![]() ![]() He had a Gibraltar-size chip on his shoulder, and he could be prickly and cantankerous. 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. ![]() 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. Critics could have raised these and other questions-but again, no one did. 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. Which was strange, because I could imagine the arguments the Vermeer establishment might have made. ![]() No one seemed willing to engage with Binstock’s actual contentions. Its arguments were ridiculed (privately) as preposterous, and Binstock himself was dismissed (privately) with disdain. 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. There was not a single academic review-not then and not ever. The establishment did not respond at all. So I was eager to see how the wider community of scholars and curators was going to respond. 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. I found the author’s argument by turns absorbing, perplexing, and confounding, but also curiously plausible and certainly worth entertaining. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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