I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  Han had no real interest in Boon’s untutored eye, but this was the first time he had shown the Emmausgängers to anyone and the awe and reverence that Boon lavished on the painting heartened him.

  ‘How much do you think it might be worth?’ Boon asked.

  ‘That very much depends,’ Han said, ‘there are so few authenticated Vermeers – I doubt one has come on the market any time this century.’

  ‘But in general terms – if this Bredius agrees it is genuine – is it worth twenty thousand guilders? Fifty thousand, one hundred thousand?’

  ‘As I said, no Vermeer has come on the market as a comparison – there are fewer than forty in existence. But if it proves to be genuine, then it would be an important painting, very important . . . I certainly believe it should not be sold for less than a million guilders.’

  No sound could have been more welcome to Han than the the soft click as Boon’s jaw dropped.

  On 30 August 1937, Boon wrote to Abraham Bredius at the Villa Evelyne in Monaco, briefly outlining how he had come to represent a painting he believed might be of interest and asking if he might submit the painting for the Maître’s eventual authentication. Bredius agreed and suggested Boon bring the painting to him in Monaco.

  Han accompanied Boon to the Gare d’Austerlitz where the lawyer had reserved a couchette on the train bleu to Monte Carlo. Han remained in Paris. Everything, now, was out of his hands. If Bredius rejected the Emmaus, everything was lost: not only the months, the years of work and experimentation, not simply the money that was to be made selling a ‘genuine’ Vermeer, but his last shred of self-esteem. If Bredius dismissed it, it would be pointless to submit it to any other expert: the art world, then as now, was a small, closed circle and news of a suspect painting would quickly spread and no reputable dealer or critic would entertain it. If Bredius said it was genuine, there might be those who doubted his attribution, but the opinion (for it would be no more than an opinion) of a single expert would be enough for the painting to find a place on the walls of a prestigious gallery. Han went back to his hotel, took two of the morphine tablets he had recently been prescribed, and tried to relax.

  The following morning, nervous but proud, perhaps, to be a part of this patriotic enterprise, Boon stood on the doorstep of the Villa Evelyne. Bredius’s manservant ushered him into the studio where the ageing critic, wrapped in a fur stole, eased himself painfully from his chair. There are likely to have been few preliminaries, little small talk: Bredius was anxious to see the painting. The old man watched as Boon opened the crate and delicately removed the painting. Bredius settled his wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and taking the painting gingerly, examined the canvas and the stretcher. The canvas itself was clearly centuries old, worn in patches, easily perhaps old enough to be genuine. He propped the picture against a wall and stood back. His heart immediately lurched into his throat; a depth of feeling welled inside him as great – perhaps greater – than he had felt when he first set eyes on Christ in the House of Martha and Mary.

  ‘Well?’ Boon inquired after a long moment.

  ‘How did you say you came by it?’

  ‘I am representing a young woman who may wish to sell,’ Boon began, launching into the agreed story. ‘An old Dutch family from somewhere in the south of Holland. They had a castle in Westland, near Naaldwijk, I believe. Her mother moved to France when she married, the painting is one of a number she brought with her as her dowry.’

  Bredius nodded, only half-listening, intent on his inspection of the painting. He was drawn in by the unmistakable brilliance of Vermeer’s archetypal colours, the gamboge, the lead-tin yellow, the ultramarine. Taking a loupe from his desk, he studied the intricate tracery of the craquelure, murmuring half to himself. Boon meanwhile warmed to the story, finding it surprisingly easy to embellish now that he had begun:

  ‘There were many paintings – in the region of a hundred and sixty if I remember correctly. She – my client – contacted me because since her parents’ death the family has fallen on hard times rather. I must say I was disappointed by the paintings. Workmanlike, perhaps, but they seemed to me of no real interest: this one I came across in one of the disused bedrooms. I don’t believe she remembered it was there. Her father apparently had thought it assez laid, too ugly certainly for it to be hung in the public parts of the house. It was simply gathering dust there, but I saw it and thought . . .’

  ‘It is interesting, certainly,’ Bredius interrupted. He took a small flask from his desk and a wad of cotton. ‘May I?’ he asked Boon. ‘It is a simple alcohol solution – a standard test – I shall stop the moment there is any sign of wear.’

  Boon nodded; Han had explained the procedure. The old man took the alcohol swab and held it over a corner of the painting. The fumes rose like a heat haze in sunlight. The paint did not react. Bredius took a stronger solution and once again brought the wad of cotton over the painting. Then, gingerly, like a lover making his first caress, he stroked the surface of the painting gently. He removed the swab and stared at the pristine cotton.

  ‘I wonder . . .’ Bredius sounded a little flustered now. ‘Would it be possible for you to leave it with me for a day or two to study it?’

  Boon agreed, giving Bredius the name of the hotel where he was staying. The manservant showed him out. Bredius barely looked up, entranced by the Emmausgängers, noting the characteristic shaft of light falling from the window at the left of the picture which bathed the figures with a tender radiance, considering the oblique, ethereal serenity of the Christ. It was the answer to his prayers.

  In the two days that followed, Bredius would have been wise to remember Sainte Thérèse’s maxim: ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ The painting seemed so perfect – fitting like the forgotten piece of a puzzle into the mystery of Vermeer’s career, corroborating everything he had ever written on the subject. The composition unmistakably recalled Caravaggio’s Christ with the Disciples at Emmaus, but the colours and the light were unquestionably those of Vermeer in Dresden. It was, as he would later write, ‘. . . quite different from his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer . . .’

  It is certainly true that Bredius was an old man, that his eyesight was failing, but Han was not relying on an old man’s infirmities; on the contrary, he was depending on Bredius to use all of his acumen and his considerable intellect to decipher the clues he had scattered through the canvas. The suggestion of the Girl with a Pearl Earring in the face of the maidservant, the allusion to The Astronomer. Bredius would hardly need the signature to be certain . . .

  Forty-eight hours later, Boon was summoned. He had enjoyed his impromptu holiday on the Riviera. Back in Paris, Han had tried to distract himself with customary vices, but knowing that the Maître held his future in his hands made even champagne taste of vinegar. When Boon was shown into the study, Bredius was clearly excited and impatient. He spoke quickly, animatedly about the colours, the pointillé on the bread, the face of Cleopas. Boon barely understood a word.

  ‘So you believe it is genuine?’ Boon asked at last.

  Trembling slightly, the old man reluctantly tore his rheumy eyes from the canvas and nodding slowly, handed Boon an envelope.

  Boon immediately phoned Han at his Paris hotel, but could not reach him. He phoned again that evening and the receptionist put his call through to Han’s room. The telephone rang and rang in the darkness. At length the hotel operator came back on the line. ‘Je suis désolé, Monsieur . . . Would you care to leave a message?’

  ‘No,’ Boon said, unwilling to have his triumphant news conveyed by a desk clerk. ‘On second thoughts, tell him Dr Boon called, tell him to call me at my office urgently.’ He phoned once more before boarding the night train to Paris, but again Han was absent, partaking of some aptly named Dutch courage. Boon left no message.

  From the Gare d’Austerlitz, Boon took a cab directly to van Meegeren’s hotel. Han was at the front desk, checking his messages. The receptionist h
ad just handed him a phone to return Dr Boon’s call when Boon tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Where the devil have you been? I tried calling half a dozen times.’

  ‘What did he say? Bredius, what did he say?’

  Boon ushered him away from the desk and the two men sat in the hotel bar. Han ordered strong black coffee. ‘Well, what did he say?’ Han nervously lit a cigarette.

  ‘He thinks it is genuine. He really is a curious fish, wrapped up in all those furs . . .’

  ‘He said it was genuine? What else – did he say anything about the painting, did he like it?’

  ‘Here . . .’ Boon handed Han the certificate of authentication. ‘See for yourself . . . I haven’t opened it.’

  A waiter brought the coffee. Han stared at the envelope which bore Bredius’s monogrammed letterhead, then quickly tore it open with his thumbnail and scanned the note. ‘This magnificent piece by Vermeer, the great Vermeer of Delft, has come to light – may the Lord be thanked – from the darkness where it has lain for many years, unsullied, exactly as it left the artist’s studio.’ Han realised he had been holding his breath. He drew deeply on his cigarette; ‘almost unparalleled among his works’. Han relaxed and began to smile. ‘I found it hard to contain my emotions when the masterpiece was first shown to me.’ The smile broadened slowly to become a grin. He sipped his coffee. His head was still pounding, his hand holding the letter quivered slightly. ‘Composition, expression, colour – all conspire to form a harmony of supreme art, supreme beauty. Bredius 1937.’ And then Han broke into a gruff, rumbling laugh.

  13

  A MOST STUPID AND MALIGNANT RACE

  Grant me patience, just

  heaven! Of all the cants

  which are canted in this

  canting world, though the

  cant of hypocrites may be

  the worst, the cant of

  criticism is the most tormenting!

  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

  The letter in Bredius’s elegant cursive, which Han held in his trembling hand, was worth much more than the painting which, at Boon’s insistence, he now deposited with the Crédit Lyonnais for safekeeping. Though it was merely the opinion of one man, it would be all the art world would need to accept his forgery as a genuine Vermeer.

  The role of the critic is crucial in the art world – as much now in the twenty-first century, as it was in the 1930s. Though new tests used to authenticate old masters have proliferated – infrared and ultraviolet examination, thermoluminescence, photospectrography, carbon dating and autoradiography – it is still the expert’s discerning eye which makes the attribution, for, though tests can determine the age of a canvas, the composition of the pigments or the nature of the underpainting, they cannot determine a Rembrandt from a Rubens.

  ‘A critic,’ Whitney Balliett declares, ‘is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.’ Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Bredius’s decision not to have the Emmaus submitted for X-ray and chemical analysis, not out of negligence, but because of his absolute confidence in his instinctive ability to tell a masterpiece from a forgery. The continuing success of forgers throughout the twentieth century is testament to the fact that it is a ‘talent’ which critics still prize today. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sees this intuition as the central gift of what he calls the fakebuster:

  Fakebusters are a rare breed of cat. They are connoisseurs who have the singular ability – call it a sixth or seventh sense – to detect a forgery instantaneously in almost every field.

  These people, who are primarily not book scholars and certainly not theoreticians, describe the feelings as a pull in the gut or a warning cry from a voice deep inside them. The talent cannot be studied and applied. It is nurtured and refined only by saturation.

  Hoving seems to believe that the true expert is someone who, not by dint of learning and diligence alone, nor through exhaustive technical research, is possessed of a quasi-supernatural gift. Of course, the ‘gut feeling’ Hoving describes is informed by thousands of hours in the presence of originals; an expert will be intimately familiar with an artist’s characteristic brushstroke, his subjects and his media. A keen eye will quickly spot an anachronistic detail, the hesitancy of the forger’s hand compared to the assured spontaneity of the artist.

  But experts are indeed a rare breed whose methods include arcane rituals: the art historian Richard Krautheimer, author of Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, would pinpoint the year in which a sculpture was crafted by licking the mortar; another eminent art critic determines the age of an old master by solemnly chewing a sliver of varnish. It is a talent best nurtured in childhood: Joseph Duveen, perhaps the greatest American art dealer of the twentieth century, underwent an interesting initiation. To test young Joseph’s ‘gut feeling’, his uncle lined up along a shelf some of the priceless porcelain in the Duveen family collection together with a number of near-perfect copies. Then, handing his nephew a walking-stick, he told the boy to smash all but the genuine articles. Duveen did just that.

  One might be forgiven for thinking that the single defining gift of the expert is hubris.

  The extent to which the art world still relies on the opinion of the expert in matters of attribution is in inverse proportion to the results: not only have experts failed to recognise some of the most preposterously crude forgeries, they have regularly dismissed genuine masterpieces with supercilious ease only to have their opinions reversed by equally confident experts. Many paintings have crossed this chasm from genuine to forgery more than once.

  When Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den went under the hammer in 1885 it sold for £2,520. In 1963, by which time a confident expert had decided it was the work of Rubens’s contemporary Jacob Jordaens, it fetched only £500, but less than two years later when another, equally confident, expert insisted it was ‘school of’ Rubens, it was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for £178,600.

  In Art Fakes in America, David L. Goodrich tells the chastening story of Leo Ernst, a plumber from Dayton, Ohio, who in 1934 bought three canvases from a German sailor ‘for next to nothing’. When he later married, his wife, who had studied art, discovered the crumpled canvases in the attic and asked her husband where he had bought them. ‘They are nothing,’ he told her. ‘Just some junk I got gypped on.’ Anna Ernst, however, thought they might be valuable. She spent several years attempting to track down some reference to the paintings in public libraries, before deciding to visit New York, where she and her husband trudged from dealer to museum only to be informed by one expert after another that the paintings were copies or forgeries. ‘The dealers,’ Ernst recalled, ‘told us to throw them in the ash can.’ Anna was reluctant and continued her research, but it was not until 1966 – thirty years after her husband had bought the paintings – that she stumbled on an old, yellowed newspaper which gave an account of the 1922 break-in at the Großherzoglichen Museum in Weimar during which two German soldiers had looted a number of paintings which the article described in some detail. The descriptions were strikingly similar to the paintings in her attic. Taking the canvases and the newspaper clipping to the very same galleries which had dismissed them years earlier, Anna and Leo Ernst were rewarded when the same experts immediately and confidently recognised the Rembrandt self-portrait, together with major works by Ter Borch and Tischbein.*

  If all this seems to be in the dim past, consider the portrait of George Washington which sold at Christie’s in New York for $3,300 in 1987. Barely five months later, after an accommodating expert had certified the painting as the work of Gilbert Stuart, it was resold by Sotheby’s in London for $495,000.

  For every painting thus exalted, a dozen masterpieces are relegated to the limbo of ‘artist unknown’; among them, some of the best-loved paintings of the classical Western canon. This is not to say that they are forgeries, but that our notion of what is authentic has changed. Nowadays most scholars would agree
with Nelson Goodman’s definition: ‘The only way of ascertaining that the Lucretia before us is genuine is thus to establish the historical fact that it is the actual object made by Rembrandt.’ Historically, however, this was not so. In the Italian city-schools of the baroque and in the Amsterdam of Rembrandt’s time, a master painter would sign any painting made under his tutelage. All of these works would once have been thought ‘authentic’, but the emergence of the idea of the artist as a lone genius, a solitary creative force, has irrevocably changed this. In 1920 there were more than seven hundred attributed Rembrandts; today barely three hundred and fifty paintings are thought to be ‘authentic’ in the modern sense, and despite the millions of prints sold every year which attest to the contrary, The Polish Rider (discovered in 1897 by Abraham Bredius) and Man with a Golden Helmet in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie are no longer attributed to the master. Does it matter whether The Polish Rider is by Rembrandt or his pupil Willem Drost – after all is it not the same painting? In a very real sense, it is not: by Drost The Polish Rider is worth about 10 per cent of the same painting when attributed to his tutor.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that Han clung to Bredius’s certificate of attribution. The first hurdle in his daring fraud had been cleared, elegantly, effortlessly, but Han was all too aware that, in the words of Walter Kim, ’The market is the only critic that matters.’

  As they stowed the crate in the vault of the Crédit Lyonnais, Han asked Boon if he would be prepared to handle the sale of the painting, offering the canny lawyer ‘30 per cent of the commission Mavroeke is paying me’. In the excitement, Han had almost forgotten his imaginary Italian lover. Boon readily agreed. Bredius, he told Han, was writing an article on the Emmaus for the Burlington. Han suggested that the sale of the painting should be delayed until it appeared. Excited now, Boon proposed to Han that they go for a drink to celebrate.

  ‘Not yet, my friend, not yet,’ said Han, keenly aware that art is not art until it’s sold. Until then it is merely a storage problem.