One of Vermeer’s most famous paintings—The Guitar Player (1672)—goes on show today alongside its “twin” in a new display at Kenwood House in north London. Double Vision: Vermeer (1 September-11 January 2026) includes the original image of the guitar-playing woman, which is housed at Kenwood, while its doppelgänger, Lady with a Guitar, is on loan from the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“The Guitar Player by Vermeer is an exquisite work of art, perfectly capturing a single moment in time. It is one of only 37 known paintings by Vermeer, an artist who specialised in depicting everyday life in domestic interiors,” says a statement from English Heritage which runs Kenwood House.
The new presentation reignites debate about the authenticity of the Philadelphia painting. “Since the 1920s scholars have puzzled over the relationship between these two paintings, but this display does not draw conclusions, instead inviting visitors to witness the prowess of one of the greatest artists of the 17th-century and respond to this question for themselves,” adds English Heritage.
Philadelphia’s Lady with a Guitar was assumed to be the original, until the Kenwood version emerged in 1927. As Kenwood’s The Guitar Player was in considerably better condition and appeared authentic, it was quickly accepted as the prime version.
In 2023, Arie Wallert, a former scientific specialist at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, told a symposium in Amsterdam that there are two versions of the work by Vermeer: the long-accepted painting at Kenwood House and the similar composition that has been in the Philadelphia museum’s stores for nearly a century.
The compositions are virtually the same, except for one key difference: the girl’s hairstyle. Kenwood’s sitter has her hair in ringlets, while Philadelphia’s does not. The Kenwood painting is also signed by Vermeer, while the Philadelphia version is not.
The earliest firm provenance for the Philadelphia picture appears to be the Cremer collection in Brussels in the 19th century. It was later acquired by the Pennsylvania lawyer John Johnson, who died in 1917. The Kenwood painting was part of the Iveagh collection bequeathed by Lord Iveagh in 1927.
Over the past two years, conservators, curators and art historians from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, have reassessed the Philadelphia painting. New research has also been undertaken on the Kenwood painting by English Heritage and the National Gallery in London.
The research is ongoing with findings due to be revealed in a forthcoming article. However, according to English Heritage, key discoveries so far include differences in the ground layers (the first layer of paint applied to the canvas).
The Kenwood painting was prepared with a single pale grey-brown ground, while the colour of the Philadelphia ground is dark brown. In addition, ultramarine paint used extensively in the Kenwood painting is not found in Philadelphia’s. Instead, the artist used indigo, a cheaper blue pigment.
Gregor Weber, the former head of the department of fine arts at the Rijksmuseum and a Vermeer specialist, tells The Art Newspaper: “I am very curious to know more about these findings. Without knowing [this] information, the Philadelphia painting seems to be an early copy of the Kenwood original…
“The hairstyle has been modernised in a style starting around 1680 as can be seen in several portraits of fashionable woman by Jan Verkolje in Delft, Nicolaes Maes in Amsterdam and others. This is the reason why I think it must be an early copy.”
Jennifer Thompson, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of European painting and sculpture and curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, says in a statement: “Double Vision provides a thrilling opportunity to place the two pictures side by side and to consider what science and connoisseurship offer to our understanding of Vermeer and 17th-century painting materials and techniques.”
