Fake 28

A fake brought to my attention by this week's number of the NYRB.

According to flickr: 'The Music Lesson, a photograph of Madame Tussauds’ [in Amsterdam, not the London one] recreation of Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson). Hiroshi Sugimoto, born and raised in Tokyo, is a Japanese photographer. This photograph is part of his series called "Portraits", begun as a commission by the Deutsche Guggenheim in 1999. In this series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures. The figures are based on portraits from the 16th century and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. Sugimoto placed his tripod so that the mirror tilting from the wall in the diorama caught its reflection, as its counterpart in the painting catches Vermeer's easel'.

I had no idea that people went to this amount of trouble to make copies of pictures. I even came across a suggestion that people like Vermeer used wax models too, although searching the National Gallery (in Washington, not the London one) freebie at reference 2 fails to find any wax at all. In any event, Philips sold this particular copy - the fifth of five numbered prints - for $629,000, appropriately on all fools' day, 2014. Their blurb was rather more fulsome than that reproduced above, but for that sort of money, that is what one expects.

PS: my own eye being so good that I did not spot that this fake was not quite the same as the original, a copy of which has hung in our front room for over thirty years, until I held Cortana up against it. With part of the 'not quite' being the omission of a number of important features. Readers are invited to play spot the difference.

PPS: the next morning: I remembered this morning about the book by Houellebecq about a photographer who made a good deal of money by taking arty photographs from funny angles of Michelin maps of parts of France. See references 3, 4 (particularly January 7th, 2011) and 5 with the latter part of this last getting exercised about Houellebecq cutting and pasting from Wikipedia without acknowledgment of source. But maybe he knew all about Sugimoto.

Reference 1: https://www.phillips.com/detail/HIROSHI-SUGIMOTO/NY040114/63.

Reference 2: https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/johannes-vermeer.pdf.

Reference 3: La Carte et le Territoire - Michel Houellebecq - 2010.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=territoire.

Reference 5: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Carte_et_le_Territoire.