Lost Art Forgery And Thefts The Enigmatic Vermeer Raiders Of The Lost Art

Vermeer is the ultimate enigma. He created some of the world's most treasured paintings, including the Girl with a Pearl Earring. But we know very little about him. In fact, for two centuries, his masterpieces were largely forgotten. But an intrepid French explorer in the 19th century managed to hunt them down in hidden locations, where they'd been scattered across Europe. You don't hear people making these pilgrimages for most artists. And what is it about Vermeer that encourages this need? Slowly but surely, Vermeer came to be appreciated for the artistic genius that he was. Vermeer is one of the most enigmatic Dutch artists of the 17th century. Once you see a Vermeer, you never forget it. And you never forget where you saw it. However, the process of reclaiming his paintings has been fraught with peril. One of the most successful forgers of all time, Han van Meegeren, managed to fool the experts for years with his collection of fake Vermeers. His trial was a media sensation that rocked the art world. It seems astonishing to us now that we were fooled by the van Meegeren fakes. It's wishful thinking. You really want a painting to be Vermeer. If you just want it, you know it will be. He was just a brilliant psychologist and he understood that scholars would think, we've always been expecting to find these and here they are. There are very few genuine Vermeers around and many have been lost to us once again, being stolen by members of the IRA and the Boston Mob. It would appear that they were very selective in what they took. Even Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering were looking to get their hands on Vermeers by whatever means necessary. Hitler managed to get a hold of two. Goering was sold a fake, made by van Meegeren. The forgeries have made life difficult when it comes to the work of the Dutch master. If you would discover a genuine Vermeer, it would make your day, but you have to be really careful. It's been an epic struggle to reclaim the works of Johannes Vermeer from their hidden locations and from the thieves that took them. That struggle continues today. At the end of World War II, Joseph Piller, a Jewish resistance hero, was tasked with hunting down SS and Gestapo members after the liberation of the Netherlands. He also managed to track down Han van Meegeren, a very wealthy resident of Amsterdam who he discovered had been behind the sales of many recently rediscovered Vermeers. But one of those sales had been made to the Nazi leader Herman Goering, and van Meegeren was accused of collaboration. You can answer the question, Mr van Meegeren. My father told me I would never amount to anything. He didn't approve of your career? I know nothing, he used to say. Incapable of nothing. Well, he was wrong, wasn't he? A man doesn't acquire 50 houses. 52. Yes, 52. You had to be clever to do what you did. Where did they come from, Mr van Meegeren? Where did you find the Vermeers? But what Piller didn't know was that van Meegeren was one of the most successful art forgers of all time. Just like Johannes Vermeer himself, van Meegeren lived and worked in the city of Delft and was also an artist. But he was chastised by art critics at the time. They said his style was just an imitation of the old masters. Van Meegeren decided to retaliate by proving that he could imitate them so accurately that even the experts would be fooled. I think he had two motives. One was obviously money. It was a way of earning some money by making these fakes. But I also think he wanted to get his own back on the art world. They didn't like his art. So he thought he would do something to get his own back on the critics. Van Meegeren was a Dutch Delft architect who has made some buildings in Delft as well. So around Delft you will find some real van Meegerens. They are buildings alongside canals. Van Meegeren discovered he could make wonderful Vermeers with the kind of paint Vermeer used in his time. And people from that area liked it very much and thought the possibility to own a real Vermeer. Han van Meegeren made forgeries of other artists. But it was the fact that Johannes Vermeer was such a mystery that allowed these fakes to be so successful. Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632. Exactly 300 years before van Meegeren started his fakes. He joined the artistic guild of St. Luke and may have been taught by another celebrated artist who worked in Delft, Karel Fabritius. Fabritius was Rembrandt's greatest pupil but was tragically killed at the age of 32 when a gunpowder store exploded in Delft destroying much of the city. The event became known as the Delft Thunderclap. Vermeer survived the gunpowder explosion and started working on his paintings, including A View of Delft, made six years after the tragedy. We know very little about his life. He actually ran an inn or a tavern in the town of Delft outside The Hague. The city of Delft in the 7th century was very rich. We did business all over the world. Wonderful buildings, already stone, but also a lot of wooden houses. He was a Dutch Golden Age painter, that great flowering of the Dutch Republic. We think Vermeer was in the middle class of people. His mother-in-law was very rich, of course. His father had two inns. It always sounds as though he suffered from his father who had been a cloth worker and dealer and became a tavernkeeper and killed a soldier and generally sounds like a rogue. Married a Catholic, had 15 children, 11 of which survived. One imagines his life didn't look anything like a Vermeer. Maybe that was the point. We have no definitive pictures of Johannes Vermeer, but it's believed by scholars that he may have painted himself into one of his early works, the Procurus. It's a genre scene where you have a figure in the background and he looks like a painter and, you know, he may be Vermeer. I like to think it is Vermeer, but, you know, we don't know that for sure. Vermeer may also have painted himself into one of his later works, the Art of Painting. He had other jobs, so, you know, he earned his money as a painter, but he had an inn and he dealt in art, so he was an art dealer. He had 11 children with his wife. He was also an innkeeper. He had the two inns of his father. He was a seller of antiques and that kind of thing. He was a painter as well. How the poor man found time to paint a tool is a miracle. Some very successful artists, like Rembrandt, had a studio and employed a lot of assistants who would work doing some menial task, but Vermeer seems to have worked just by himself and that's probably a reflection of both the way he wanted to work and the fact that he didn't earn very much money. You know, there's a great idea that great suffering makes great art. Vermeer's unique way of working and the materials he used seem to explain why there are so precious few examples of his paintings in the world today. I think it's a combination of two reasons why we have such a very small output. One is that we simply don't have the paintings, that they were lost, because, of course, a lot of pictures do get lost and some of his must have done. The other thing is he probably did work very slowly. I mean, they're very meticulously and carefully painted. He painted using lapis lazuli quite a lot and he painted gem-like pictures that were made out of gems often. Vermeer used very expensive colours, the stone lapis lazuli. In those years, it was very expensive. Because he produced so little, he probably didn't earn a great deal and there were also economic problems in the Netherlands at the time and when he died, he was in debt. Vermeer died in Delft at the age of just 43. His reputation as an artist did not extend much beyond his hometown and his name faded into obscurity very quickly, along with his paintings. It was not until almost two centuries later that he finally got the recognition that he deserved when a French exile made it his mission to bring Vermeer to the world. Johannes Vermeer lived and painted in the city of Delft near The Hague, but his reputation as an artist didn't extend much beyond the city he worked in and when he died at the age of 43, it seemed Vermeer had missed his chance to be considered one of history's greatest artists. I don't imagine that his pictures sold for much and there weren't very many of them. If you're painting probably two pictures a year, that's not like being Picasso. In those times, Rembrandt and some other painters also in Delft, Vermeerveld and Pieter de Hooch, for instance, sold a lot more paintings to other people than Vermeer did. The volume of the work available is a key component in this. Even accounting for ones that may have been lost or destroyed even, it's still a relatively small output for someone who was an artist for over 20 years. In those years, it was not very common to like a Vermeer. The prices which were paid on the selling in Amsterdam were also not so very high, for instance. There were no paintings by Vermeer in French public collections. I think the Vermeer in the Mauritshuis was the first Vermeer to enter a public collection in the Netherlands. So if you have these paintings in private collections, if you had good contacts, you could go there, but it's different from a museum. There were a few collectors of his work and they were saved by them. Often they were later attributed to other artists, not to Vermeer. And then Vermeer was rediscovered in the mid-19th century. Vermeer's rediscovery was due to a French exile named Théophile Touré, who found himself captivated by the paintings. Touré made it his life's work to track down as many Vermeers as he could. It wasn't going to be an easy task, though. After Vermeer's death, his paintings had scattered across Europe and were often incorrectly listed as the work of far better-known artists at the time. Many of them would end up in royal possession. In 1742, a girl reading a letter by an open window was acquired for Augustus III, the King of Poland. With the belief that it was a painting by Rembrandt. The Music Lesson was also bought by a king in 1762 when it was purchased for King George III of England. It entered the royal collection at Buckingham Palace where it was listed as being by Franz van Mieris. In 1802, the guitar player became the property of Lord Palmerston, who would go on to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The art of painting, Vermeer's most treasured item that he always kept in his possession, would end up being listed as a work by Pieter de Hooch. It travelled to Vienna, where it became part of the House of Chern in collection in 1813. The little street and the milkmaid stayed in the Netherlands, though, when they entered the collection of the aristocratic Dutch family, the Sixes, at the House of Six in Amsterdam. Vermeer. Jan Vermeer. I had never heard the name before, either, but it was simply astonishing. The first one I saw was at The Hague. The brilliance of the light, the intensity of the colour, both real and utterly original. I had to know who painted it. He went to the mother's house in The Hague in 1842, saw this huge panorama on Delft, and, well, he was blown away immediately by this incredible painting. The view of Delft is an amazing picture, very beautifully painted. I can see that it was a landscape which would certainly have appealed to people in the 19th century. I searched every gallery in Holland I knew, every one. I found two more in private collections. Again, simply astounding work. This was art concerned with the real. Servants at work. The town where he lived, unadorned. This was art for man. He travelled all over the place and discovered new paintings. The only thing I can get to know him is by reading what he left us, and it's almost a diary of his travels. He drew up a list of works which he felt were by Vermeer and identified quite a lot of them for the first time. We had wondered what you got up to during your time away. A mistress or two, my brother thought. We never thought you'd fallen in love. Love is selfish, Isaac. I could not keep Vermeer to myself. In fact, that was the reason I asked you here. Isaac Pereyre was a wealthy Parisian financier and art collector. Torrey hoped that he could convince Pereyre to purchase one of the Vermeers he'd found. It was 1866, and Torrey was publishing his findings in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. This was for him like the starting point for, like, you have a Rembrandt research project, he had a Vermeer research project, and I think it took him the rest of his life to do this. He wrote an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts which is a kind of groundbreaking essay on Vermeer, his oeuvre, and his life. 1866 is sort of the key date. He was published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which increased everyone's awareness of him as an artist and of his works. He really writes everything, how he went to the Hague, how he saw the painting, how he had never heard of Vandermeer de Delft. Torrey had actually bought several Vermeers for himself during his travels, but he was hoping that Pereyre would purchase the Geographer to help establish Vermeer's name. A Vermeer in your collection would transform the way people think of him. See how the scholar grips the book as if caught in the very moment of inspiration. He doesn't want to let it go. And his understanding of light, Isaac. It is a very fine piece. This doesn't do it justice. The scholar's cloak is blue, but the deepest blue you could imagine. You must have it. You must. I'm sorry. Pereyre would soon be persuaded, though, and Vermeers would quickly become a must-have item for the world's wealthiest collectors. Pereyre was a very well-known collector. You have the publication in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, so all the connoisseurs read that. Of course, all the collectors read this. And if there is a new discovery of a new name, then of course everybody wants to own a Vermeer, and Pereyre was no exception to that. Why don't you buy it yourself? The old master has demanded much of me. He needs new advocates now. Well, he could have no finer ally. And none more persuasive. Show it to me again. It was thanks to Torrey that we really rediscovered Vermeer, and that sort of put him on the map, if you like, and then he became very collectible in the 20th century. But of course at that time it was very hard to come by, so these paintings were really expensive, and we know that at that time even forgeries were made in the early 20th century. Forgeries had started to appear, but real discoveries were still being made. Torrey had identified many of the Vermeers he found by the subtle and varying signatures that the artist used. That signature was then found on two paintings in the early 20th century, Diana and Her Companions, and Christ in the House with Mary and Martha. They were very different from most of his known works, and if they didn't have signatures, it's unlikely they would ever have been attributed to Vermeer. Surprisingly, Vermeer's most famous work, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, was not identified by Torrey before he died in 1869. However, it had not gone unnoticed by those who had seen it. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fascinating story, and as we know it was sold for six guilders or something incredible. Actually, it turns out it was more recognised at that time than you would think because it was, from very early on, really greatly admired by novelists. These were actually novelists who were writing stories, stories about travelling through the Netherlands. Early on it was recognised and then slowly becomes written about among the art historians of the world. The art historians believed that there were still more Vermeers to be found, though, especially from his early career. And Han van Meegren saw an opportunity. His Vermeer fakes, made in the 1930s, were hugely successful, and his career as an art forger would have probably continued if he hadn't sold one of them to Herman Goering. Sir! Goering's man? He's been found. Has he talked yet? I don't know, sir. That's all we have. Han van Meegren, in a desperate attempt to save his own skin, was about to send the art world into a panic when he revealed his deception. He was put on trial where he had to prove himself guilty of forgery rather than face conviction of Nazi collaboration. When World War II came to an end, it was discovered that Hitler had stashed away many priceless artworks for his own private collection. He'd even managed to get hold of two Vermeers, including the Astronomer and the Art of Painting. Herman Goering, it seemed, had also got hold of a Vermeer, and the trail led right back to Han van Meegren. Your German friend, Miedl, he's been arrested, hiding in Spain. He's no friend of mine. Well, he's had plenty to say about you. Van Meegren was accused of selling a painting to Goering and collaborating with the Nazis. Unusually for Goering, he actually paid for it, a relatively decent sum of money from an art dealer who either genuinely believed that it was a Vermeer or must have been crapping his pants. I mean, really, knowing that he was selling a fake to Goering isn't a very safe thing to do. And in order to avoid that charge, he said that he'd sold a fake so this is how the whole thing came out into the open. He says that you came to him, Goering's art dealer, with the sole purpose of doing business with the Nazis. That is a lie. You'll swear to it. Isn't that right? Yes, sir. On oath. It's a lie. No, he isn't. The simple fact, Mr van Meegren, is we don't need to talk to you any more. This will convict you for collaboration, though naturally any cooperation you might offer at this point would be considered when it came to sentencing. Where did you get the Vermeers, Mr van Meegren? Where did you take them from? Who helped you? No-one. No-one helped me. I did it. I painted them. I painted them all. Being accused of forgery was a far lesser crime than collaboration with the Nazis. But van Meegren would have to prove that these newly discovered Vermeers were, in fact, fakes. And so a trial was conducted where, oddly, van Meegren had to prove himself guilty rather than innocent of a crime. It seems astonishing to us now that we were fooled by the van Meegren fakes. But they were accepted by some of the top experts in Dutch art, including Bredius. And once one or two experts had accepted it, the others seemed to. The touch van Meegren used, just not to make something Vermeers very famous for, but to make it look like it could be a Vermeer. People were so eager to have those paintings. It is not easy to admit when you've been made a fool of. You laid a trap for us, Mr van Meegren. It was a clever one too. We wanted to walk into it. For your works seem to give us the answer to a mystery. They filled the chasm between early Vermeers like this one and his mature masterpieces. Our search for truth and beauty blinded us and, in the end, we were all caught out. He did a very clever thing, which was that he made Vermeers that didn't look like Vermeers, and that was really sensible. If you'd done Girl With A Pearl Brooch, you could have held it up next to Girl With A Pearl Brooch. He said, I don't think so. But in those days, scholars believed that Vermeer had studied in Italy, which he hadn't. And so what he did was he painted a Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, in the style of Vermeer. And every, you know, scholars who saw with their brains rather than their eyes thought, oh, well, it's obviously, you know, you can explain this like this. And people were fooled. I would like to begin my analysis, if I may, with the Supper at Emmaus. The pigment used by Mr Van Meegeren, although chemically identical, is quite different when viewed under a microscope. It's always easy to be wise after the event, because when you do a fake, there's something of your own time that goes into it, and later on it looks wrong. Something that everybody wanted. And you can wait. So I'm still waiting for the self-portrait of Vermeer to appear. But you have to imagine at that point in time, so there were a lot of monographs, the documents had been published, so everybody knew that there were more paintings. They were different from the Vermeers that we now know. They were early religious works, it was said. So Van Meegeren had tried to fill a hole in Vermeer's career. This black substance, a dye of some sort, imitating centuries' accumulation of dirt, was used to further the illusion of age. His wishful thinking, it's something you really want a painting to be Vermeer. If you just want it, you know it will be. It's a brilliant con. He really saw what scholars were like. We've long suspected there'd be Italianate pictures, and of course he was a Catholic, so here at last. Very clever forgery, meaning an old canvas was used and acolyte was used, so it really had the coccolade, the coccolade pattern that you see in old master paintings. This X-ray reveals the remnants of the original painting below, a priming layer with patches of lead-white paint, here and here. I do think he was brilliant, Van Meegeren, not a brilliant painter or a brilliant material forger, but he was just a brilliant psychologist. And of course the next Van Meegeren that comes along and doesn't look like Vermeer is not going to be compared with Fugue of Delft, it's going to be compared with the last Van Meegeren. Van Meegeren was forced to paint a Vermeer fake in front of reporters and court-appointed witnesses to show exactly how it was done. I must thank Mr Van Meegeren for his cooperation throughout this process. Indeed, I have never known a defendant so anxious to be found guilty. It's very easy for us to think these people were foolish to think it is a Vermeer, because it's a terrible painting. I think many people know about Van Meegeren, but when you ask them the real story behind it, they don't know. You do admit to painting these works? Yes. And selling them at the exorbitant prices charged? If I'd have sold them cheaply, everyone would have known they were fake. Everyone is interested in fakers, so it does give one a certain notoriety, and there is a great deal of interest in Van Meegeren. Some people like to have his work just because of who he was. So there is a certain admiration for someone who got away with it for so long. What was it that made you continue after painting a mess? You had made your money. Why go on? It was the satisfaction... ..of deceiving good men like Dr Cormans? Of swindling them? The satisfaction of perfecting my technique. I couldn't stop myself. So money had no influence on your decision? Money has brought me nothing but misery. Of course, he's also very damaging to Vermeer's work, and it's important to sort out what is the real Vermeer and what are the fakes. Han van Meegeren died soon after the trial was completed and before he served any time in prison. The forgery scandal he created showed just how hard it's been to reclaim Vermeer's legacy. But in the decades that followed, many of the genuine articles were lost to us once again in daring heists. And one is still missing. Han van Meegeren had forged numerous Vermeers for over a decade. His sensational trial in 1947 had proved an embarrassment for the scholars of Vermeer who had fallen for his deception. And as a result, one painting called A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, which had been accepted as a Vermeer since 1904, was suddenly labelled yet another forgery. It was not until the 21st century that it started to be accepted once again. I think that is a Vermeer. I didn't think so initially. Although not all of what one sees is by Vermeer as far as I'm concerned. There's been lots of technical analysis done on the painting and to the canvas, and I think that strongly indicates, I believe, that it is Vermeer. She has a large yellow cloak that covers the upper part of her body. You can see the tin lid yellow underneath layer and that the modelling of the underneath layer seems to me appropriate for Vermeer, whereas the modelling on the upper layer not. So I think that painting was reworked at a certain point for some reason. Some comments could be made on the quality of, for example, the depiction of her arms, but scientifically, I think it's been proven that it is part of his work, yes. The Young Woman Seated at the Virginals suddenly became the only remaining Vermeer in private hands. All the others had become part of museum or state collections. And over the last few decades, they've been the target of some of the most notorious art thefts in history. In 1971, the Love Letter was taken from the Fine Arts Palace in Brussels where it was on temporary exhibition. It was recovered two weeks later and returned to its home at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Another Vermeer that was stolen in the 1970s was the Guitar Player. Once owned by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, this later work of the artist was taken from Kenwood House. The Guitar Player was stolen in 1974. Kenwood House is an isolated house in Hampstead Heath, so it was a bit vulnerable at that time. The person broke in through the window, through the shutters, into the room and stole the Vermeer specifically, ran off with it, wasn't caught. There was various theories. There's been links made to IRA and demands were made to transfer prisoners from a prison. Also, there was a ransom note saying they were going to burn it on St Patrick's Night. However, it ended with an anonymous tip-off. It was later found abandoned in the churchyard in Smithfields in central London. A helpful phone call. Ring, ring. You don't know me, but there's a Vermeer in your churchyard. When I arrived here about a quarter of an hour ago, I found a lot of press here saying the painting had been found. And, of course, I was absolutely thrilled because it was so terrible it had never been stolen, really. There it was propped up against a gravestone. It was damp but relatively unharmed. It has slightly suffered from the atmospheric conditions while it's been away from us, and this is hardly surprising. A skilled restorer will have to see to the very slight cupping of the paint surface that has occurred. I seem to recall that they stole some other pictures from Kenwood and dumped them down by the lake and made off, so leaving the things in the wet grass wasn't unusual for them. Obviously not a professional thief did it. There's not much point in taking a picture and then just leaving it in a churchyard. I should think, possibly, if anyone wanted to leave anything without being seen anywhere in the city of London at night, it's a rather good place because it's all very deserted and very few people live around here. It's the only Vermeer that is still on its original, or very early, stretcher. So it is unique and it's very special and we have to take, obviously, extra care of it because it's quite fragile. This picture was on its original 17th-century stretcher and there's no mistaking that. There's no mistaking the original wooden dowels round the edge of the canvas too. They, of course, are the pegs that Vermeer put in. Today, artists have used galvanised tacks, so we can be absolutely certain. It's amazing that this is still on its same stretcher from 1672. The same year as the guitar player was stolen, yet another Vermeer was taken, the lady writing a letter with her maid. It's the only Vermeer in Ireland and had to endure a second theft in the 1980s. The lady writing a letter with her maid was stolen in Ireland in the 1970s and the IRA was involved. That was at the height of the troubles. That was also recovered. It was stolen from Ruspera House outside Dublin. There was a wonderful sort of figure of my childhood called Dr Rose Dugdale, who was a sort of debutante turned IRA terrorist who, you know, she stole it first and they found it about a week later. I think it's unfair to say the IRA was responsible. No, at the time, Bridget Rose Dugdale and her boyfriend Eddie Gallagher were not just Irish nationalists, but they were paramilitary sympathisers. Their big idea was to get these things and then hold them to ransom as much as you can establish a motive for the theft of those paintings, both in Kenwood and at Ruspera. The painting was stolen a second time in the 1980s by a criminal from Northern Ireland and it was recovered in Antwerp. The painting is back and now at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Fortunately, all these stolen Vermeers have been returned to their rightful homes. But one is still missing. The concert. This was taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, along with a painting by one of Vermeer's contemporaries, Rembrandt, in one of the most daring art thefts of all time. The concert was taken in 1990, along with Rembrandt and a number of other important works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. On the night of St Patrick's Day, 1990, two Boston Police Department cops turned up at the museum, banged on the door, the guys walked in, produced a gun, tied up the two guards and spent several hours in the museum deciding what to take. Certainly the concert by Vermeer and also Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee are two exceptionally valuable paintings, taken away over a matter of hours and they haven't been seen since. Most important works that are stolen do eventually turn up, but this one is now 20 or more years ago, but the hunt is still on. The problem has been that the FBI have gone down one road and I think there were other roads to go down. For years, the theft has been linked to James Whitey Bulger, a notorious figure in Boston organised crime, who was captured in 2011. The Whitey Bulger story is the story, he was the kingpin. I cannot see how it's possible that Whitey did not have, either at the time or certainly soon afterwards, some connection to those paintings. However, to be fair to the FBI, there's no hard evidence of that. I've been very lucky that I've actually studied every Vermeer in the world under a microscope. I've seen it out of the frame and the concert I spent two days with in that way and I still have all these slides of the painting and all the kind of little magical ways in which he's coloured highlights and it's always a huge loss that I still feel. I hope it will come back, I hope it will come back, because for a museum it's very sad that you don't have the work itself anymore. The hunt for the concert goes on, but it's not the only missing Vermeer that could be out there. Vermeer died in poverty and most of his works were later auctioned off in a 1696 sale of a man called Jacob Disius, who had inherited 21 of Vermeer's paintings. Some of the works listed in the auction catalogue haven't been found yet and include another little street and even a self-portrait of the artist. I'm still looking for the self-portrait that he made because it is documented that he made one and we know there was a second little street, like the painting in the Rijksmuseum, so maybe paintings will turn up, but it's not really the largest production. It would be absolutely incredible, I mean, if we would be able to find one of these paintings that have been mentioned in the Disius sale in 1696 already, but have completely disappeared. One painting that wasn't listed in the Disius sale but has been attributed to Vermeer for a while is the Saint Proxedes. In 2014, Christie's in London auctioned the painting after announcing that technical analysis carried out at the Rijksmuseum strengthened the case that this is a genuine Vermeer. Thank you. We move on to lot 39. Please note that there is additional literature that's been posted throughout the view. Lot 39, the Vermeer. It may even be his earliest known work, as the lead isotope tests on the white paint of the Saint Proxedes indicate that the exact same batch of white paint may have been used on both this painting and Diana and her companions. I actually did see that painting. It was in an exhibition in Rome, I think, two years ago. And it's a very difficult painting to attribute because this Proxedes, a saint, she is depicted by Felice Ficarelli, an Italian painter, and then there is a copy after that painting. And it's very difficult if there is a copy, to see who made this copy. The Saint Proxedes picture is very unusual. There's a signature on it which is thought to be Vermeer's, and it appears to be a copy of an Italian painting. And there is one scholar in America, Arthur Wheelock, who believes that it's an authentic Vermeer. I feel very strongly it is by Vermeer, and I've had the opportunity to study that one very closely and also to see it together with the Ficarelli painting. And they're, to me, they're entirely different and a very different character, one very much a Dutch painting and one very much an Italian painting. And there are a lot of elements of the Saint Proxedes that are consistent with early Vermeer. The complicated thing, obviously, is based on another painting, and so many of the elements of it are, have this Italian quality that people aren't comfortable with in Vermeer's world. We're still hoping there will be more Vermeers, and then there is also the thing, is it a real Vermeer or not? Because that's, every time a Vermeer pops up, you'll get those questions. 3,000,000, 3,200,000. 3,500,000, 3,800,000. 3,800,000, yes, 4,000,000. We have no other copies of paintings by Vermeer, so this will be unique if it is a full-size copy of a painting. 4,200,000, yes, 4,500,000. 4,800,000. 4,800,000 pounds. It's unclear as to why he would have wanted to copy this particular painting, and stylistically it's been questioned as whether it's consistent with Vermeer's work. 5,500,000 pounds. Last chance. Sold, thank you, for 5,500,000. Just like the lady seated at the virginals, scientific tests seem to be bringing another painting back into his canon. It's been quite a battle trying to rescue the legacy of Johannes Vermeer. Arguments will continue over the attribution of some of the paintings, including the unique Saint Proxedes. But even if no new Vermeers do turn up, the few paintings we do have continue to entrance people all across the globe. The mystery of Vermeer goes on. There's always a chance that something might emerge. I think it's a little bit unlikely at this stage because he's been famous for 100 years, but who knows, something might emerge. I mean, you can hope, but he's so well-known now that I'd be surprised if something came up new that wasn't already known. But you never know, in a private collection, it may appear in future years. Today, one of the real absolute stars of what the Dutch Golden Age in painting was, but also a painter with a very tiny little oeuvre. Once you see a Vermeer, you never forget it. You never forget where you saw it. The milkmaid, or you see the View of Delft, or you see the Girl with the Pearl Earring, or you see the Woman with the Balance in the National Gallery, the Woman in Blue, I mean, you name it. It's magical to watch the power of this artist. But the most important thing is they are all such distinctive images.