“How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it is worth?” So ends Theft: A Love Story by the Australian novelist Peter Carey. This scabrous riff on the slipperiness of cultural value in the international art scene asks: is a copy so good that even experts mistake it for the original painting still a fake?
Questions of authenticity and attribution are behind a new display by English Heritage at Kenwood House in London to mark the 350th anniversary of the death of Johannes Vermeer. For the first time in 300 years, two nearly identical paintings of the Guitar Player, one signed by the Dutch master, the other on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and until recently believed to be a 17th- or 18th-century copy, will hang side by side. Experts have puzzled over the relationship between the two paintings for 100 years. Now visitors are being invited take part in a game of spot the difference (there are five, apparently), comparing a recognised masterpiece and its “twin”.
