The Lacemaker (after Vermeer)

A faithful, almost reverent copy of Vermeer’s Lacemaker, painted by Salvador Dalí in 1955 in front of the original at the Louvre, where he had been granted permission to set up his easel before the picture. At barely nine by eight inches it matches the intimate scale of Vermeer’s panel, and it stands apart from almost everything else Dalí made in the period for being a straight reproduction rather than a transformation.

A copy for Robert Lehman

The copy was commissioned by the New York banker and collector Robert Lehman, who is recorded in correspondence with the artist and who wanted a Lacemaker of his own when an autograph Vermeer was beyond reach. Dalí honoured the original closely, though his own hand shows through in small ways: the blue cloth tumbling from the sewing cushion has a liquid, molten quality, and the lacemaker’s expression reads as a touch harder than Vermeer’s serene model. The painting passed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.

An obsession with rhinoceros horns

For Dalí the small picture was anything but calm. “Up until now,” he said, “the Lacemaker has always been considered a very peaceful, very calm painting, but for me it is possessed by the most violent aesthetic power, to which only the recently discovered antiproton can be compared.” He had become convinced that the composition was secretly built from rhinoceros horns and their logarithmic spirals, the same form he believed underlay the sunflower and the cauliflower. Alongside this faithful copy he produced a separate Paranoiac-Critical Study of Vermeer’s Lacemaker, now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in which the seated figure detonates into a shower of curving horns.

The lacemaker and the rhinoceros

The fixation spilled out of the studio. In the spring of 1955, filmed by his collaborator Robert Descharnes for an unfinished film, The Prodigious History of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, Dalí went to the Vincennes zoo in Paris, propped a large reproduction of the Lacemaker in front of a rhinoceros named François, and tried to provoke the animal into running its horn through the canvas. The rhinoceros declined, so Dalí eventually pierced the reproduction himself with a narwhal tusk. The episode, equal parts spectacle and sincere theory, marks one of the more extravagant tributes ever paid to a Vermeer.