Femme jouant du cistre

Before the forgeries that fooled a nation, there were rehearsals. In the mid-1930s Han van Meegeren painted a small group of Vermeer-style pieces that he never tried to sell, working out how to imitate the pearly light and quiet interiors of Delft's most famous painter. This is one of them, a young woman with a cittern, a plucked instrument of Vermeer's own century. The type is pure Vermeer, a single figure absorbed in music beside a window, though the picture was really a practice run for a con that had not started yet. When the scandal broke after the war and van Meegeren confessed, these unsold studies were gathered up with the rest, and this one entered the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.