Hat was never tested in the laboratory and never firmly placed among his output, which is why it is listed as a potential rather than a confirmed fake. After the sale to Thyssen the painting dropped out of the record, and its present whereabouts are unknown.