The Sunday Gentleman (48 page)

Succeeding steps were routine. In late 1937, the members of the Rembrandt Association, after hiring four more experts to test the Vermeer with chemicals and rays and having found it authentic, paid van Meegeren half a million gulden—$200,000—for his treasure, and then presented it to the august Boyman’s Museum in Rotterdam. Its first public exhibition took place in September, 1938, when it starred in a showing of 450 Netherlands masterpieces gathered to celebrate Queen Wilhelmina’s Jubilee. Critics from The Hague, from London, from Paris swarmed to view it. So great was their reverence that they demanded the museum floor be carpeted about the Vermeer to prevent noise while they contemplated. The museum obliged. Several critics wrote ecstatically that it was far and away Jan Vermeer’s greatest effort.

Van Meegeren was delighted. He had proved his mortal enemies idiots and made himself rich. The following year, he decided to make a second Vermeer. This too he sold, for an even higher price. The next year, he made a third. In all, he produced six. The public prosecutor of Amsterdam feels this was his biggest crime. “Had he painted his first one, and made fools of the critics, well, all Holland would have laughed and he would have been a great hero. But no, he couldn’t stop. He wanted to get rich quick. He timed his little joke into a big business. That is his crime.”

Van Meegeren disposed of all his forgeries except the sixth. Not needing the money it represented, and since he rather fancied it, the painting was kept on the wall of his house beside an authentic Frans Hals he had recently bought. Then came his downfall. An agent, the go-between Reinstra, appeared and persuaded him to permit its sale. Van Meegeren explains that he did so only reluctantly, and with the provision that it not be sold to the Nazis, who were then occupying the country. Three weeks later, after competitive bidding by a Dutch syndicate, the picture went to Hermann Goering in exchange for 150 of his paintings, valued at 1,600,000 gulden or $600,000 (at the 1943 rate). Out of this sum, $250,000 was passed down to van Meegeren, and the rest was retained by the agent in commissions. So delighted was Goering with the deal that he wrote thanking van Meegeren and addressing him as “my painter laureate.” Van Meegeren remembers the incident sadly. “I was indignant when I learned it had been sold to Goering. But I took his money, and that was the beginning of the end.”

Today, a year and a half after his confession of forgery, Hans van Meegeren is a tired and broken man. The only thing that keeps him going is his burning desire to prove, beyond all doubt, that he faked the Vermeer and tricked the high priests of art. Constantly, he brings forth new evidence to prove his guilt. He points to the Vermeer heads. Vermeer painted life-sized heads. In his own pictures, van Meegeren purposely drew all human heads six centimeters larger than Vermeer’s, because he had a pet theory that they looked more lifelike when enlarged. This, he says, is only one of many proofs of his forgeries. But his enemies glibly reply that this un-Vermeer-like touch is not proof of forgery but merely proof that this newly discovered series of Vermeer is unique and different.

Undaunted, van Meegeren presents other proofs. The chairs on which Christ sits, in the first and sixth pictures, are drawn after the fairly modern chair in his own studio. And Christ’s hands are not modeled after Vermeer’s type of hands but after van Meegeren’s own hands. And his paints: He displays receipts from dealers in London, where he purchased the more expensive tubes. Recently, van Meegeren recalled that he had left a remnant of the rare seventeenth-century canvas he had used lying on the floor of his French villa. He felt that this would be irrefutable proof of his forgery. He demanded that the strip of canvas be brought to Holland. The Dutch government dispatched two police officials to van Meegeren’s villa in France. The police ransacked the villa. There was no seventeenth-century canvas. Van Meegeren was crushed, and now insists that his enemies got there first and destroyed it. While van Meegeren has many friends, he has few who dare to come out in the open and defend him. One who does defend him, while thinking very little of his artistic talent, is van Dantzig, the Amsterdam art detective. Van Dantzig insists there is no question that van Meegeren is a forger. “There are dozens of pieces of evidence that van Meegeren perpetrated a hoax,” he says. “Take one single thing. The brush stroke. That is one of the most individual, subconscious acts of a creative artist. Some strokes are long, some short, some thick, some thin, some curved at the beginning and at the end, and made with a quick motion. Jan Vermeer used small strokes, putting down flecks of color and dots of reflected light in sharp decisive movements. He was creating and knew where each one went. Van Meegeren’s strokes are slower, more careful, his flecks and dots much more studied, as if done by one who had to think where and how to put them down. Or take the human hand. Vermeer’s hands are broken, knuckled like living hands. Van Meegeren’s hands are blobs and his fingers lifeless sausages. Or take the human hair. You can feel Vermeer’s hair. It grows. Van Meegeren’s hair is a mop, stuck on, manufactured. And so on. There’s no end of evidence.”

Nevertheless, even though short on ammunition, van Meegeren’s enemies continue to do battle. They constantly try to embarrass him with questions. They ask him to produce his living models for the Vermeer. He retorts that he had no models, needed none, that an artist who has done three thousand figures in his lifetime can dispense with models. His enemies then divert their attack to his alleged collaboration with the Nazis. Not long ago, a Dutch journalist in Berlin found a book of van Meegeren’s reproduced black-and-white drawings bearing the inscription, “To my beloved Fuehrer, with best wishes, Hans van Meegeren.” His enemies broadcast this news throughout the Netherlands and the Continent. Van Meegeren countered at once. He recalled that during the occupation a German officer, an aspiring artist, had asked for his autograph in a book of his drawings. He obliged with his signature only. He insisted the German officer must have written in the inscription to Hitler over his signature, and sent it on to Der Fuehrer. Van Meegeren demanded that the signature and inscription be studied by Dutch handwriting experts. This was promptly done. The handwriting experts reported that van Meegeren was right, the signature was his own but the inscription to Hitler was by another hand. Van Meegeren asked for the volume itself. He wanted it for evidence in his trial. When the police tried to produce it, it was gone—no one knows where.

So the intrigue and word-baiting continue in Amsterdam. What will be the legal result? Opinions vary widely. A minority feels the case will be dropped in the next year or two, and that van Meegeren will be given his freedom. The majority feels the international jury will be forced to admit that the Vermeer are clever fakes. If so, van Meegeren will most likely be jailed for a period of two to six years or fined two million dollars. This, incidentally, would be a somewhat stiffer sentence than he would have got as a Nazi collaborator.

But Hans van Meegeren wants the stiffer sentence. It will vindicate his honor and blast the complacency of art critics. He also wants to buy his six paintings back. He has had an offer of eight million dollars, a sum widely publicized in Europe, for the lot from a well-known American millionaire. Van Meegeren will not reveal the name of the American.

But van Meegeren does not think that he will ever live to see his victory and collect this new fortune from the United States. “If I should die tomorrow,” he says quietly, “the dealers, museums, critics would be much relieved. The thorn would be out of their side. The case could be dropped, the Vermeer I forged declared authentic, and the experts would never be bothered again. As long as I live, they are on the spot. There is much at stake in my life. Millions of dollars in cash, and years of art-dealer prestige. They know all of this, and they are desperate. That is why I am very careful on the streets these days. When I see a car driving toward me very fast, I duck into a doorway. It would be a shame if an accident happened to me at this stage, wouldn’t it?”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

When I arrived in the Netherlands in September, 1946, intent on obtaining material about the Hans van Meegeren saga, I was told by members of his intimate circle that I was the first writer to make an effort to present his story in depth through a large-circulation periodical. Before my investigation into the Vermeer forgeries, there had been numerous brief newspaper accounts of the raging art controversy, but these had not attempted to assess van Meegeren’s personality, or consider his full role in the series of hoaxes, nor had they shown the fantastic dilemma his case presented to the authorities.

I was unable to spend time with van Meegeren himself. He was ill. He was also under strict police surveillance and control. Consequently, a considerable amount of my material was acquired through my friendship with M. Petzoldt, a clever Dutch journalist in Amsterdam who was well acquainted with and trusted by van Meegeren. Not only did Petzoldt answer any questions I had to ask, but he acted as a go-between, taking my more personal inquiries to the ailing painter and bringing back van Meegeren’s frank replies. Also, the Amsterdam art expert, M. M. van Dantzig, gave generously of his time and cooperation. And there were at least a dozen other sources in Amsterdam that I eventually tapped for information on van Meegeren.

When I had what I wanted, I moved on to Paris. There I wrote my story, which I called, “How to Be an Old Master.” Before leaving for Madrid, I sent the completed draft to my New York literary agent, Paul R. Reynolds, who immediately placed it with
The Saturday Evening Post
. They published it under a more provocative title, “The Man Who Swindled Goering,” in their issue of January 11, 1947. Even before the story appeared, the Reader’s Digest had purchased it for a lead reprint, and ran it in their issue of March, 1947.

Few short pieces that I have written have received as much attention as did the van Meegeren story, from those interested in acquiring dramatic rights. I was overwhelmed by inquiries about motion picture, play, and radio rights. Of some interest was a serious inquiry from Edward Gross, who had successfully produced Chicken Every Sunday on Broadway, and who wanted me to convert my van Meegeren article into a stage drama. I agreed to try to do this. I still have a clipping from the February, 1948, theatrical page of a New York daily, which begins: “Edward Gross will cast Irving Wallace’s play, ‘
Masterpiece
,’ on the Coast Gross plans to open it in Los Angeles this spring and then tour east to Broadway,” The announcement was accurate but premature. I had, indeed, entitled van Meegeren’s story
Masterpiece
for the stage version, and I had written an outline and almost one full act, when I was forced to abandon the project. I no longer remember exactly why this was, although I suspect that a major reason was that I had run out of eating money just when I had become a father for the first time, and was forced to revive my bank account by becoming a salaried screenwriter.

But if movie and play interest in van Meegeren came to nothing, there was a third source of interest in the dramatic rights, and this one did develop successfully. On January 1, 1948, Paul Muni starred as Hans van Meegeren in a national network radio adaptation of “The Man Who Swindled Goering.” And in 1953, my story was acquired by a television company, and somewhat later, was shown coast-to-coast as
The Hoax
, featuring Herbert Marshall and Paul Henried.

Unfortunately, Hans van Meegeren did not live to know how widely his fame—or notoriety—was publicized, not only through the radio and television versions of my story on him, but through the great amount of literature concurrently growing up around his legend. To my limited knowledge, there have been at least one dozen, perhaps two dozen, books published since his death which are devoted entirely or in great part to his life and his acts of creative forgery. Merely glancing at my nearest bookshelf, I can see such volumes as
The Master Forger
by John Godley,
Vermeer—van Meegeren: Back to the Truth
by Jean Decoen, Van Meegeren’s
Faked Vermeer and De Hooghs
by Dr. P. B. Coremans,
The Art of the Faker
by Frank Arnau,
The Mystery of van Meegeren
by Maurice Moiseiwitsch.

When I left van Meegeren in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1946, he was still awaiting the decision on the seventh Vermeer, the one which he had deliberately forged for a jury of international art judges. Based on this
Child Christ in the Temple of the Elders
, the art judges would determine if van Meegeren should be tried by the state as a man who had perpetrated fraud by faking six Vermeer and swindling Goering with one, or if he should be tried as a political collaborator who had faked none of them but simply sold real Vermeer, and one of them to a wartime enemy.

After I departed from Amsterdam, Hans van Meegeren lived on for another fifteen months. It was in the early autumn of 1947 that the international art judges came to their decision. They voted that Hans van Meegeren had, indeed, fooled all of them, and their learned colleagues. The seventh Vermeer, done by van Meegeren on assignment, had convinced them that the other six Vermeer were fakes. The key evidence, aesthetic considerations aside, was that presented by one of the judges. Dr. P. B. Coremans, director of the Central Laboratory of the Belgian Museums, who stated that laboratory investigation proved van Meegeren’s seventeenth-century Vermeer contained in their paint a synthetic resin, which had not even been discovered until 1900. Despite the fact that a Swiss chemistry professor dissented—“the micro-chemical analyses on which Coremans has based his findings yield no evidence that any synthetic resinous products are present in the layers of paint”—the other art judges reluctantly agreed with Coremans that although the signatures on the six Vermeer bore the master’s signature, “I.V.M.” (for I. V. Meer), the paintings had been executed by the impostor Hans van Meegeren.

And so, on October 29, 1947, Hans van Meegeren went on trial before the District Court of Amsterdam. To his delight, he went on trial as a George Psalmanazar, as a Thomas Wainewright, as a William Ireland, admirable fakers and impostors all, and not as a commonplace collaborator. The evidence of forgery was heard in a single day. Van Meegeren did not contest it. The state prosecutor demanded that van Meegeren receive two years’ imprisonment for his fraud. The court adjourned for two weeks to consider the sentence it should deliver. On November 12, 1947, the court reconvened. Hans van Meegeren, frail and ailing, awaited the sentence. Because of his ill health (and, perhaps, because of the sympathy of the Dutch public, so appreciative of one who had so daringly tweaked the noses of critics and authorities), the prosecution’s demand for two years’ imprisonment was not heeded. Hans van Meegeren was sentenced to only one year in jail.