The Smiling Girl

The Smiling Girl is not a Vermeer but a twentieth-century forgery, painted around 1925 in the manner of the Delft master and now catalogued by the National Gallery of Art in Washington as the work of an anonymous artist rather than of Vermeer himself. Cast as a tronie, a half-length character study, the young woman’s broad, open smile borrows the look of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring closely enough to convince the most respected Vermeer authorities of its day.

Attributed to Theo van Wijngaarden

The picture is generally attributed to Theodorus (Theo) van Wijngaarden, a Dutch restorer and forger who was a friend of Han van Meegeren, the most notorious of all Vermeer forgers. It has a twin in deceit, the false Lacemaker that passed through the same hands and entered the National Gallery alongside it; the two have long been treated as a pair from the van Meegeren circle.

Sold to Mellon and given to the nation

The deception worked at the highest level of the market. The canvas was bought by the American financier Andrew W. Mellon from the dealers Duveen Brothers in December 1926, and was published as a newly discovered Vermeer by W. R. Valentiner in Art in America in 1928. It entered the National Gallery of Art with the Mellon gift in 1937, as accession 1937.1.55, and was shown there for decades as an autograph Vermeer.

Exposed as a modern hand

Connoisseurship and laboratory study eventually told against it. In his 1995 account of the two forgeries, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. set out the case for a modern hand, and pigment analysis found synthetic ultramarine and lead chromate in the paint, neither of which was available in the seventeenth century. On that evidence the Gallery reclassified the picture as a twentieth-century forgery, catalogued today as the work of an anonymous artist with the presumed forger named as van Wijngaarden.