Did Vermeer Make a Copy of His Own Painting? A New Exhibition Invites You to Be the Judge
Two nearly identical artworks, at least one of them by the renowned Dutch master, hang side-by-side for the first time in three centuries
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For decades, art historians have debated whether a painting of a woman strumming a guitar was the work of Johannes Vermeer, the renowned 17th-century Dutch master. At a new exhibition in London, you get to be the judge.
Two almost identical paintings, at least one of them by Vermeer, hang side-by-side for the first time in 300 years in “Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood,” which runs through January 2026.
In both paintings, a woman in pearls and a fur-trimmed yellow outfit plays a small guitar, her gaze affixed sideways to something out of the frame. Behind her hangs a gold-framed painting of trees, and a few books are piled on a table near the window. The paintings, like many Vermeers, bring the viewer intimately close to the scene at hand.
But there are key differences between the two works. The most notable change is the woman’s hair. In one painting, it’s braided atop her head. In the other, it hangs in ringlets near her shoulders. The former painting’s colors are more muted than the latter’s, which is in much better condition. Crucially, the latter painting is signed by Vermeer himself, while the former has no signature at all.
Quick fact: Johannes Vermeer’s lasting legacy
The 17th-century artist’s most famous works include Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid.
For many years, both paintings were thought to be Vermeers. That changed in the 1920s, as the Guardian’s Esther Addley reports. Experts agreed that the signed painting, which hangs at Kenwood, a stately home in London, was a Vermeer. But they came to the conclusion that the unsigned version, which belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a 17th- or 18th-century copy by an unknown artist.
The mystery was further complicated in 2023, when a Dutch art researcher published an article arguing that the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Guitar Player may be a Vermeer after all. The researcher, Arie Wallert, notes that artists reproducing their own pictures was an established practice in the 17th century.
Inspired by Wallert’s work, both the Philadelphia museum and English Heritage, which manages the Kenwood collection, have been testing their respective paintings in hopes of uncovering whose hand is behind the Philadelphia artwork. The results of those analyses are expected within a few months, per the Guardian.
In the meantime, the debate continues at Kenwood, where the two paintings hang next to each other, creating “a rather beautiful confusion,” as Wendy Monkhouse, English Heritage’s senior curator at Kenwood, tells the Guardian.
“[The debate] is balanced on a hair’s breadth,” Monkhouse tells the London Times’ David Sanderson. “There are a whole series of arguments based on the science, and you can see where they have used the same pigments in the same place and the same strokes.”
One complicating factor is that the quality of the Philadelphia painting has deteriorated over the years, while the Kenwood piece remains in remarkable condition for an artwork from more than 300 years ago.
In the past, skeptical experts have cited the difference in hairstyles between the two paintings as evidence that the Philadelphia painting couldn’t have been done by Vermeer, the Times reports. Ringlets, some argued, fell out of fashion only after Vermeer’s death in 1675. However, Monkhouse doesn’t think a difference in hair alone can provide a satisfactory answer.
“I don’t think anybody has Cosmopolitan from 1680 that shows exactly how the hair styles are massively changing,” she tells the Times.
If the Philadelphia painting, with no ringlets in sight, does turn out to be a Vermeer, it would be groundbreaking for scholars of the Dutch master. Vermeer, who only achieved limited success in his lifetime as a painter and primarily worked as an art dealer, has a famously small corpus of just 37 known paintings. His modest oeuvre shrank by one in 2022, when the National Gallery of Art concluded that Girl With a Flute was not an original Vermeer.
For Vermeer enthusiasts who can’t make it to Kenwood, English Heritage has published some of the findings from analyses of the twin paintings on its website.
“Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood” is on view at Kenwood in London through January 11, 2026.