The Sunday Gentleman (47 page)

One of these men, M. M. van Dantzig, a caustic and peppery little art detective who had just published a volume in Dutch on Vermeer, masochistically admits van Meegeren fooled him at the outset. “But now, after careful study, it is quite obvious his Vermeer are fakes,” says van Dantzig.

Incidentally, van Dantzig’s favorite indoor sport consists of haranguing his fellow experts with the statement that 60 percent of the paintings owned by museums and collectors are, like van Meegeren’s Vermeer, fakes. Van Dantzig arrived at this somewhat arbitrary figure through a private alchemy, which none of his friends understands. His colleagues have long ceased to argue with van Dantzig about his percentage, which they regard as preposterous and beyond proof, but they do agree wholeheartedly with him that there is a large number of fakes floating about in high places. As one Dutch critic, reviving the old art witticism, jested, “Of the 2,500 paintings done by Corot in his lifetime, 7,800 are to be found in America.” Other critics, more seriously, cite evidence ranging from the two copies of Gainsborough’s
Boy Blue
, which produced international consternation, to the recent exposure in Paris of a forgery factory turning out Picassos and Utrillos by the dozen. So expert were the latter that Utrillo, called in by the gendarmes, had to look twice and accept the advice of a Sûreté specialist before disowning the oils forged under his name.

“There are many reasons for fakes in collections,” explains van Dantzig. “For one, it was quite proper and fashionable in the seventeenth century for an apprentice to make copies of his master’s work or his style and sign his name and sell the copies as the master’s originals. The so-called art experts are often unable to discriminate between copy and original. A masterpiece is accepted as genuine because others before insisted it was genuine, and so the legend builds. But really, you cannot simply glance at an oil and say it is authentic. Van Meegeren’s forgeries prove this once and for all. You must look through a painting to the personality behind it. In an old master’s original, the color, composition, all elements go together. That is because the originator does it all at once, creatively, in one fresh stroke. The copyist, the forger, does each thing separately, because he isn’t inventing and creating, but rather thinking, analyzing, imitating. But many experts do not see this, and that is why many collectors own masterpieces no more authentic than van Meegeren’s Vermeer.”

Other authorities, off the record, agree that the van Meegeren case places a question mark before acquisitions in many famous collections, especially the younger collections. It shakes the confidence of the broad art public, many of whom may wonder about the authenticity of the accepted Vermeer now hanging in The Hague, Edinburgh, Berlin, Vienna, New York, London. Are they real or not, since some contemporary experts have been proved thoroughly gullible? And what about other works of art? “The number of pictures bought and sold, at one time or another, as Rembrandt’s,” Dr. Maximilian Toch, the Manhattan art detective, has remarked, “is six to ten times as great as the maximum number that Rembrandt can have painted, and there is a much larger discrepancy in the case of other artists, like Anthony Van Dyck, with some two thousand attributed to him but perhaps only seventy executed by his hand.”

And what about the numerous “originals” by Raphael? Millet? Rubens? Ingres? Are they all authentic? And who determined that they were?

To these troublesome questions, now pumped to life in the cafes and art circles of Europe, the supporters of van Meegeren add one more: If van Meegeren’s false Vermeer were passed upon and bought and praised as originals, then is not every creative forger who has worked in the style of another, and who has hoodwinked the experts even for a time, a special kind of genius in his own right?

There is a whole cult in Holland that thinks so, that thinks Hans van Meegeren is a perfect example of this kind of genius. They remind you that their hero did not copy a single “known” masterpiece, but rather created brand-new masterpieces in the manner and style that the old master might have used had he been around longer. They call it “creative” forgery in the Netherlands, and they say it is not crime but Art, and that van Meegeren is perhaps one of the greatest painters in this category in all art history.

Van Meegeren, at present, is less interested in being regarded as a genius than in proving that his mortal enemies, the art critics, are wrong. “I could fool them again, if it were kept secret,” he insists. “If I had time to study Rembrandt carefully, to learn exactly how he mixed his paints, I could fool those idiots with forged Rembrandts—and they would see the signature, the style, the cracked canvas, and exclaim, ‘Ah, a new undiscovered Rembrandt, the most magnificent yet!’”

Hans van Meegeren began sketching seriously in grammar school, at an age when other young men were playing with Erector sets and dropping live turtles down their sisters’ backs. But by the time he went to Delft, the university town near Rotterdam, he was determined to make a sane living as an architect. This resolve did not last long. Delft was the birthplace and home of Jan Vermeer, and the background for many classical Dutch landscapes, and Hans van Meegeren soon fell under its spell. He abandoned blueprints for an easel. While living in Delft, he supported himself by teaching art history and drawing at the Delft Institute of Technology, but he devoted every moment of his spare time to his own painting.

In 1914, one of van Meegeren’s oils won a major prize in a competition sponsored by the Academy of Art in The Hague. That was van Meegeren’s beginning as an artist. By the 1920’s, he had achieved a minor reputation, but had earned little money. It was a period when he was in desperate need of money. In 1912, he had married Anna de Voogt, and she had borne him two children, Inez and Jacques. He had the support of this family to worry about. Then, in 1923, having fallen in love with Jo van Walraven, a half-Dutch, half-Spanish divorcee and actress, van Meegeren divorced Anna to make off with Jo, whom he did not marry until 1929. But by then, his financial situation had begun to improve. Two books of his line drawings and black-and-white studies were published in Holland, and he was receiving commissions to paint members of the nobility in London and several American millionaires on the French Riviera.

About this time, van Meegeren began his bitter feud with Dutch critics and contemporary Dutch painters. They resented his independence, his barbed wit, and his growing financial success. Too, they resented his refusal to play ball in prewar Holland, the press was sometimes quite as venal as it was in nearby France. When Dutch critics approached him with the routine offer of good reviews for his exhibits if he would pay for them, van Meegeren indignantly refused. So the critics wrote bad reviews. They roasted and scalded him. They labeled him a second-rater. The feud continued for five years, and at last, in 1936, when he could bear the criticism no more, van Meegeren determined to get even. He conjured up several plans, and in the end, it was the most difficult and most decisive that gripped his imagination.

The critics and experts were always fawning over and prattling about the Old Masters, he reflected, and everything was great for them when it had the guaranty of the signature and tradition. “The more I thought, the more I knew they would even swallow my own work if they were sure it was unimportant and had the right signature,” van Meegeren told a friend later. “It was a terribly difficult undertaking, and tricky, but I was furious with them and wanted to make them ridiculous. So I decided I would have my joke. I would paint an Old Master and have them accept and praise it.”

Van Meegeren laid the groundwork for his hoax carefully. He weighed against one another the Old Masters that he might imitate. He considered da Vinci and Rembrandt first, then discarded them. Finally, he selected Vermeer. Why Vermeer? “Because I had a great admiration for him,” he says now, “but I could have just as easily taken any other. Also, there were other reasons. His style was easiest for me, and most adaptable. And much of his personal life was cloaked in mystery, which would make the discovery of a new Vermeer more reasonable.”

Although he already knew much about the artist of his choice, van Meegeren spent added months studying Vermeer thoroughly. He went to contemporary accounts for fragments about the master’s personal life. He learned that Vermeer had been married as a youth, had had eight children, and had lived a very respectable life in Delft. He learned Vermeer had been a prosperous artist—one visitor to Vermeer’s studio recounted that he could not find a single oil for sale, all had been sold, and the visitor was forced to buy his Vermeer from the neighborhood baker. In reading further, van Meegeren found evidence that Vermeer had toiled as a student or apprentice under the immortal Rembrandt In fact, Rembrandt had had twenty apprentices at the time, who helped fill in the backgrounds of his more detailed oils.

In his researches, van Meegeren learned also that Vermeer had been forgotten for almost two hundred years after his death simply because he had quarreled with the Dutch historian Houbraken, who thereafter refused even to mention him in his
The Great Theater of Dutch Painters
, which became a bible for critics. “Because he was not mentioned in that book, he was neglected and forgotten,” says van Meegeren, “and probably many of his finest pieces were lost through neglect because his name was not well known. It shows you how critics judge greatness.” In 1865, an exiled Frenchman named Burger-Thore became interested in the obscure Vermeer, chased his paintings about the world, publicized them, and laid the foundation for Vermeer’s current fame.

With this information in his head, van Meegeren began to study Vermeer’s actual paintings. Some catalogues named thirty-six authentic Vermeer, others named thirty-seven and forty. Van Meegeren confined his study to a handful of paintings of undeniable authenticity (whose provenance was established by contemporary accounts) that hung in Amsterdam and The Hague. He observed Vermeer’s sense of color, his brush stroke, his square touch. He noticed his weaknesses” in drawing heads, and his genius at ‘portraying still life. He absorbed Vermeer’s trademarks—infallible as fingerprints—the repetition in many paintings of the lion-headed chair, the rumpled rugs, the stained-glass windows in the backgrounds.

Van Meegeren’s last step in his preparation was a technical one. The painting must be physically foolproof, something right out of 1670. The experts, of course, would test the effect of alcohol on the colors, would inject hypodermic needles to find the chemical content of the paint, would employ X-rays and infrared rays to photograph the canvas, would employ quartz lamps to penetrate the overlays. All this, van Meegeren anticipated.

He dug out contemporary seventeenth-century manuscripts and learned that Vermeer and Velasquez utilized for colors gamboge, a gum resin used as yellow pigment, lapis lazuli, a blue obtained from the powdered stones, and white zinc instead of white lead. To obtain real lapis lazuli, van Meegeren paid as high as $2,000 a tube. “The one stumbling block,” van Meegeren recalls, “was the oil to be used in paint mixtures. Modems use linseed oil for mixing. That’s no good. Use it and your paint will never get hard and old. Luckily, I discovered in an old manuscript exactly the oil Vermeer used. I used it, too, and it hardened my paint and made it foolproof against all alcohol tests.”

No detail was too small to van Meegeren. He overheated his paints because Vermeer had done so. He learned that the masters used badger hair in their brushes, instead of hog’s bristles which are used today. Van Meegeren knew that when the experts found some of the seventeenth-century-type hairs in the oil of his painting they would be positive of its authenticity.

When he was ready, van Meegeren took his knowledge, his materials, his wife, and moved into a barnlike villa in Nice. He devised, for his Vermeer, an inspiring portrait of Christ breaking bread with his disciples at Emmaus—
De Emmausganger
. He toiled, meticulously, untiringly, hour after hour, day after day, for seven consecutive months on this painting. Not even his wife knew what he was up to. When it was done, he went over it again, point by point. Everything was there—even to the old cracks in the surface. He had learned that in the years before Vermeer, the paint broke in large cracks, but the paint in Vermeer’s oils (like the paint in the oils of Vermeer’s contemporaries) broke in smaller, chainlike cracks, so van Meegeren’s own imitation cracks, created by scratching them out in pattern and then baking them apart in a kitchen stove, were exactly in the manner of the master. There was only one last touch. Vermeer’s signature. Van Meegeren daubed it on, and the deed was done.

Now, from his knowledge of Vermeer’s life, he invented the story of the “discovery.” He knew that Vermeer had worked side by side with Italian student-painters. The Italians had painted Christ at Emmaus. They had taken their products to Italy. Most likely, then, Vermeer had done Christ at Emmaus, and most likely, in the unrecorded years of his life, he had traveled in Italy. Very well. This new Vermeer would be found in Italy. Van Meegeren would learn of it through a friend, purchase it cheaply, and then resell it.

Thus fortified, he went with his handiwork to Amsterdam. Before putting it up for sale, he knew he must obtain a certificate of authenticity. Van Meegeren approached one of Holland’s great art historians and experts, ninety-year-old Dr. Abraham Bredius, a doddering ancient who dwelt in obscurity and who was a year away from death. Van Meegeren showed Dr. Bredius his discovery. The old expert, flattered that someone was consulting him again, blinked at it through dim eyes, submitted it to spectroscopic, X-ray, and alcohol tests, and then gave his enthusiastic seal of authenticity and approval.

Still excited by the “masterpiece” that he had authenticated, Dr. Bredius published an article about it in
Burlington Magazine
, an English art review. Full of unrestrained praise for the newly discovered Vermeer, Dr. Bredius wrote: “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio!…We have here a—I am inclined to say the—masterpiece of Jan Vermeer of Delft.”