I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  ‘A copy?’ Han coughed on his life-giving smoke. ‘To paint a copy is no proof of artistic talent. In all my career I have never painted a copy!’ He quickly considered the proposal – it was too tempting to resist. ‘I shall paint you an original. A new work in the Vermeer style, that should be proof enough for you.’

  ‘There will have to be official witnesses . . .’

  ‘Bring anyone you like, but I will not paint it here in this cell. I shall need access to my studio, pigments and canvas, and if I am to create then I must be allowed the morphine I need in order to be calm. But I shall paint you a masterpiece.’

  18

  GLORY’S SMALL CHANGE

  A hero is born among a hundred,

  a wise man is found among a

  thousand, but an accomplished

  one might not be found even

  among a hundred thousand men.

  Plato

  On Friday 13 July, Joop Piller held a press conference at which he announced to a handful of incredulous reporters that the case against the suspected Nazi traitor Han van Meegeren was being reconsidered in the light of new information.

  The suspect, Piller announced to the journalists, now claimed that Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, the Vermeer which had been sold to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was in truth a forgery. In fact, he added, Mijnheer van Meegeren had confessed to forging a dozen works by Vermeer and other artists, many of them in prestigious public and private collections – chief among them The Supper at Emmaus, the pride of the Boijmans Gallery and the most visited painting in the Netherlands.

  At a second press conference some days later, a junior officer gave details of Han’s confession which, he emphasised, were as yet uncorroborated. Asked whether the charges of treason had been dropped, the officer declined to comment, stating only that the case against van Meegeren was being reviewed. He did, however, confirm that Han had agreed to paint a new Vermeer under the watchful eyes of a rotating detail of prison officers. The press, he added, would be permitted to attend. Immediately, there was chaos. National newspapers dispatched journalists and photographers to cover this curious trial by ordeal. Stringers for foreign newspapers relayed the incredible story to their editors who sent correspondents from London and Paris. One of the Dutch tabloids gleefully ran the front-page headline: ‘HIJ SCHILDERT VOOR ZIJN LEVEN!’: ‘HE PAINTS FOR HIS LIFE!’

  Han, who was still in custody, was not allowed to return to the studio in his home on the Keizersgracht, but an entire floor of the offices of the Allied Art Commission was provided for him to use as a studio. Pigments and ores were procured for him, phials of oil of lilac and canisters of phenol and formaldehyde. From the recently reopened artists’ supplies shops a large canvas was obtained and sufficient quantities of gesso, umber, ochre and carmine. Some enterprising soul even succeeded in obtaining a few scant ounces of raw lapis lazuli with which Han could make ultramarine.

  Recalling his arrival, flanked by the two officers who would invigilate at these unusual proceedings, van Waning Heemskerk was impressed by the forger: ‘He was a most interesting man – just like an artist ought to be, with always a cigarette in one corner of his mouth, and that famous nice hair he had, grey, with a wave in it – he was a charming man to look at, let us say, but don’t trust him . . .’ Photographers and television crews arrived at the Herengracht studio, journalists barked questions to Han as he began preparing his pigments.

  For his valedictory Vermeer, Han chose a subject he had painted for his disastrous second solo exhibition in 1922: The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple. For four or five hours each day, supplied with liberal quantities of Bols jenever and morphine, Han, incongruous in his prison overalls, stood beneath the glare of the photographers’ arc lights and sketched out the huge canvas. Each time he stopped for a cigarette he chatted good-naturedly to the prison detail assigned to observe, eager for news of developments in his case. It was a prison officer who informed him that the paintings he had claimed to have forged had been seized by the police and were now being held at an undisclosed location. Neither journalists nor experts were allowed to view them while arrangements were being made for the director of the Central Laboratory of Belgian Museums, P.B. Coremans, to have them forensically examined.

  As soon as the pentimento was complete and he began the modelling on the face of the androgynous Young Christ and the delicate folds of his ultramarine tunic, it was clear to everyone present that this was a man easily capable of painting The Adulteress, perhaps an artist talented enough to produce The Supper at Emmaus. There were hysterical reports in the press alleging that Han had painted The View of Delft, Girl with the Pearl Earring, every Vermeer in the Netherlands. Slowly, as the weeks passed, the painting began to take shape: the hooded eyes recalled the Emmaus, the faces of the jurisconsults kneeling rapt about the figure of the transfigured Christ were those of the disciples in The Last Supper. The painting took Han two months to complete, and while it is far from being the consummate masterpiece Han had promised his captors, it is a significant improvement on The Footwashing and The Adulteress. Before it was complete, Han learned from his guards that the public prosecutor had dropped the charges of collaborating with the enemy and that, although new charges had yet to be filed, he was not to be charged with forgery – a crime which did not exist in the Dutch statute books – but with ‘obtaining money by deception’ and ‘appending false names and signatures with the intent to deceive’ in breach of articles 326 and 326b of the Dutch Penal Code. Immediately he heard the decision, Han, reluctant to offer evidence which the prosecutor might use against him, refused to age The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple or to forge Vermeer’s signature.

  Until a date could be set for his trial, and pending forensic examination of the paintings, Han was released on bail and returned to the Keizersgracht home he still shared with Jolanthe. He was weak from his spell in prison and regularly complained of chest pains. Jo attempted to persuade him to stay home and rest, but Han, who had longed for celebrity, could not forswear his audience. He would go out every evening in his sober suit, his florid cravat, and revel in his infamy in the little bars of the negen straatjes, the warren of tiny streets where the art and antique dealers liked to drink. He would sit sipping a jenever and wait to be recognised. Sometimes his son Jacques went with him. At last he had come into his kingdom.

  On 5 November Han’s determination to be found guilty of committing masterpieces took a blow. Jean Decoen, an eminent Belgian art historian and critic, wrote an article for the magazine La Lanterne expressing doubts about Han’s confession: ‘The arguments and proofs adduced have by no means convinced me’, Decoen wrote, offering to ‘give at once . . . the reasons which lead me to doubt the veracity of the statements of van Meegeren’. It was strange that Decoen should have come to such a categorical verdict since he had not yet seen or examined any of the suspect Vermeers, nor had he visited the Boijmans during the exhibition at which The Supper at Emmaus was first displayed. Even so, he confidently wrote, ‘of any forged Vermeers I have seen, none can be compared with The Disciples at Emmaus, and if van Meegeren is the author of it, I salute him. The case would be unique in the history of painting . . .’ This much, at least, was true: no modern painter had ever attempted to conjure an old master from the ether. In the words of Decoen’s contemporary Louis Hertig, ‘A complete forgery is uncommon, with an old painting it is impossible. To paint a seventeenth-century canvas today can only result in a work that is not viable.’

  In December 1945, though the charges against Han had not yet been filed, the Official Receiver began proceedings to recover the proceeds of Han’s fraud, something which would rapidly result in Han being declared bankrupt. Though it was not yet admitted that all, or indeed any of the questionable paintings were forgeries, and the government commission to examine the forensic and aesthetic qualities of the paintings had not yet convened, claims for compensation were invited from van Meegeren’s victims. D.G. Van Beuningen, W. van
der Vorm and Dirk Hannema of the Boijmans Gallery petitioned the Official Receiver to recover a total of 4.35 million guilders. The Dutch state, on behalf of the Rijksmuseum, sued to recover the 1.3 million guilders paid for The Washing of Christ’s Feet, and – since Reichsmarschall Göring was a war criminal now in Nuremberg awaiting trial – the 1.6 million paid by the Nazi administration for Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery. In addition, the Belastingdienst – the Dutch tax office – insisted that Han pay income and capital gains tax on his undeclared income for the previous decade, a claim they insisted should take precedence over all others.

  The mathematics of the claims against Han’s estate were absurd. Of the 7.25 million guilders paid for his forgeries, Han had received about 5 million – the balance had been paid in fees and commissions to G.A. Boon, Rens Strijbis, Jan Kok and Hoogendijk. The claimants, however, were insisting that Han reimburse the full purchase price of all the paintings. Had Han been able to repay this amount, his net earnings from the sale of the forgeries would be zero, yet he would still owe the state more than 5 million guilders in unpaid tax.

  The matter, however, was academic: of the 5 million guilders Han had received, he had already frittered away 1.5 million (equivalent to an annual expenditure of $1.3 million a year). A further 900,000 guilders had been seized in 1943 when Han had attempted to convert his 1,000-guilder banknotes. In his divorce settlement Han had given Joanna another 800,000 guilders and almost half a million more was still scattered in metal boxes in heating ducts, radiator covers, gardens and attics in properties throughout the country, never to be found. Han’s assets – the houses, hotels and nightclubs he owned – were valued at less than 2 million guilders. All of these, together with the house on the Keizersgracht – which was in Joanna’s name – and their contents, including Han’s collection of antiques and genuine old masters, would in time be auctioned off to cover his debts.

  The statute of limitations on fraud, Han’s lawyer Maître Helding advised him, is seven years, so it was a small comfort to realise that the money from The Supper at Emmaus – bought on behalf of the Boijmans eight years earlier – would not have to be refunded. For Han’s day-to-day expenses the Official Receiver allowed him a small monthly stipend. For the rest, he depended on handouts from Joanna, whose divorce settlement could not be sequestered. ‘Jo asks nothing for herself,’ he told Cootje, ‘she just gives and gives. It’s rather foolish of her from a financial standpoint, considering the millions I gave away.’

  Jo’s handouts financed his riotous lifestyle. Far from being chastened by his brush with the law, Han was determined to drink life down to the lees. He spent long evenings with Cootje in her studio, which he ensured was always well stocked with food, wine and fine cigars – a difficult task given the continued rationing. He clearly loved this tender, timid creature and was worried that having destroyed her marriage, she would be left with nothing when everything he owned was sold off. Carefully, he began to put together a ‘shoebox’ for Cootje, smuggling jewellery, gemstones and valuable old coins and even a number of genuine old masters out of the Keizersgracht house and the clutches of the bailiffs. But even the comforts afforded him by the creature he called ‘this sweet irruption in my life’, did not allay his obsession with die meisjes van het Plein, ‘the girls on the square’. Cootje allowed him to invite them back to the studio on the Oudezijds Burgwal where they warmed themselves and feasted on fine food and jenever. They danced naked around the wood stove as Han sketched their lithe bodies, gaunt from the hardships of the ‘Hunger Winter’. By now, the bacchanal was mostly in his head, he was paying the girls – with trinkets and jewellery – simply for their company.

  In the wider world Han’s popularity was still soaring. A 1946 newspaper poll ranked him second only to Louis Beel, an archetypal patriot who was to become prime minister of the first postwar Dutch government. Publishers wrote suggesting Han write his memoirs, television stations wanted to make documentary films. An American tycoon made an astounding proposition – he would buy back all of Han’s forged Vermeers at their original purchase price, thereby allowing Han to repay his creditors, and fly the famous forger to America where he would spend a year touring with an exhibition of his works and offering masterclasses in painting new ‘old masters’. Han declined all offers, though he collaborated with his close friend Marie-Louise Doudart de la Grée on Emmaus: A Novel, a fictionalised account of his path to glory, which became a bestseller.

  In the meantime, infinitely slowly, the cogs of criminal investigation ground steadily on, led by an intrepid inspector named Wooning. Han proved a supremely co-operative felon, giving Wooning a tour of his Amsterdam studio and handing over the keys to his villas in Laren and Nice. He offered the gruff, plain-speaking officer directions as to where evidence might be found. In Amsterdam and in De Wijdte in Laren, Wooning found raw materials for pigments, canisters of phenol and formaldehyde, brushes and canvases, but in the Villa Estate he found a wealth of incriminating evidence. Although the villa had been abandoned for years, it was remarkably as Han and Jo had left it. Wooning began his search in the basement which had served as Han’s ‘laboratory’. There he found four finished forgeries: two in the style of Vermeer – A Woman Reading Music and A Woman Playing Music – an unfinished Portrait of a Man in the style of Gerard Ter Borch and a sketch for a variation of Frans Hals’s Malle Babbe which P.B. Coremans would later comment ‘was as good as any of the works of Hals’s pupil Judith Lyster’. Propped on an easel was a canvas with a preliminary sketch for a new Pieter de Hooch and nearby a ‘blank’ canvas from which the original had been painstakingly removed and a priming layer added. A convincing age crackle had been induced across the entire surface. There was, however, no sign of the large oven which Han claimed he had used to ‘bake’ his forgeries, though, following Han’s instruction, he found a spar – the twenty-inch section of wood which Han had cut from the Emmaus stretcher, but the strip of canvas which Han claimed to have cut from The Raising of Lazarus before painting the Emmaus was not to be found.

  Despite the abundance of circumstantial evidence corroborating Han’s confession, the Belgian critic Jean Decoen remained convinced that the Emmaus and The Last Supper were genuine Vermeers. He accepted that The Woman Taken in Adultery, The Footwashing and Isaac Blessing Jacob were crude imitations by a second-rate artist suffering a folie de grandeur. As an amateur art dealer, he alleged, Han had discovered two genuine Vermeers, the Emmausgängers and Het Laatste Avondmaal, exactly as he had first claimed, and, flushed by his success in selling them, had contrived and sold the later forgeries, relying on their similarity to Vermeer’s masterworks. Decoen was finally issued a visa to travel from Brussels to Amsterdam, where he asked if he might examine the Vermeers Han claimed to have painted. Embarrassed by the press coverage of the van Meegeren affair, the authorities declined but, when the critic persisted, permitted Decoen to examine The Supper at Emmaus and The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple. Having studied the works, Decoen wrote a second article for La Lanterne in which he stated: ‘The least that can be said of this affair is that we are dealing with a disturbing hoax. The painting in the Boijmans is a genuine work of the seventeenth century and is by Jan Vermeer of Delft. In painting The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple, van Meegeren has proved beyond doubt that he could not have executed the Emmaus.’

  In the spring of 1946, Han learned that his trial, scheduled for May, was to be postponed. The case against him had not been made. Meanwhile, on 13 March in the crowded courtroom in Nuremberg, his unwitting nemesis Hermann Göring, wearing a grey uniform and yellow boots, took his seat in the witness chair. He had little time to think of art, which only a year before had been his passion. According to Jonathan Petropoulos’s Art as Politics in the Third Reich:

  Göring filled all of his homes with artworks, though Carinhall, a huge, Norse-style structure, was his showpiece and therefore the repository of his most valuable pieces. By mid-1944 a visitor would enter the great atrium of Carinhal
l and witness a stunning array of artworks, with the center of the room dominated by four huge canvasses: two Hans Memling portrayals of the Madonna and child, a Madonna and child by Lochner, and Han van Meegeren’s Christ and the Adulteress.

  The former Reichsmarschall learned that Han van Meegeren had forged his treasured ‘Vermeer’ while a prisoner in Nuremberg.

  According to a contemporary account: ‘he looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.’

  19

  A DIRIGIBLE ARBITRAMENT

  I forgot to ask you first what

  sort of acquittal you want.

  There are three possibilities,

  that is, definite acquittal,

  ostensible acquittal, and

  indefinite postponement . . .

  Franz Kafka, The Trial

  On 29 October 1947, Han van Meegeren stepped from his house at 321 Keizersgracht to face the mob of waiting journalists. Tastefully dressed in an ultramarine suit, a teal shirt and a cobalt blue tie, his hair like hoarfrost slicked back from his proud high forehead, his moustaches clipped and waxed, he looked every inch the aesthete. Chatting and joking with the press, he ambled south along the Keizersgracht, parrying questions as he went. The reporters could not know that his leisurely pace owed more to the minor heart-attack he had suffered during the summer which had required him to spend a month convalescing from acute angina in the soothing gothic halls of the Valeriuskliniek.

  The motley troupe crossed the canal at Huidenstraat, Han pausing for a moment to gaze south towards the Leidseplein, where his ‘little girls’ plied their trade by night. He smiled, turning back to answer a reporter from the London Times. Traders from the antique shops on the Runstraat stood in their doorways to watch this curious procession as it passed. In a burst of late summer sun, the cortège turned left on to the Prinsengracht. Someone sitting on the terrace of Het Molenpad called out ‘Veel geluk’, Maître’ as he passed. Han shook his head – he was not hoping for good luck; he, more than his enemies, more than the prosecuting counsel, more than his victims wanted a guilty verdict.