Girl with a Flute

When the collector Joseph Widener gave his paintings to the National Gallery in 1942, this little oak panel arrived as the museum's fifth Vermeer. Two of the Vermeers already hanging there were exposed in 1974 as 20th-century forgeries. This one is genuinely 17th-century, yet doubts about it were in print by 1950.

In 2022, after two years of pigment analysis and imaging, the gallery's team concluded that Vermeer had not painted it, and the label became Studio of Johannes Vermeer. They describe someone who knew his method step by step and repeated each step more coarsely. Between the parted red lips sits a tiny blue-green dot of light, which they read as a misunderstood copy of Vermeer's habit of tinting highlights with the surrounding colour.

The Rijksmuseum's head of paintings, Pieter Roelofs, said Amsterdam would hang it as a real Vermeer, and in 2023, in the Rijksmuseum's large Vermeer exhibition, it did.