by Frank Wynne
3
THE VIEW OF DELFT
So departed this Phoenix to our sorrow in the
midst and at the height of his powers, but
happily arose from out his fire, Vermeer
who in masterly fashion treads his path.
Arnold Bon, The Phoenix, 1667
Looking north from the Hooikade across the Schie, the riverscape sweeps from Kethelstraat in the west, along the medieval city wall to the magnificent Schiedam Gate. Across the canal stands the Nieuwe Kerk framed by clouds and further east the Rotterdam Gate, its great barbican crowned with octagonal towers stretching out towards a double drawbridge which leads to the shipyards. The city seems silent, prosperous and peaceful, glowing in the haze of early morning. Wealthy burgers gossip on the quays as the glassine river flows almost imperceptibly.
Stepping back from the painting in the hushed halls of the Mauritshuis, Han felt a wave of sadness. When he had dreamed of Delft, this was how it rose in his imagination. He had pored over the monochrome reproduction in Korteling’s catalogue many times. Now, here it was: Vermeer’s View of Delft. It was a view he should be able to see himself every day. The Hooikade was a minute’s walk from the Institute of Technology on the confluence of canals known as de Kolke. He had stood there often, looking north as Vermeer had done, but the world the master had captured, the brickwork, the gates, the towers and the bridges, had disappeared.
The great barbican which dominates the painting’s eastern skyline was demolished soon after Vermeer painted it and the medieval city walls had long since crumbled, but much of the glory of Delft had held out until it fell to the industrialists of the nineteenth century. The Kethel Gate and the magnificent red-brick and limestone Schiedam Gate were torn down in 1834 and two years later, the Rotterdam Gate was reduced to rubble. Of Vermeer’s numinous cityscape, only the spires of the Nieuwe Kerk and the Oude Kerk remained.
Han stared at the painting, rapt. This was his first visit to the Mauritshuis, his first glimpse of the artist he would come to love above all others. It was appropriate that his first love was the View of Delft, the painting which, according to his biographer John Nash, rescued Vermeer from oblivion.
On Wednesday 16 May 1696, almost twenty years after Vermeer’s death, the property of Jacob Dissius, including the largest collection of Vermeer’s work ever offered for sale, was auctioned. Lot number thirteen, The Town of Delft in perspective, to be seen from the South, sold for the princely sum of 200 guilders. Thereafter, the painting – and Vermeer – all but disappeared. In the century and a half that followed, Vermeer’s name was mentioned only in passing by art historians as one of the ‘pupils and imitators’ of Gabriel Metsu or Pieter de Hooch. It was not until May 1822 that the View of Delft – This most capital and famous painting of the master – reappeared, to be bought by the Dutch state for 2,900 guilders and presented to the newly opened Mauritshuis. It would take a further thirty years before the painting and its artist were ‘discovered’ by Théophile Thoré, the eminent French critic whose obsession with the man he called ‘the Sphinx of Delft’ would singlehandedly secure for Vermeer a place among the masters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Thoré, a respected and influential cultural commentator, was critical of neoclassicism and the romantic tradition of Géricault and Delacroix, favouring instead the new realism of Courbet and Millet. He was an early admirer of the Impressionists. In part Thoré’s taste was political: he was a radical who had been elected a member of the Assemblée Nationale after the revolution of 1848, but was forced to flee France after his involvement in an abortive coup d’état. What he admired in Dutch seventeenth-century art was precisely what he had praised in the work of Courbet and Millet: an unassuming realism, with none of the trappings of romanticism, of allegory or history. He did not believe in art for art’s sake, the popular catchphrase of the times, but, as he put it, art for man’s sake.
‘. . . having become, of necessity, an exile,’ he wrote later, ‘and, by instinct, a cosmopolitan, living in turn in England, Germany, Belgium and Holland, I was able to explore the museums of Europe, collect traditions, read, in all languages, books on art, and attempt to untangle somewhat the still confused history of the Northern schools, especially the Dutch school, of Rembrandt and his circle – and my “Sphinx” van der Meer.’
From the moment in 1849 when Thoré stood and gazed at the View of Delft, as Han did now, he became obsessed with the work of this forgotten master. ‘The obsession caused me considerable expense. To see one picture by van der Meer, I travelled hundreds of miles: to obtain the photograph of another van der Meer, I was madly extravagant.’ For almost twenty years he lived in exile, travelling under an alias and researching Vermeer’s life and work. Despite his limited means, he bought several paintings by Vermeer. In 1866, under his pseudonym Willem Bürger he published a dazzling three-part study of the work of Johannes Vermeer van Delft in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. It was the first step in elevating Vermeer to the ranks of the great Dutch masters of the Golden Age.
It was a painstaking task. Vermeer signed barely half of his paintings, and by the nineteenth century many of his works had come to be attributed to other – more famous and more valuable – artists. George III accidentally acquired a Vermeer he was told was a Frans van Mieris, the Emperor of Austria bought The Allegory of Painting as a genuine Pieter de Hooch, and A Woman Reading a Letter spent a brief, glorious period as a Rembrandt before becoming a de Hooch in 1826. Thoré/Bürger proved a perceptive but quixotic critic. Though he correctly recognised Vermeer’s hand in these paintings, he mistakenly included works by Mieris, Jan Vermeer of Haarlem, and Jacob Vrel. In fact, Thoré/Bürger’s favourite Vermeer, A Rustic Cottage, reproduced on the first page of his article, is now attributed to Derk van der Laan. Thoré/Bürger began to see Vermeer’s hand in everything. Eventually, the founder of Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Charles Blanc, protested in exasperation: ‘Nowadays, Mr Bürger sees Delft just about everywhere; although until now we have benefited from his mania; leave him alone!’
In the summer of 1907, when Han made his first pilgrimage to The Hague, Vermeer was still all but unknown. The pioneering work of Théophile Thoré, and recent discoveries by Abraham Bredius, the director of the Mauritshuis, were only then being distilled into the first catalogue raisonné of the master’s work by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the deputy-director of the Mauritshuis. De Groot’s monograph, published in the autumn of 1907, slashed the seventy-three paintings Thoré/Bürger had attributed to Vermeer to barely fifty. Of these, four were then in the Mauritshuis: alongside the View of Delft hung A Lady Standing at the Virginal and Woman with Pearl Necklace, both of which had been bequeathed to the museum by Thoré/Bürger. Next to them hung Diana and her Companions, which was then on loan to the museum. Han found himself inexplicably drawn to the artist. It was not merely that Vermeer’s work encapsulated all of the virtues of the Dutch Golden Age which Korteling had instilled in him. Vermeer’s long sojourn in obscurity appealed to van Meegeren. Here, he thought, was a kindred spirit: an artist reviled and rejected by his own, his genius only belatedly and grudgingly recognised by his countrymen. For even at the tender age of eighteen, Han did not aspire to be an artist, he aspired to genius.
In his first year at university, Han was diligent in his studies but he spent as much time as possible in The Hague, haunting the halls of the Boijmans and the Mauritshuis, sometimes travelling to Amsterdam to spend whole days wandering the galleries of the Rijksmuseum. His passion for fine art crept into his architectural assignments: his professors were bemused to see front elevations adorned with classical statues, casements ornamented with flourishing window-boxes, dogs sleeping in the gardens, once even an anatomical study of a horse’s head in the margin. When not attending classes, Han spent his time with Wim, quizzing his friend as if attempting to take an art degree by proxy. His free time he spent mastering the styles of the artists he admired, practising the techniques of Rubens and Rembrandt, constantly circling ba
ck to Vermeer, utterly unaware that at that very moment Pablo Picasso was adding the final electrifying brushstrokes to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting that would unleash cubism on a startled public and change the face of art once more. Seventy-five years later, the critic Robert Hughes would write: ‘With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three-quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off.’ The twentieth century had arrived just as Han was struggling to absorb the seventeenth.
At university, Han reinvented himself. The precocious adolescent became a dandy, the scrawny boy who had hated sports joined the boat club where he proved an able oarsman and developed an impressive physique. He cultivated vice, becoming an accomplished smoker and an incorrigible drinker. From the imperious heights of the Delft Institute of Technology, Han looked out upon a new world, far from the narrow strictures of his father. To his new friends, he introduced himself as an artist. At night he and Wim would go drinking with their companions and Han would hold forth on art and culture, offer opinions on contemporary artists and styles he barely knew and regurgitate half-digested philosophy with wit and passion and the infallibility that for centuries has been issued to first-year students. Walking home as dawn broke over the canals, euphoric and inebriated, his friend Wim later related, Han would stop at every street corner and announce himself: ‘Henricus van Meegeren: genius!’
It came as a shock to Han when, returning to Deventer for the holidays, he found his brother Hermann there. After almost two miserable years studying at the seminary at Culemborg, Hermann had finally admitted that he had no vocation and had run away. Hermann was reticent about the reasons for his loss of faith, but Han had the impression that his brother had been involved in a homosexual affair. His father was incensed, implacable. There could be no question of wasting the years of religious instruction, to say nothing of the esteem which a son in the priesthood would confer on the family. Han argued with his brother, urging him to stand up to their father’s benighted authoritarianism. When Hermann fell to pieces, Han took up his brother’s case, but Henricus was immovable. He contacted the local bishop, who arrived some hours later and dragged the recalcitrant sheep back to the fold.
Han would not see his brother again. After returning to the seminary, Hermann’s health began to fail. He had always been a sickly child and his father thought the boy’s illness wilful. The abbot may have concurred, for it seems that no doctor was called to treat Hermann, nor, when his illness worsened was he admitted to a hospital. Before he could be ordained, Hermann was dead.
4
A SHADOW OF DIVINE PERFECTION
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
Her name was Anna. She was Eurasian, alien, exotic, like Vairaumati sprung from one of the brazen, burnished Tahitian portraits by Gauguin. Her skin was sensuous and tawny, her eyes were pale almonds, her hair shone like a hank of coal-black silk. Han sketched her on a summer afternoon at the boat club, her willowy limbs trailing in the iridescent water, sunlight pooling around her bare feet like beads of spilt mercury.
For almost a year, he watched this dreamlike wraith. He did not speak to her, he hardly dared look at her. Despite the urbane personality he had assiduously cultivated since arriving in Delft, Han was excruciatingly shy in the company of women. Even now, in his fourth year in the town, at the age of twenty-two, he was still a virgin.
Han was jubilant and nervous at discovering she was studying Fine Art. He begged his friend Wim to find out who she was. Her story was as enchanting as her dusky skin. Her name, Wim told him, was Anna de Voogt and she had been born on the island of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Though her mother was not of noble birth, news of her startling beauty reached the son and heir of an Indonesian prince who wooed her and asked for her hand in marriage. But Anna’s mother was captivated by the lure of the West and rebuffed the prince to marry Heer de Voogt, an official with the Dutch East India Company. If her mother dreamed of being swept away to Europe, she was disappointed. Before Anna was five years old, her father was re-posted to Java and her parents divorced. Anna was sent ‘home’ to the Netherlands where she was raised by her grandmother in Rijswijk, a small village on the outskirts of The Hague.
Wim arranged an introduction, and Han stammered the lines he had been rehearsing for almost a week: ‘I have a bone to pick with you. I am an artist and you are the one girl I am unable to draw!’
Anna laughed, flattered by Han’s self-conscious bluster and impressed that this gangling youth could so confidently introduce himself as an artist. They chatted easily, sitting on the riverbank. Anna asked Han about his studies and he shamefacedly admitted that his father had forced him to study architecture.
‘But I am an artist,’ he said, ‘I can show you my work.’
To her surprise, Anna discovered in his work a confidence, a sureness of line and an eye for detail which impressed her. They were soon inseparable. She loved him because under his wild free-thinking he was sensitive and shy. He loved her from the moment she asked the simple, innocuous question: ‘Why on earth are you studying architecture? You’re already an artist.’
He painted her at every opportunity, but the painting she most loved was the first: a strange exotic scene conjured out of his imagination. He knew nothing of Indonesia, but invented the flowers and the vegetation that framed a scene of her olive-skinned body, naked, emerging from the sea. When Han, worried that someone would recognise the model, suggested that he burn it, Anna laughed at him.
‘Don’t be so prudish, Han, this is the best thing you have ever done.’
Han blushed charmingly: he was besotted. Anna was intelligent, mysterious, stunningly beautiful, but most of all she believed in him as an artist. By her side he felt as if he no longer needed to pretend: her affection, her admiration, her awe were unconditional. Within six months, he had asked her to marry him. Anna was firm but affectionate in her refusal: they had not yet finished their studies and had no means of support. Undeterred, Han proposed to her over and over, too impulsive to tolerate deferred gratification.
In the end, the decision was made for them when Anna fell pregnant. Girding herself against the stories Han had told her of his fearsome Henricus, Anna agreed to meet his father. Henricus, though furious at Han’s recklessness and deeply prejudiced against the Muslim faith, was won over by this intelligent, level-headed girl. He blustered about the importance of Han’s studies, his career, but he sensed that here was someone who might keep his heedless son’s feet firmly on the ground.
‘You realise the boy is a dreamer. If you do not discipline him, he will never be able to support you and the child. Do you think you can keep him in check?’
Anna laughed, warming to this gruff man in whom she saw something of Han.
‘I will try, sir.’
His blessing when it came, was conditional: Anna had to agree to convert to Catholicism and raise their children in the Catholic faith. They married in the spring of 1912 and, with no money to set up home, moved into a small apartment above Anna’s grandmother’s house in Rijswijk.
Immediately, Han converted the bright, spacious loft in their new home into ‘his studio’. He was excited, elated: finally he was an adult – free to make his own decisions, to carve his own way in the world. He had a wife who worshipped and admired him, who believed in him and nurtured his talent. In their first breathtaking year together, he could barely take his eyes off her silken skin. She was his first willing model, and even as her belly swelled, he would call on her at all hours of the day to come and pose, endlessly excited by her bare foot, the tender nape of her neck, the delicate curve of her breasts as he worked on a painting. Anna became increasingly worried that he was devoting little time to his studies. Han, whose only architectural work had been to redesign the university boathouse where the couple had met,
told her he had no intention of being an architect. He was an artist, he said, and would support Anna and their child by the wiles of his pencil. Anna insisted he should complete his degree in architecture. He had studied for five years, she argued, it was important to spend these last months revising so that he could pass his exams. It would take time to establish himself as an artist; in the meantime architecture would offer the family much-needed security.
Han would have none of it. Perhaps, he admitted, he could not expect commissions and portraits before he had proved himself, but in the meantime, he was prepared to dip his brush into the tawdry world of newspaper illustration. He approached a number of editors who asked him to provide samples. For one, who had asked for illustrations of a bear to accompany an amusing story, Han worked himself into a frenzy, making endless visits to the zoo to sketch bears at play, studying the stuffed bears in the Natural History Museum and poring over books by naturalists. When he submitted the fruits of his labour the exasperated editor pointed out that the illustration was totally unsuited to the coarse four-colour printing process of a newspaper.
