“How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it is worth?” So ends Theft: A Love Story by the Australian novelist Peter Carey. This scabrous riff on the slipperiness of cultural value in the international art scene asks: is a copy so good that even experts mistake it for the original painting still a fake?
Questions of authenticity and attribution are behind a new display by English Heritage at Kenwood House in London to mark the 350th anniversary of the death of Johannes Vermeer. For the first time in 300 years, two nearly identical paintings of the Guitar Player, one signed by the Dutch master, the other on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and until recently believed to be a 17th- or 18th-century copy, will hang side by side. Experts have puzzled over the relationship between the two paintings for 100 years. Now visitors are being invited take part in a game of spot the difference (there are five, apparently), comparing a recognised masterpiece and its “twin”.
A 2022 exhibition at Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art similarly set out to examine “what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer”. The long-contested Girl With a Flute was subsequently downgraded to the work of an associate, because “the quality falls short of Vermeer’s standards”.
Earlier this summer, a rumbling dispute about the authenticity of Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, bought for a record sum by the National Gallery in London in 1980, was reignited, with a petition launched calling for a public debate to resolve the issue. The National has been accused of covering up a duff acquisition by applying a modern blockboard to the painting’s back – claims the gallery has rigorously refuted.
Art-world controversies are often the stuff of detective fiction. The Kenwood masterpiece has fingerprints on its surface, presumably those of the artist himself; the Philadelphia painting still has the wax seal of a long-ago owner on the back. No wonder such stories appeal to writers.
Along with Carey’s Theft, other fictional art capers include Michael Frayn’s 1999 Booker-prize shortlisted Headlong, about an art historian who believes he has uncovered a lost Bruegel; Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer prize-winning The Goldfinch, which takes its title from a 17th-century painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius; and most recently Nell Stevens’ tale of Victorian love and fakery, The Original. There’s even a Simpsons episode, The War of Art, in which Homer and Marge think they have discovered a valuable Dutch painting in a yard sale. Doh! “You only cared about that painting when you thought it was created by someone famous,” the forger tells a disappointed Lisa.
He has a point. But the provenance of a painting is vital, not just to scholars. In a world of fake news, manipulated images and digital art theft, authenticity matters more than ever. Artists are campaigning to protect their intellectual property from AI crawling because authorship is the hallmark of human creativity.
English Heritage hopes to have a final verdict on the two paintings at Kenwood House by year’s end. The display encourages visitors to really study them, to become amateur art historians. This is part of a growing trend in museums and galleries, such as the new V&A East Storehouse, to involve the public as co-curators. The real winner of this contest is the viewer, who gets to bask in the quiet luminosity of Vermeer while taking part in an important moment in art history.
