Vermeer’s Daughter
F
ifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then conventionally ascribed to Vermeer. To hear Binstock tell it, Maria’s paintings include one of the most popular: Girl With a Red Hat, at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. He believes that painting and another at the National Gallery are self-portraits by Maria, and that she is also the artist behind two out of the three Vermeers at the Frick, in New York; two out of the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in New York; and one in the private Leiden Collection.
I happened upon Binstock’s book, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, not long after it was published, in 2008; at the time, I was picking up pretty much anything about Vermeer (and writing about Vermeer myself). I found the author’s argument by turns absorbing, perplexing, and confounding, but also curiously plausible and certainly worth entertaining. I was struck by how Binstock’s account helped explain the smattering of “misfit paintings”—those strangely uncharacteristic efforts, especially toward the end of Vermeer’s career, whose attributions were regularly being contested (or defended) by experts. So I was eager to see how the wider community of scholars and curators was going to respond.
The establishment did not respond at all. There was not a single academic review—not then and not ever. I started broaching the subject with some of the experts I’d encountered during my own forays into Vermeer and was urged to give the book the widest possible berth. Its arguments were ridiculed (privately) as preposterous, and Binstock himself was dismissed (privately) with disdain. No one seemed willing to engage with Binstock’s actual contentions.
Which was strange, because I could imagine the arguments the Vermeer establishment might have made. If Vermeer didn’t paint all of the works attributed to him, then why is there no record of Vermeer ever having had any kind of assistant, despite the strict rule of the local painters’ guild (of which Vermeer was for a time the head) that assistants be registered? How could a girl as young as Maria—a teenager, if Binstock’s chronology is correct—have possibly created a painting as extraordinary as Girl With a Red Hat? Also: Why would Maria have suddenly stopped painting—and isn’t it too much of a coincidence that she stopped painting when her father died? And is Binstock’s chronology even correct? The dates he assigns to paintings are crucial to his narrative, but some differ significantly from the dates proposed by others, providing ample scope for debate. Critics could have raised these and other questions—but again, no one did.
I decided to seek Binstock out, and across a series of visits more than a decade ago began to see what may have been some of the reason for the lack of engagement. Then living in northern Manhattan, Binstock was no longer academically affiliated—he’d somehow managed to burn through not one but two highly competitive tenure-track positions—and seemed a bit lost. He had a Gibraltar-size chip on his shoulder, and he could be prickly and cantankerous. And yet he was so guileless—his modus operandi, he once joked, was to shoot himself in both feet and then shout “Nobody move!”—that his manner could be almost endearing.
At the time, I happened to be directing something called the New York Institute for the Humanities, at NYU, and I decided to give Binstock’s theory a whirl in a public symposium. In.) Others who spoke that day included artists (Chuck Close, April Gornik, Vincent Desiderio) as well as generalist art historians and other scholars (Martha Hollander, James Elkins, Anthony Grafton). The idea was to subject Binstock’s arguments to a stress test, and I myself—eager to hear the strongest arguments against Binstock, as I still am—occasionally took the position of devil’s advocate. Those who spoke at the symposium had a wide range of responses but were unanimous in feeling that Binstock deserved a hearing. Not a single Vermeer specialist could be persuaded to participate.
