Market dispatch·Global
$35 in 1881, $600M Today: How One French Critic Rescued Vermeer From 200 Years of Obscurity
Artnet's new 'Art Bites' history feature recounts how the French critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger single-handedly revived Johannes Vermeer's reputation in the 1860s, after two centuries of neglect that saw the Dutch master's works forged under a more fashionable signature.
Three and a half centuries after his death, Johannes Vermeer is shorthand for the Dutch Golden Age. Yet for the two hundred years following his death in 1675, aged just 43 and deep in debt, the painter was almost entirely forgotten outside his hometown of Delft.
Only 34 paintings are firmly accepted as Vermeer's, the result of a slow and fastidious working method. He ran no large studio, trained no pupils to carry his style forward, and rarely travelled, so no reputation took root in the great art capitals. After his death his widow was forced to sell off most of his works to satisfy creditors, scattering them across the country. By the mid-19th century his name carried so little weight that some of his paintings were forged with the signature of Pieter de Hooch, then the more bankable Dutch interior painter.
The turnaround began with one man. The French critic and collector Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, writing under the pen name W. Bürger while exiled across Europe for his republican politics, first encountered Vermeer's View of Delft in 1842 and was captivated. He called the elusive artist his 'sphinx' and spent years tracking down canvases he believed to be authentic as he travelled.
In 1866 Thoré-Bürger lent six Vermeer paintings to an Old Master exhibition at the Palais des Champs-Élysées in Paris, alongside two essays and a catalogue of the artist's works. That combination of scholarship and display pulled Vermeer back into art history for good. The market lagged behind: when Girl with a Pearl Earring appeared at auction in 1881 it fetched just two guilders and thirty cents, the equivalent of about $35. Today's valuations put the same painting near $600 million.
The essay also notes that three of Thoré-Bürger's own Vermeer purchases now hang in public collections — two at London's National Gallery and one at Berlin's Gemäldegalerie — while Vermeer's auction record stands at $30.1 million, set at Sotheby's London in 2004 for A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, the first Vermeer to come to auction in more than eighty years.
