B
redius had discovered Vermeers as well as Rembrandts, three times in all, an astounding record in view of Vermeer’s tiny body of work. The story of the first find, Allegory of Faith, is the most straightforward. The painting, now in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was hidden beneath a double disguise when Bredius spotted it in a Berlin art gallery—the picture bore the signature of one artist, the now nearly forgotten Caspar Netscher, but was thought to be actually the work of the somewhat better-known Eglon van der Neer. Bredius believed he saw Vermeer’s hand, and he convinced the world (which remains convinced) that he was correct. “With this acquisition of the new Delft Vermeer,” one Dutch newspaper crowed, “Dr. Bredius has once again found a bargain with his perspicacious eye.”The find, in 1899, enhanced Bredius’s already high reputation, and in time it would fatten his wallet, but Bredius never cared much for the picture itself.* “A large but unpleasant Vermeer,” in Bredius’s words, Allegory of Faith is a com plicated religious work complete with a crucifixion scene (in a painting within the painting) and an array of such symbolic touches as a fallen apple and a crushed, bleeding snake. Bredius picked up the picture for almost nothing, lent it to the Mauritshuis and then the Boymans Museum for nearly thirty years, and finally sold it to an American collector for $300,000 (roughly $3.8 million in today’s dollars).
* Nor do many other Vermeer lovers. Arthur Wheelock, for one, called Allegory of Faith
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The story of Bredius’s second Vermeer find is more of a detective tale. It began in 1876, at an auction in Paris. A buyer for the Mauritshuis Museum bought a dozen paintings, including one by Rembrandt’s pupil Nicholaes Maes. Diana and Her Companions, as it is known, shows Diana, goddess of the night, and four of her attendants. The mood is quiet and somber. One woman bathes Diana’s feet. All the faces are hidden or in shadow, all the women lost in contemplation.
In the 1600s, subjects taken from mythology or religion or history like this one were deemed better suited than any others to serious art. Landscapes, still-lifes, interior scenes with serving girls or ladies reading letters, all took second place, usually a distant second. Two centuries would pass before tastes shifted. In the late 1800s, when the Impressionists claimed Vermeer as an honorary ancestor, they hailed his fascination with color and the play of sun light, but just as important, they endorsed his focus on everyday life. The Vermeers they liked best—as we do today—were the domestic interiors. But Vermeer seems to have begun his career as a more-or-less conventional painter of “important” subjects, as in this scene from Roman mythology.
The director of the Mauritshuis scolded his buyer for paying too much for
Diana. Three years after the purchase, in a guide to the museum’s collection,
he was still complaining. “A Nicholaes Maes, Diana and Her Companions, would have been an important painting,” he wrote, had it not suffered so much dam age through the centuries.
Then, in 1892, Bredius, who had taken over as the Mauritshuis’s director, helped reveal something remarkable. When a sharp-eyed observer thought he saw something odd in Maes’s signature, Bredius called in the Mauritshuis’s restorer. While Bredius and his deputy, De Groot, looked on, the restorer dabbed at the signature with a swab dipped in alcohol. The three men saw at once that someone had tampered with the painting. The Maes signature— more accurately, an NM monogram—had been fashioned from a signature lying beneath it. The original signature: IV Meer. That was huge news, for this was how the great Vermeer signed his paintings!* Evidently some du plicitous soul had done his best to remove the signature of the then little- known IV Meer; after that, he converted the traces that remained to the monogram of the more desirable Nicholaes Maes.
* Vermeer experimented with a number of different but closely related signatures. The I
But the mystery was not yet resolved. At the Mauritshuis, Diana hung in the same room as A View of Delft, which was indisputably a Vermeer. The two paintings looked nothing alike. Could the same man really have painted both? Moreover, Diana seemed to show Italian influences, especially in the richness and depth of its colors. Vermeer, as far as anyone knew, had never visited Italy. Bredius suggested that perhaps the IV Meer who had painted Diana was not Vermeer of Delft but his less renowned contemporary, also named Vermeer, from Utrecht. (And the Utrecht Vermeer had apparently visited Italy, where he produced paintings similar to Diana.)
Here matters stood, unresolved, all through the 1890s. In the meantime, in Britain, a religious painting called Christ in the House of Mary and Martha had been kicking around barely noticed. It shows Christ seated at a table with Mary on a stool before him, watching attentively, and Martha, eyes downcast as so of ten in Vermeer, standing at Christ’s shoulder and offering a basket of bread.
Where the picture had been before about 1880, no one knew. In 1884, a furniture and antiques dealer sold it to “an old lady” for ten pounds, accord ing to a collector who acquired the painting years later. We know nothing more of this mysterious elder ly buyer except that she quickly resold the paint ing for thirteen pounds. It turned up a few years later, again without making a stir, in Bristol, England, in 1901. There an art dealer threw it in as a bonus to a buyer who had just spent £140 on two paintings.
The new own er brought his three purchases home to London and showed them to a friend and art dealer named Norman Forbes, a partner in a gallery called Forbes and Paterson, on Bond Street. Forbes waved aside the two “finds” and homed in on the religious picture, the afterthought in his friend’s deal. “I told him it was a Vermeer and a very excellent one at that,” Forbes recalled. “He was incredulous, so I told him to get a little spirit and clean off the varnish in one corner. He did so, and found Vermeer’s beautiful signature.”
Word raced through the art world, and Bredius came running to London. The newly discovered Vermeer signature on Christ in the House of Mary and Mar tha looked identical to the Vermeer signature Bredius had found nine years before on Diana and Her Companions. At Forbes and Paterson, Bredius scrawled an excited note with his usual jumbled syntax and frantic, almost random underlinings. “Exactly as the M[aurits]huis Diana. Very colorful & exactly the same colors without any doubt by the same hand.”
It took one last round of debate to convince nearly all the art world that both Christ in the House and Diana were indeed by the Vermeer, Vermeer of
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Delft, and not by Vermeer of Utrecht. In the end, Bredius’s deputy, Willem Martin, made the argument that won the day. (De Groot, the former deputy, had moved on.) Everyone agreed, Martin pointed out, that the same artist had painted Christ in the House and Diana. Furthermore, the colors in Diana looked just like those in The Procuress, a painting that was definitely by Vermeer of Delft. Therefore all three paintings were by Vermeer of Delft.
I f a n y f org e r had been paying attention, the story would have put a large grin on his face. As we have seen, Thoré-Bürger, the historian who rediscov ered Vermeer, had assigned a great number of unlikely works to him. But that had been de cades before. The discovery of Christ in the House and Diana in 1901 showed once again that Vermeer had sides to him that no one had ever sus pected. In time, that uncertainty would open the door to all sorts of mis chief.
Half a century later, the eminent scholar P.T.A. Swillens still refused to believe that either Diana or Christ in the House was by Vermeer. “Diana never can have been his,” and Christ in the House was even worse. Everything about it was wrong—the subject, the light, the shadows, the folds of the cloth, the ges tures. “In no single part, conception, composition, treatment, size or technical execution is there a single similarity to be discovered with any authentic work of Vermeer whatever. The whole is born of a completely different spirit which has nothing in common with Vermeer.”
But at the time of Bredius’s discovery, no one voiced doubts like that. In stead, they hailed Bredius. And then, only five years after his discovery of
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Bredius struck again. In 1906, he had gone to Brussels to look at a private collection of Rembrandt drawings. Bredius happened to glance up.
“Suddenly my eye fell on a small picture, hanging up high,” Bredius re called. “Am I permitted to take this down once, as it appears to be something very beautiful?”
His host gave permission.
“And yes!” Bredius concluded his story, for once making his point in a whisper rather than a shout. “It was very beautiful.”
Bredius attributed the unknown painting to Vermeer. The world (includ ing Bredius’s archrival De Groot) raced to second his judgment. In the first de cades after its discovery, the painting’s price increased ten thousand-fold. The picture, now known as Young Girl with a Flute, eventually ended up in the
collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today its status is in doubt. The National Gallery labels it “Circle of Johannes Vermeer.” In 1989 the great scholar J. M. Montias suggested that Vermeer began the painting but abandoned it for some reason, and a later artist finished it.*
But in 1906, the Young Girl reigned unchallenged. Bredius’s newest triumph puffed him up in the eyes of the world and in his own mind as well. Young Girl with a Flute was just the latest proof of his unmatched intuition. Not only had he found three Vermeers (he did not claim credit for Diana, which would have brought the tally to four), but his discoveries had been different from one another. Though Young Girl with a Flute looked like a Vermeer, Allegory of Faith
and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha did not. The identification of the two religious works was perhaps more impressive because they were so strange, so unlike the common notion of a Vermeer. Here was irrefutable testimony to the power of Bredius’s eye.
But all three discoveries dated from around 1900. Bredius had been young then, just entering his prime. What could be better, thirty years later, than to cap his career with one final announcement that would amaze the world?
* The fi rst to dispute the attribution to Vermeer was Swillens, in the same book in which he rejected Diana and Her Companions and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.