How did the National Gallery come to discover that two of its “Vermeers” were by Van Meegeren?
Like virtually every museum or collector possessing examples of Vermeer’s work that had come to light during the previous quarter century or so, the Gallery began to get suspicious soon after World War II. But anytime the attribution of a picture is questioned, arguments naturally begin to fly back and forth. In the case of the Gallery it took a very long time for the two fakes—The Smiling Girl and The Lace Maker—to move, step by step, down the scale of esteem from “Vermeer” to “Follower of Vermeer” to off-the-wall-and-into-storage. In part, this was due to the technological limitations of picture analysis at the time. By the late 1950s, the Gallery’s curators were pretty well convinced that the works were not by the master, but initial lab tests showed that all the pigments were appropriate to the seventeenth century. So the pictures remained on view, even though by that point almost no one took them seriously as works of Vermeer. Eventually, more sophisticated tests proved both pictu
