Woman Reading Music

Vermeer returned again and again to one quiet subject, a single woman by a window absorbed in reading, whether a letter or a sheet of music. That habit was exactly what Han van Meegeren imitated here. In the mid-1930s, learning to forge Vermeer, he painted this woman reading music as one of several trial pieces he never offered for sale. Copying the motif was safer than copying any single painting, since a plausible new Vermeer of a familiar type invited fewer awkward comparisons. He would put that lesson to work a few years later on pictures that sold for fortunes. This one he never sold, and it entered the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after the fraud unravelled.