Long Suspect, a Vermeer Is Vindicated by $30 Million Sale

Long Suspect, a Vermeer Is Vindicated by $30 Million
Sale
By CAROL VOGEL

Published: July 8, 2004


LONDON, July 7 — The first painting by the Dutch
master Johannes Vermeer to come to auction in more
than 80 years — and one that for decades has been
suspected of being fake — sold for $30 million
Wednesday night at Sotheby's here.

The overflowing salesroom burst into applause when
George Gordon, an expert in the Sotheby's old-master
paintings department, took the winning bid by
telephone. While the auction house is not saying who
the buyer was, it is believed to be Stephen A. Wynn,
the Las Vegas casino owner.

For years Mr. Wynn has collected trophy paintings by
the great masters: Rembrandt, Rubens, Cézanne, Renoir,
Picasso and Sargent.

Other possible buyers, experts say, could have been
the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. (Scott J.
Schaefer, its chief curator, was in the audience) and
Lord Thomson of Fleet, one of the richest men in
Canada.

Still, most experts in the room thought the buyer was
Mr. Wynn. If it was, he was one of seven determined
bidders. Robert Noortman, an old-master paintings
dealer based in Maastricht, the Netherlands, also
tried hard to buy the painting. He stopped bidding at
$25.7 million. Mr. Noortman, who was sitting in the
front row, said before the auction that he wanted to
buy it for his inventory.

"Whoever bought the picture outbid one of the most
experienced dealers in the business," said Rachel
Mauro, a Manhattan art dealer who was at the sale. "As
a Vermeer — and I happen to believe it really is a
Vermeer — the price isn't that crazy. If it did go to
Las Vegas, it would certainly look good there."

The sale price of the painting includes Sotheby's
commission: 20 percent of the first $100,000 and 12
percent of the rest.

"We were extremely pleased," said Alexander Bell, head
of Sotheby's old-master paintings department in
London. "It is unlikely that a painting by Vermeer
will ever come to the market again."

When Sotheby's first announced the sale in March,
auction house officials estimated it would bring $5.4
million, a price far lower than what a second-rate
Impressionist painting might fetch at auction.

They were obviously nervous. For decades the
authenticity of the painting, "Young Woman Seated at
the Virginal," has been in dispute. But after 10 years
of study and testing by a group of scholars, museum
curators, painting conservators, costume experts,
paint analysts and auction house experts, Sotheby's
said it was confident it was genuine.

Sotheby's promoted the auction vigorously with
advertising, hoping to attract collectors from around
the world. Vermeer's popularity has been fueled in
recent months by the best-selling novel "Girl With a
Pearl Earring" and the 2003 movie based on it.

The painting, which served as the cover image on the
old-master sales catalog this year, has an entry that
is 22 pages long and includes an extensive history as
well as pictures of color pigment tests.

The canvas is small — 10 by 8 inches — and dates from
around 1670. It shows an intimate scene of a young
woman seated at a virginal, a type of harpsichord,
with her eyes gazing directly at the viewer. It is the
last genre scene by this artist in private hands apart
from one owned by Queen Elizabeth II. The last Vermeer
to appear at auction was "The Little Street"
(1658-1660), which was included in a sale in Amsterdam
in 1921. It failed to sell and was later bought by a
collector who donated it to the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam.

While technical evidence had supported the theory that
"Young Woman Seated at the Virginal" was by Vermeer,
it was not until the process of cleaning the canvas
was completed about six months ago in the Netherlands
by Martin Bijl, the former head of painting
conservation at the Rijksmuseum, that the majority of
experts and scholars endorsed the painting.

Until now only 34 paintings have been fully accepted
as by Vermeer, who was not a prolific artist and who
died young, at 43, in 1675.

Nobody had disagreed with the attribution until Han
van Meegeren, a master forger, revealed a half-century
ago that between 1927 and 1943 he had sold fake
Vermeers to unsuspecting museums and collectors. The
art scholar A. B. de Vries then excluded this painting
from an important monograph.

For much of the 20th century the painting languished
in near obscurity. From the description in a
17th-century sales catalog, the painting once belonged
to Pieter van Ruijven, Vermeer's most important
patron. By the early 19th century, it was owned by
Wessel Ryers, a Dutch collector. By 1904 it was
documented as a Vermeer in the collection of Sir
Alfred Beit, a collector in Ireland, who also owned
the artist's famous "Lady Writing a Letter to Her
Maid." In 1960 the painting was sold to Baron Freddy
Rolin, a Belgian dealer, who died in 2001. It is his
family who sold the painting now.

Experts at Sotheby's compared it to two larger
Vermeers at the National Gallery in London, "A Lady
Standing at the Virginal" and another portrait of a
lady seated at a virginal, both also late paintings by
the artist.

The auction house and Baron Rolin also consulted Libby
Sheldon, who runs the paintings analysis unit at
University College in London. She analyzed the
pigments and was able to find corresponding ones used
by the artist in authenticated works.

Ms. Sheldon also studied the painting's canvas and
discovered that it matched the one used in "The
Lacemaker," which is in the Louvre. "The two are so
similar," Ms. Sheldon said, "they could have been cut
from the same bolt of cloth."

=====
Sanjeev Narang
email: ask-(/at/)-eConsultant.com
http://www.sanjeev.net



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