Every view of Delft, every chequered floor, every girl at the virginals might be by this fascinating Meer. Scholars authenticated, dealers dealt and the market convulsed and boiled. Millionaire collectors who thought they owned peerless Vermeers were giving wall-space to anonymous Dutchmen. In the 1930s, Baron von Thyssen believed he had not one, but two of the precious total. Bernard Duveen sold Andrew Mellon a Laughing Girl.
Reproductions show the ghastly image of a smirking, bug-eyed moron.
If this seems a peculiar insult to Vermeer's genius and grace it arose out of peculiar conditions. The works newly attributed, or misattributed, to Vermeer were prodigiously various and uneven. Nobody had yet established just how few paintings there were, nor the full range of his subjects, imagination or style - whatever it was that distinguished a Vermeer from a minor hack. Thus when the Christ at Emmaus was discovered in 1937, it solved a lingering mystery. Nw comes the strangest incident in Vermeer's posthumous career.