“Vermeer, Vermeer Forgeries, and the ‘Van Meegeren Affair’”
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Join Jamestown Arts Center for a JAC Talk with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., one of the foremost scholars of Dutch and Flemish painting. Wheelock is the former Curator of Northern Baroque Painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where he served for more than four decades, and Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Maryland. A specialist in Vermeer and seventeenth-century Dutch art, he has organized major international exhibitions, including the landmark 1995 Johannes Vermeer exhibition at the National Gallery, and has published widely on Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and other masters of the period.
Wheelock will discuss the infamous “Van Meegeren Affair,” the 1947 trial in which Dutch forger Han van Meegeren argued that he had not sold priceless Vermeer paintings to the Nazis, but had instead deceived them into purchasing his own forgeries. The case stunned the Dutch public and the art-historical establishment, especially after it was revealed that The Supper at Emmaus—long celebrated by Dutch scholars as one of Vermeer’s greatest works—had in fact been painted by Van Meegeren.
This talk traces how the scandal reshaped scholarly understandings of Vermeer’s oeuvre, prompting art historians to reconsider works that had previously been attributed to the artist. Wheelock will focus in particular on Young Woman Seated at a Virginal in The Leiden Collection, exploring the painting’s complex attribution history, its place within debates around Vermeer, and its recent conservation treatment.