I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  Even before Bredius’s article appeared, news of the painting had reached Amsterdam, London and New York. Joseph Duveen, consultant to the Frick Collection, immediately expressed interest in seeing it. He contacted Boon and asked if he might send a representative from his Paris office to view the painting before it was offered for sale. Boon phoned Roquebrune where Han, who knew of Duveen’s formidable reputation, readily agreed. The viewing took place in the vault of the Crédit Lyonnais. When Han called to ask how the meeting had gone, Boon could say only that Duveen’s man had been respectful and polite and had said only that he would discuss the painting with his client. On 4 October the following telegram was dispatched via Western Union:

  NLT DUVEEN

  BOTH SEEN TODAY AT BANK LARGE VERMEER ABOUT FOUR FEET BY THREE CHRISTS SUPPER AT EMMAUS SUPPOSED BELONG PRIVATE FAMILY CERTIFIED BY BREDIUS WHO WRITING ARTICLE BURLINGTON MAG BEGINNING NOVEMBER STOP PRICE £ NINETY THOUSAND STOP PICTURE ROTTEN FAKE STOP

  For Han, it was a chastening experience. Nor was it the only one. Georges Wildenstein, the president of the renowned Paris dealers Wildenstein et Fils also dismissed the painting as a shoddy forgery. Some months later, Margaretta Salinger, a senior research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was to state that she came to the ‘immediate conclusion on viewing the picture that it was not a Vermeer’.

  Van Meegeren’s biographer Lord Kilbracken says that such dissenting voices were ‘forgotten in the wild enthusiasm a few months later’. Fifty years later Thomas Hoving would disingenuously suggest, ‘The word never got out because all the French experts thought the thing too ludicrous to mention.’ If the art world today is a village, in 1937 it was a parish pump: no painting certified by the legendary Bredius which purported to be a Vermeer was ‘too ridiculous to mention’, especially since the aforementioned experts did not voice their opinion even after Bredius’s article was published. The silence of the critis was a combination of professional courtesy and self-serving pragmatism. A public dispute would merely undermine faith in the art market. In this towering edifice of expert opinion, no one was prepared to throw stones.

  Bredius’s article, ‘A New Vermeer’, appeared in the November issue of the Burlington. It was a hymn to everything Han had striven to achieve:

  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! And what a picture! Neither the beautiful signature ‘I. V. Meer’ (I.V.M. in monogram) nor the pointillé on the bread which Christ is blessing, is necessary to convince us that we have here a – I am inclined to say thé – masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.

  The subject is Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus and the colours are magnificent – and characteristic: Christ in a splendid blue; the disciple on the left, whose face is barely visible, in a fine grey; the other disciple on the left [sic] in yellow – the yellow of the famous Vermeer at Dresden, but subdued so that it remains in perfect harmony with the other colours. The servant is clad in dark brown and dark grey; her expression is wonderful. Expression, indeed, is the most marvellous quality of this unique picture. Outstanding is the head of Christ, serene and sad, as He thinks of all the suffering which He, the Son of God, had to pass through in His life on earth, yet full of goodness . . . Jesus is just about to break the bread at the moment when, as related in the New Testament, the eyes of the disciples were opened and they recognised Christ risen from the dead and seated before them. The disciple on the left [sic] seen in profile shows his silent adoration, mingled with astonishment, as he stares at Christ.

  In no other picture by the great Master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story – a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of the highest art.

  As to the period in which Vermeer painted this masterpiece, I believe it belongs to his earlier phase – about the same time (perhaps a little later) as the well-known Christ in the House of Martha and Mary at Edinburgh (formerly in the Coats collection). He had given up painting large compositions because they were difficult to sell, and painters like Dou and Mieris were already getting big prices for their smaller works.

  The reproduction . . . can only give a very inadequate idea of the splendid luminous effect of the rare combination of colours of this magnificent painting by one of the greatest artists of the Dutch school.

  The opening paragraph would have been enough, Han thought, to silence the naysayers – who, in any case, had not proved very vocal – but what followed made him exult: ‘the highest art’, ‘this magnificent painting’. Han read hungrily, watching Bredius piecing together the puzzle he had created: the ‘characteristic’ colours, the nod to Christ in the House of Martha and Mary; Bredius had even gone so far as to contrive a reason why Vermeer had ceased to paint large religious works. The almost comical errors in the article – Bredius writes that the painting is ‘untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration’, failing to notice Han’s deliberate vandalism and clumsy restoration, and twice suggests that the disciple in yellow is on the left – did nothing to detract from what Han thought was a tour de force of the critic’s art: intuition, half-truths and imagination woven into an ecstatic dithyramb.

  Bredius’s final paragraph was telling, however: the reproduction was ugly: the small, muddy black-and-white photograph made the figures look lumpen, the composition cramped, and encouraged the rumour mill. ‘The reproduction . . . did not give an accurate impression of the painting,’ Georges Isalo wrote in the Revue des Beaux-Arts. ‘Immediately, there were rumours: It’s not a Vermeer! It’s a forgery!’ But those who saw the painting itself were utterly convinced: Hannema, the director of the Boijmans and his colleague van Schendel at the Rijksmuseum thought it a masterpiece and vied as to which of the great institutions was to bid for it. The formidable Dutch art dealer D.A. Hoogendijk approached a number of wealthy Dutch patrons attempting to raise the necessary finance. A. M. de Wild, whose The Scientific Examination of Pictures Han had used as a crib sheet in preparing his forgery, was completely convinced.

  Hannema, still irked that Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch, which he had tried hard to acquire, had gone to the Rijksmuseum argued, ‘I have come to the conclusion that everything possible must be done to secure this masterpiece for the Netherlands, and if possible for the Boijmans museum.’ Han encouraged Boon to sell the painting to the Dutch state, claiming that as a work of national importance, it should be repatriated to the country of Vermeer’s birth. In fact, Han knew that playing on the loyalty of his compatriots was the surest way of securing a high price for his work. Besides, Han wanted his painting to hang in a national gallery alongside those he thought of as his peers. And when the time came for him to reveal himself as the architect of this masterpiece, he wanted all of those who had scorned him to pay heed.

  D.A. Hoogendijk contacted W. van der Vorm, a Dutch shipping magnate and patron of the arts, who agreed to put up the lion’s share of the money needed to secure the painting. The balance came from the Rembrandt Society and a number of smaller private donations, among them a generous contribution from Abraham Bredius himself. The painting was acquired for 520,000 guilders and donated to the Boijmans Gallery.

  Now that the painting was sold, the press coverage began in earnest: there were stories of the discovery in newspapers from Berlin to New York, sagacious profiles of Vermeer in the Sunday supplements, feature articles on the treasure to be found in one’s attic. In the hundreds of column-inches, not a single dissenting opinion appeared: the critics who wrote were collectively awed, admiring, deferential; in the weeks, the months, the years that followed no one who doubted the authenticity of the painting dared to wield a pen. An unspoken consensus had been reached and those in the art world toed the party line. For Han, it was conclusive proof that critics worldwide merely aped each other’s posturing, parroted the sam
e opinions: he felt vindicated. He longed to howl his authorship from the rooftops, but there would be time, there would be time . . .

  14

  ALTERCATION WITH A MUSEUM GUARD

  The ordinary man casts

  a shadow in a way we do

  not quite understand. The

  man of genius casts light.

  George Steiner

  What can we say about the Emmaus? Is it, as Bredius thought, a luminous magnificent masterpiece? In Thomas Bodkin’s introduction to the catalogue raisonné of Vermeer’s work in 1940, while lamenting that so few works by the master existed, he added: ‘Occasionally a sensational discovery, such as that of the superb Supper at Emmaus, which was found a few years ago in the linen-cupboard of a house in Paris,* occurs to remind us that similar possibilities are not exhausted.’ By 1967, John Godley (Lord Kilbracken) in his biography of Han was to write: ‘The fact that it is a forgery detracts immeasurably from its value as a work of art, but it is a fine picture and, by any standards, better than any other he had painted in his own name or was to paint in the future.’ Godley goes on to suggest that ‘There seems little doubt [but for the events that followed] . . . that the Emmaus would still be the pride of the Boijmans.’ By 1991, Han would find little admiration even among his peers: the British forger Eric Hebborn in his autobiography Drawn to Trouble is damningly succinct in suggesting ‘. . . van Meegeren was neither a skilled painter nor a good draughtsman’. Later still, Thomas Hoving in False Impressions dismissed Han’s most famous work as ‘a monstrous daub’ though he reluctantly acknowledged the fact that ‘Sadly, plenty of contemporary aestheticians and deconstructivist art philosophers affirm that the van Meegeren garbage is as satisfactory as a genuine Vermeer.’

  What we know of a painting invariably colours how we see it. Armed with the knowledge that The Supper at Emmaus is a forgery, it becomes difficult to arrive at an objective opinion, to disentangle the artist’s work from what we know about it. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger explores the ways in which words can change not only how we see, but the very nature of what we see. On page twenty-seven, Berger reproduces a Van Gogh painting with the simple caption: This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment. Then turn the page.

  When the page is turned, we find a reproduction of the same painting, now with the handwritten caption: This is the last painting that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.

  As Berger points out, ‘It is difficult to define how the words have changed the image, but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.’

  Some statements go beyond merely influencing what we see. In semantics, certain phrases are known as ‘performatives’ because they perform an act or create a state of affairs when uttered under appropriate or conventional circumstances. When spoken by a priest or an authorised registrar, the phrase ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ is a performative: the marriage begins the moment the words are spoken. When uttered by an art expert, the phrase ‘This is a forgery’ is a performative, capable of transforming beautiful, intensely lyrical works universally proclaimed as masterpieces into manifest dross. The moment someone tells us that a painting is a forgery it somehow seems unthinkable that it was ever accepted as genuine. Suddenly, we can see its every flaw – the hesitancy of the forger’s hand, the shallowness of his palette, his superficial grasp of anatomy, of light, of perspective. As John Berger affirms, ‘It is authentic and therefore it is beautiful.’

  There are those, however, who believe that Han van Meegeren utterly succeeded not only in painting like Vermeer, but in becoming the master. From the outset, it is true, Han’s quest was curiously similar to that of the hero of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Jorge Luis Borges’s story takes the form of a critical essay about the work of a French symbolist poet who does not wish to translate, much less transcribe Don Quixote; instead, ‘his admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided – word for word, line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.’ In pursuit of the seemingly impossible quest, Menard first considers becoming Cervantes: wiping three centuries of European history from his mind, converting to Catholicism, seeking out some Moors and Turks to fight. In the end, he decides: ‘the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting.’ The real challenge is ‘coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard’.

  Without reference to the original, Pierre Menard succeeds in writing chapters IX and XXXVIII of Book I of Don Quixote and a fragment from chapter XXII which coincide exactly with Cervantes’s original. To the reader, it may seem an absurd feat, and yet to the critic whose essay forms the backbone of the fiction, while ‘the Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, the second is almost infinitely richer.’

  The contrast between the styles is equally noticeable. The archaic style of Menard – a foreigner, after all – suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his predecessor, who confidently manipulates the everyday Spanish of his own time.

  So too, Maurice Moiseiwitsch in his biographical study The Van Meegeren Mystery when he writes, without a whit of irony:

  In the final analysis, one may say that Van Meegeren’s Christ in Emmaus is every bit as good as Vermeer’s best work and that he was just as skilful a painter as the Master. In a sense, Han’s achievement is greater than Vermeer’s. Every artist knows it is far easier to paint or write or compose in one’s natural idiom than produce an original work in the style employed by another. For Shaw to have written Shaw’s plays is proof of genius; but for Shaw to have written a play attributed to Chekhov – and first-class Chekhov at that – is all but a test beyond human reckoning.

  In the autumn of 1938, none of these considerations mattered. The Supper at Emmaus was not yet a van Meegeren, it was something rarer and more exquisite – an unseen canvas by the great Johannes Vermeer van Delft. The knowledge that it had been painted by one of the finest painters in the canon of Western art coloured the judgement of all who saw it. All that remained now was for the newly authenticated masterpiece to be presented to the public. Han intended to return to Roquebrune to wait quietly and soberly for the inaugural exhibition of the Emmaus at the Boijmans Gallery, but was distracted somewhat by a lissom, blonde Swedish girl, with whom he spent a wild, extravagant week in Paris.

  He met her on the third night of his ‘quiet private celebration’ of his success in the Tsarewitsch, ‘a nightclub of great refinement and lax morals, with prices to match’. She worked as a dancer. He was wearing the sober grey suit and tie he favoured, his greying hair was slicked back, his slightly sinister moustache waxed. He ordered a magnum of champagne and an ounce of caviar. When the orchestra played, he asked a dusky, big-hipped girl to dance, and invited her to join him at his table. Another magnum of Krug 1928, another dance and he brought back to the table a flaxen-haired Swedish girl, a silk butterfly primly veiling her pudenda and fishnet stockings accentuating long legs that went all the way up to the wallet in his breast pocket. Her friends joined them. The raucous, slightly peculiar Dutchman bought drinks for clubbers at the neighbouring tables. To ward off starvation, he ordered another ounce of sevruga caviar, feeding the overpriced fish eggs to bored, smiling dancing girls busy doing mental arithmetic. He would later boast that he asked the orchestra leader to play Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.

  In this first long, debauched week, Han was invariably too drunk to consummate his infidelity, but still he bought his Swedish girl small exquisite gifts, and in a flurry of guilt spent his afternoons, hung-over, buying jewellery to give to Joanna. By the time he arrived back at Primavera, he was beginning to worry. When he revealed himself as the author of the Emmaus, he would have to repay the money. Almost a third had already disappeared in fees and commissions and his week in Paris had made a noticeable dent in the remainder, but, he reasoned, with the fame from the Emmaus, he would easily make the money to p
ay everything back.

  His sudden wealth was no mystery to Joanna since, despite the couple’s later protestations, Han’s wife certainly knew of the forgery, but to the citizens of Roquebrune and the maître d’hôtel in every restaurant in Monte Carlo, Han claimed that he had won the gros lot in the French national lottery. He boasted about it to croupiers in the casinos where his gambling began to take a pathological turn, mentioned it in the local bars every time he bought a round of drinks. It was meagre compensation for the recognition he had long been denied, but he could not yet boast about the masterpiece which had earned him half a million guilders.

  In Rotterdam, the director of the Boijmans personally supervised the arrival of the pride of his collection. Despite Bredius’s insistence that it was ‘untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration’, Hannema realised that before it could be exhibited it would have to be cleaned, remounted and framed. He entrusted the task to a man named Luitweiler, the most respected restorer in the Netherlands. Luitweiler decided that the seventeenth-century canvas was too fragile to work on and therefore elected to have it ‘recanvased’ – a painstaking process which entailed picking away the fabric of the original canvas fragment by fragment and attaching it to a new one. When Luitweiler had finished, all that remained of the canvas which had once held The Raising of Lazarus were the edges. He could not know that the frayed fringes of the original would one day be a matter of life and death to Han. A new stretcher was made for the painting and the old one preserved for historical purposes. Only then did Luitweiler begin the process of restoration. With a dilute alcohol solution, he stripped off the top layer of varnish and then carefully began to remove Han’s inept ‘restoration’ work. He repaired the small tear over Christ’s right hand. Then, preparing small batches of paint and testing them to ensure they exactly matched the luminous colours of the Emmausgängers, he delicately repainted the areas which he assumed centuries of wear and mishandling had worn thin. Lastly, he applied a new layer of untinted varnish so that the dazzling canvas might be seen at its best. An ornate frame in the seventeenth-century style had been commissioned for the painting and once the canvas had been framed, it was returned to the Boijmans for display.