Studio of Johannes Vermeer
Dutch Republic · Baroque
The story
This name belongs to no single person. Museums use it for a painting made in a master's workshop by someone who knew his methods from the inside, and here it goes on a small picture, Girl with a Flute, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
In October 2022, after a two-year technical study published in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, the gallery gave the picture this label. Its team found that the painter had followed Vermeer's working order step by step, down to the green earth pigment Vermeer used in the shadows of skin. Each step was done more coarsely, starting from a rough grey ground on an oak panel. Who held the brush is unknown. Vermeer has no documented pupils, and no visitor to his studio mentioned an assistant.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam read the evidence differently and hung the panel as a Vermeer in its 2023 Vermeer retrospective, citing the Washington findings in the catalogue.
