I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  The forger’s chief skill, however, is his ability to lie. ‘There is a stage in the telling of lies,’ wrote the distinguished criminologist Hans Gross, ‘where the normal condition has passed and the diseased one has not yet begun.’ The forger must transcend this stage if, like van Meegeren, he is to earn a place in John G. Howells’s Reference Companion to the History of Abnormal Psychology as the paradigm of pseudologia fantastica, the pathological liar. Slighted, the conman lies to revenge himself on his detractors; humiliated, he lies to obtain a sense of power; plagued with doubt, he lies to fuel his own self-deception. Han had cultivated a lifelong disappointment with the world, had nurtured mistrust until it flourished into paranoia, brooded over his insecurities until his need to prove himself consumed his every waking thought. As he would later tell his accusers: ‘I decided to prove my worth as an artist, by painting a perfect seventeenth-century canvas.’ It was an eminently sensible decision since the twentieth century had no interest in his work. Han had failed to follow the most elementary lesson for the artist, as espoused by the critic George Moore: ‘It doesn’t matter how badly you paint as long as you don’t paint badly like other people.’ Born out of time, a realistic artist in an age of surrealism and abstractionism, he realised he had only one option open to him: he would become a forger.

  First he had to choose a victim – a painter whose identity he would usurp. Though he may have considered Ter Borch or Pieter de Hooch, he quickly settled on Vermeer. His reasons were aesthetic and pragmatic in equal measure. Vermeer was the artist whom Han admired above all others. A quintessentially Dutch master who had elevated genre painting above the populism of de Hooch’s card-players and peasants pissing in the street into something noble, something that in the twentieth century seemed alive with psychological insight, hidden passions, elliptical narratives. Emotionally, he felt a bond with Vermeer. Here, Han believed, was an artist neglected and wronged by critics. One who had died almost unknown, whose paintings had languished for centuries until time finally vindicated his genius. Han’s was a simplistic but common interpretation: though Vermeer’s fame had faded after his death, he had certainly been a successful and influential artist in his lifetime. He was a master painter and member of Saint Luke’s Guild, twice elected Head Master by the artists of Delft. His disappearance from the canon of Western art owed more to the paucity of his work and the fact that he had no school, no pupils to carry on his name. But what attracted Han were the twin facts that, since his ‘rediscovery’ by Thoré/Bürger, Vermeer’s reputation had soared to rank along with Rembrandt as the acme of Dutch artistic achievement, and yet what little was known of his life and works was so incomplete that it would be easy to add to the catalogue of accepted work.

  Han’s scheme was simple and perversely moral: ‘I devised a plan to paint a picture based on my own ideas, in my own style, but by using seventeenth-century pigments would ensure that the painting would pass the five tests which any genuine seventeenth-century painting must pass.’ He would not resort to copying or to creating a pastiche of several works. The subject was to be one which the artist had never painted, an original van Meegeren. The painting, he determined, would have to be a major work. He did not want to slip an inconsequential canvas into the artist’s canon by stealth, he wanted to paint something which would cause the art world to reevaluate the canon itself. He would have it authenticated by a leading expert in the field and sold, ideally at auction. When his work was proudly displayed in a prominent museum, admired and acclaimed by all, then and only then would he announce his charade, forcing the critics and the dealers to admit their humbug and the public to recognise his genius.

  Han did not doubt his ability to paint a major Vermeer, but just to be certain, he painted a minor genre piece, Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet, and in the spring of 1932 sold the canvas to a Mr Tersteeg, the son of the former director of Goupil’s gallery in The Hague. Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet (plate 6) was pastiche, filled with explicit allusions to authenticated Vermeers. On the right, a gentleman stands, his pose, his broad-brimmed hat and shawl copied in every detail from Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine; the lady is a mirror image of the girl in Two Gentlemen and a Girl with a Wineglass, the draperies and the framing echo the composition of The Allegory of Faith while the abandoned lute is similar to the one in The Love Letter. Van Meegeren’s first Vermeer is forgery by numbers: a patchwork of easily recognisable quotations from the master’s work in an all-too-familiar setting down to the light spilling from the window on the left on to a painting which is almost identical to the rugged landscape in the style of Jacob van Ruisdael that hangs above the clavecin in The Concert. Tersteeg had no doubts as to its authenticity and was happy to offer van Meegeren 40,000 guilders for the painting.

  With the proceeds Han bought his first car: a Dodge sedan. He knew nothing about cars and had not the first idea how to drive. The man who sold him the Dodge had to explain how to use the brake and the accelerator, what the choke was for, even when he should use the horn. He even gave Han a quick driving lesson, and, jolting and stuttering, Han drove his new toy – one of barely two dozen such cars in Holland in 1932 – back home to show Jolanthe. Jo excitedly asked Han if they might take a spin. Han, who wanted nothing more than to get as far away from Holland and the dreary puritan Dutch soul as he could manage, suggested they drive to the south of France and on to Italy. It was a belated honeymoon, a brilliant adventure: they climbed into the sleek black sedan and headed south.

  Two weeks later, the rickety car crossed the French border at Menton, and lurched down the long mountain road towards Ventimiglia. Houses in vibrant chalky colours sat perched precariously on the hillside, and, slung from every window, laundry snapped loudly in the warm breeze. Han was intoxicated by the Mediterranean: the colours seemed to shimmer and shift, the air trembled in the heat, strange plants and flowers bloomed and everywhere the people seemed garrulous and friendly. They flapped their hands when they talked, linked arms when they walked, they seemed sensuous and vital and altogether unlike the dour Dutch burghers they had left behind.

  While Lady and Gentleman at the Spinet was passed from dealer to expert, Han and Jo spent several blissful days in Milan wandering the galleries and honeyed sunlit cloisters of the Pinacoteca di Brera. It was not Han’s first taste of the glories of Italian art, he had spent three months travelling through Italy in 1921, but now that he was searching for a subject for his forgery he saw new possibilities in the desolation of Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, the elegant restraint of Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin. He was tempted by The Last Supper, which they visited at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Despite the terrible disrepair and an unwise attempt by Stefano Barezzi to detach Leonardo’s fresco from the convent wall, Han was moved by the faces of the disciples, caught in this moment between revelation and betrayal.

  He quickly dismissed the subject as too hackneyed. Hans Holbein had painted the disciples as dignified and luminescent; in Bassano’s Ultima Cena they were unruly, drunk or asleep. In the Brera in Milan, Han had witnessed the sheet lightning of Rubens’s stormy and turbulent Last Supper. There was nothing for him to bring to this subject.

  In Rome, he was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He spent hours in San Luigi dei Francesi sketching and studying the hypnotic cycle of the life of Saint Matthew. Day after day in almost every gallery he visited, Caravaggio’s dramatic chiaroscuro stared him down: the defiant suffering of The Crucifixion of Saint Peter in Santa Maria del Popolo, the boy David, almost remorseful in his victory, gazing at the severed head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese. He was struck by the visceral energy, the sheer humanity of these religious scenes. Here was a painter of such force, such passion, that he had stirred a group of Dutch students to forsake the staid constraints of Flemish painting and adopt the style of a master the Dutch had never seen. In the decade before Vermeer was born, the Utrecht Caravaggisti – Brugghen, Honthorst, Both a
nd Baburen – had briefly, brutally, changed the face of Dutch painting. Their legacy was evident in the work of Rubens and Rembrandt, and though there were elements of it in Vermeer’s early pictures, there was scant trace to be found in his mature work. Han did not know that scholars have come to believe Vermeer himself studied in Utrecht where his mother-in-law Maria Thins knew the artist Abraham Bloemaert. Certainly Maria Thins’s private collection included a number of paintings by the Caravaggisti and, as Han certainly knew, Vermeer himself owned Baburen’s The Procuress which he used as a backdrop to both The Concert and A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. What if Vermeer, too, had fallen under the spell of Caravaggio?

  It was no more than a passing notion: Han did not yet know how he might contrive a ‘seventeenth-century’ painting – how to find the right canvas, how to harden the paint, how to induce the craquelure – the fine network of cracks which is the mark of age and maturity. Until he devised a technique to deceive the expert and his alcohol swab, the X-ray machine and the chemist, the subject for an ‘early Vermeer’ was unimportant. He was excited and enthusiastic, talking animatedly about returning to his work. Joanna was happy to see that his crippling self-doubt seemed to have dissipated. He was once again the charming roué who had stolen her from her husband ten years earlier.

  As the car once more climbed the steep hill out of Ventimiglia and crossed the French border, Han felt a twinge of regret at the thought of returning to The Hague. There seemed to be nothing left for him in the Netherlands: he had resigned from the Kunstring and though never publicly named in the scandal surrounding the ‘forged’ Frans Hals he had severed his professional ties with Theo van Wijngaarden. He could not even look forward to spending time with his children since Anna had left France to return to Sumatra, taking Jacques and Inez with her. There was nothing left for them in the Netherlands but petty-mindedness and snobbery and the indifference of the art world. The Dodge sedan itself seemed to slow at the thought of the lowering skies that awaited them; it laboured for a few miles more and shuddered to a halt in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

  Han and Jo spent the afternoon strolling through the labyrinth of streets of Roccabruna, the medieval fortress conceived by Conrad 1st, Count of Ventimiglia, to protect the western frontier of his domain. In the hills that looked out over the sprawling Mediterranean, Roquebrune was the last picturesque stop made by the train bleu before arriving in Monte Carlo. They dined at the Grand-Hôtel where once the Empress Elisabeth of Austria was a regular visitor, savouring this enforced appendix to their holiday. It was here that they heard of a house for rent outside the village and, on a whim, they went to view Primavera, a magnificent villa set in a garden of roses and citrus trees in the Domaine du Hameau. From this eyrie the great windows looked out across the village to the dazzling blue streak of the Mediterranean. The landlord, a plump, agreeable gentleman by the name of de Augustinis, was taken by the artist and his handsome wife and, as they were about to make their excuses and return to the hotel, offered the property for four dollars a week. Without a moment’s thought or a word to his wife, Han took the landlord’s pen and signed the lease. It was only later, walking back towards the hotel in the gathering dusk, that he told an astonished Joanna that they were leaving the Netherlands for ever.

  8

  THE PRICE OF ULTRAMARINE

  O thou afflicted, tossed with

  tempest, and not comforted,

  behold, I will set your stones

  in antimony, and lay your

  foundations with lapis lazuli.

  Isaiah 54:11

  Han gathered the tools he needed to practise his artistic alchemy. Carmine and madder, lead and mercury he easily obtained from chemists and the artists’ supplies shops in The Hague. He bought a dozen shaving brushes: by 1930, artists’ brushes were routinely made of sable, but Vermeer, Han knew, had used only badger-hair brushes so from the shaving brushes he would fashion his own. In an antique shop, he bought a number of seventeenth-century wine goblets and some pewter serving plates to serve as props. Still he lacked his philosopher’s stone: nowhere in the Netherlands could he acquire the lapis lazuli he needed to make ultramarine. In the end, he travelled to London, where he visited the world’s foremost colour chemists at 38 Rathbone Place. Winsor and Newton sold him four ounces of raw lapis lazuli.

  The stone can be dated back seven thousand years when it was used to adorn the royal Sumerian tombs of Ur; it was prized in ancient Egypt where it was used to decorate the sarcophagi of the pharaohs. It is among the rarest of stones, being mined principally in Badakshan, Afghanistan, the oldest mine in the world, which supplied the pharaohs and the temple painters of Afghanistan, the Chinese and Indian artists of the Middle Ages. It first appeared in European painting in the altarpieces of Giotto and the illuminated manuscripts of fourteenth-century Italy. Rarer than gold, the finest lapis lazuli has, for centuries, been more expensive than the vulgar yellow metal. Artists traditionally used the pigment sparingly, reserving ultramarine for the robes of Mary and the Christ-child. By the sixteenth century, azurite or chessylite replaced natural ultramarine. But Jan Vermeer disliked azurite and used natural ultramarine, not only as a focal point, but extensively in the underpainting of his canvases. By the time Han first saw the nugget of blue stone shot through with a gold tracery on the bench in Bartus Korteling’s studio, it had been superseded in the nineteenth century by synthetic ultramarine and cobalt blue. Over the next three years, Han would buy twelve ounces of lapis lazuli from Winsor and Newton at twenty-two dollars an ounce – the price of gold in 1932 was twenty dollars per ounce.

  Back in The Hague, he scoured bookshops for anything that might help in his deception. He bought C.F.L. de Wild’s classic study Over de technick van Vermeer and Alex Eibner’s On alternatives to linseed oil and oil paints, a treatise on the various media he might use. It was here that he happened on a recently published volume which proved essential reading for the neophyte forger: A.M. de Wild’s The Scientific Examination of Pictures – a detailed account of up-to-date discoveries in the chemical analysis of pigments and the use of ultraviolet light and X-ray photography in detecting forgeries.

  Han now needed several small canvases on which to develop his techniques and, more importantly, a process for hardening the paint. He would also need a large canvas on which to paint his masterpiece. Han did not have the wherewithal or the inclination to buy and bowdlerise a genuine de Hooch or a van Mieris, so he spent several weeks scouring minor galleries for second-rate paintings he could buy cheaply. For the test paintings, small canvases would suffice, but he needed to be sure that both canvas and stretcher were of the right period. He went so far as to check the nails which held the fabric in place: such details had been crucial in the Frans Hals debacle. The canvases had to be sturdy, with little sign of wear, since Han would need to remove the existing painting without damaging or fraying the fabric.

  Joanna was surprised and irritated when Han came home with some small tawdry painting he had bought. The house was almost packed up and Jo was angry with her husband for spending time and money on such frivolities. Han bluffed her, arguing that in this he saw a Ter Borch he might restore, in another a frame he thought worth preserving. Finding six small seventeenth-century paintings proved a challenge, but Han’s search for a large canvas was proving fruitless.

  Art, if it is not esteemed, does not survive. Time gives short shrift to lesser artists, unloved paintings disappear through indifference and neglect. Han haunted galleries and junk shops, haggling over paintings, but he could not afford even the modest prices a major work by a minor artist commanded. Finally, in a junk shop, he saw a painting that he knew would suit his needs. A vast, murky oil, almost four feet by six feet, it depicted the raising of Lazarus. It was clearly seventeenth-century and from the style it seemed that the artist might have been a minor contemporary of Vermeer. Han examined the back of the painting: the canvas looked sturdy and undamaged; he checked that the painting had not been later recanvased, in
spected the nails with which the artist had affixed his essay at immortality.

  ‘How much?’

  The dealer looked up from the jumble of knick-knacks he was pricing. ‘A thousand guilders.’

  ‘I think you’ve made a mistake with the zeros.’ Han smiled. ‘The painting is by some nonentity, and it’s not difficult to see why he’s been forgotten: the anatomy is poor and the modelling is atrocious.’

  ‘An interesting assessment,’ the dealer said coolly, ‘but if it is really as bad as you say, why would a gentleman of your taste wish to buy it?’

  Han could hardly explain that he wanted to strip the existing painting from the canvas and use it to create a new Vermeer. He shrugged and – a quick-thinking and accomplished liar – explained that he was looking for a seventeenth-century painting for a client furnishing his new country house in Laren. Something inexpensive that would complement the west wing.

  ‘I need a large work for a dark corner of the drawing-room. I thought the shadows would show this piece off to its best advantage. But perhaps you’re right, perhaps my client should hold out for something a little more interesting.’

  Han bought an old map which he would later use in one of his experimental forgeries, and a silver-topped jug much like the one in Vermeer’s The Music Lesson. Before he reached the door, the dealer called him back, offering the Lazarus for half the original asking price. Han demurred, but eventually agreed to buy The Raising of Lazarus for about two hundred dollars – the equivalent of almost three thousand dollars today. If he were to make a return on his investment, Han’s ‘restoration’ would have to be superlative.