You may be familiar with the painting, "The Girl with the Pearl Earring", by Johannes Vermeer.
But have you heard of an illustrious Vermeer forgery once owned by John Ringling?
WUSF's Cathy Carter spoke with Linda McKee, a former head librarian at the Ringling Museum of Art and Deborah Walk, a retired curator at the Sarasota museum, about the mystery.
Linda, you and Deborah detail the story in a new book. It's called "Ringling, Bohler Thyssen, and the Greta Garbo Vermeer". It was inspired after you received documents from a German family named Boehler, and among the paperwork were receipts referring to a Vermeer painting?
And it was not actually a Vermeer. It was a fake painting. So, this led us to trying to find where this painting was and why John Ringling owned it. The collection, as you know, the Ringling Museum, is Baroque art, but he also collected many other areas of art from antiquities to his contemporaries. But he did not collect many Dutch paintings, and he did not have a Vermeer. So, we think perhaps he bought this Vermeer in hopes that it was a Vermeer.
Vermeer had disappeared for 200 years. Nobody even heard about him. And slowly, at the end of the 19th century, people discovered Vermeer again, and out of the woodwork, copies and copies were made. Everybody was taking chances at the time to see if what they bought turned out to be a Vermeer.
And Deborah, why would it have been important for John Ringling to acquire a painting by Vermeer?
It showed that you were truly a collector of a very, very high caliber because you needed money to be able to do that, to add all the names of whether it's the Dutch schools or the Italian, to have them all. And that's what John Ringling was really gearing towards, an encyclopedic collection because you know, great cities have great museums. Florida didn't have much to talk about, and with a Vermeer, this would have put the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in a category untouched by others.
So you received these documents that were from the 1920s and 30s involving John Ringling and an art dealer named Julius Bohler. Deborah, tell us more about him.
The Bohlers were a very, very famous family that purchased items for all sorts of European museums. He was German. John Ringling was German, and I think there was an affinity there and a trust, because in the 20s, there was great distrust of dealers in art because there was a lot of money, especially a lot of money coming from America.
You learned it's not a Vermeer, and that John Ringling eventually sold the painting. But you're still curious about the painting, which, by the way, is called "Girl with the Blue Hat" and nicknamed the Greta Garbo Vermeer because of its resemblance to the film actress. It's now in the basement of a castle in Germany owned by a different family. But Linda, did you ever find out who painted it?
I don't know if we will ever find out who painted the painting. But to us, that's an interesting point, but not really the main point of the story. Our story always goes back to John Ringling. So, we are hoping that this book sparks interest in this subject for future generations and for future researchers and art historians.
So, Linda, this is like a case study in following the provenance of a painting.
Right. The study of provenance is becoming more and more important every day, especially with the problem with Nazi provenance and restitution to families. I traced the provenance of this painting from 1930 to the present. However, we could not find any provenance before 1930. So that was a definite clue that this painting just came out of nowhere, even though they made up a provenance, and they said it was from a German collection in the 1800s. When I was at the Ringling, one of the main things I did was, I studied the provenance of every painting that John Ringling purchased. That is one of my big interests, to trace the history of a painting. There are so many more that need to be done, and maybe that will be a future project for us if this sells. It's not going to sell as much as "The Girl with the Pearl Earring", though we hope it does.
