Self-Portrait

A lost self-portrait, known only from its appearance at the 1696 sale of the Dissius collection in Amsterdam, where it was listed as lot 3 and described as “the portrait of Vermeer in a room with various accessories, uncommonly beautifully painted by him.” It sold for 45 guilders and has never been traced. No image of it survives, and the catalogue line is effectively all we have.

Why it cannot be the Art of Painting

The wording has tempted some to identify the picture with the large Art of Painting in Vienna, but scholars reject this on economic grounds. Forty-five guilders was a modest sum for a Vermeer: at the same sale and in the years around it, the Milkmaid brought 175 guilders, the View of Delft 200, and the Allegory of Faith, comparable in scale and construction, fetched 400 guilders a few years later, the highest recorded Vermeer price of the century. A composition of the Art of Painting’s ambition would not have sold for so little, which points instead to a smaller, more direct likeness.

Discarded identifications

Two surviving paintings have been proposed as the lost portrait and both have fallen away. In the nineteenth century Théophile Thoré-Bürger took a work now firmly given to Michiel van Musscher for Vermeer’s self-portrait, but the costume dates to about 1660–1665 while the youthful face looks like a man in his early twenties, too young for Vermeer at that date. A Portrait of an Unknown Man in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels was also suggested, but it lacks the “various accessories” named in the catalogue, and its attribution drifted from Rembrandt to Nicolaes Maes to Vermeer before settling on Jan Victors.

A painter who hid himself

The loss is keenly felt because Vermeer otherwise avoided direct self-display, registering his presence obliquely rather than through straightforward portraiture. The grinning musician at the far left of The Procuress has long been read as a possible self-image, and recent X-ray fluorescence scanning of A Maid Asleep has revealed a figure at an easel in the background room that was later painted out. A securely identified Vermeer self-portrait would be among the most consequential discoveries possible in the study of the painter.