Man and Woman at a Spinet

Man and Woman at a Spinet is one of Han van Meegeren’s early works in the manner of Vermeer, dated to 1932 and sold to the Amsterdam banker Dr. Fritz Mannheimer. It belongs to the experimental phase that preceded his notorious biblical fakes, and the Wikipedia account notes that it may have been produced “perhaps without misleading intentions.”

Praised by Abraham Bredius

In October 1932 the eminent connoisseur Abraham Bredius published an article examining two newly surfaced pictures attributed to Vermeer. He rejected one as false but accepted Man and Woman at a Spinet as an authentic Vermeer, calling it “very beautiful” and “one of the finest gems of the master’s œuvre.” The same Bredius would, five years later, hail Van Meegeren’s Christ at Emmaus as a genuine Vermeer, the authentication that launched the forger’s most successful run of fakes.

An uncertain afterlife

Van Meegeren built his fakes from genuine seventeenth-century canvases and paints mixed to old recipes, hardening the surface with phenol formaldehyde and baking it to mimic centuries of aging. The picture has since been recognized as his work, but no sale price is recorded and its whereabouts after the Mannheimer collection are not documented.