I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  More than two years had passed since Han’s momentous confession, eighteen months since the first scheduled date for the trial. The law’s delay was not the result of Han’s proud contumely, but of the dissent among expert voices about just which and how many forgeries Han had painted. About six of the eight pictures there was no dispute: the de Hooch genre paintings, it was agreed, were forgeries – accomplished but derivative; of the Vermeers, it was universally accepted that Han had painted the Head of Christ, Isaac Blessing Jacob, The Woman Taken in Adultery and The Washing of Christ’s Feet, but The Supper at Emmaus was still enthusiastically acclaimed a Vermeer by the art historian Jean Decoen and the director of the Boijmans, Dirk Hannema. As to The Last Supper, Daniël van Beuningen had at first refused to accept that his Vermeer was anything other than a masterpiece, but being a pragmatic businessman, when claims were filed against Han’s estate, van Beuningen sued for the full purchase price of both The Last Supper and Interior with Drinkers. In the two years that followed, persuaded in part by the certainty of Decoen and Hannema and in part by his own instinct, he had begun to waver.

  Such matters should have been settled beyond question by the Coremans Commission, which had been established by the Dutch state to examine all the paintings. Judge G.J. Wiarda, the titular head of the commission, was ignorant of the arts so the driving force had been P.B. Coremans. It was Coremans who appointed the members of the commission: W. Froentjes, official adviser on matters of chemistry to the Department of Justice, J-Q. van Regteren Altena, professor at the University of Amsterdam and Dr H. Schneider, who had been director of the Department for the History of Art. Lastly, A.M. de Wild, whose publications had proved such a boon to van Meegeren in his art crimes, and who had enthusiastically acclaimed each new forgery as genuine, was belatedly asked to join the commission which was to denounce them all. The results of their extensive forensic and aesthetic deliberations had postponed Han’s day in court.

  As Han rounded the bow of the Prinsengracht, the Gerechtshof – the Palace of Justice – hove into view, the reflections of its neoclassical pilasters and Corinthian capitals iridescent in the waters of the canal. The first stone of what had once been an almshouse was laid in the year in which Vermeer painted Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the model for Han’s first forgery, A Woman Reading Music. Crossing the canal a thrill of excitement mingled with dread surged through him to see the hundreds of journalists and onlookers, admirers and adversaries who had been queuing since before sunrise hoping to squeeze into the Fourth Chamber of the District Assize Court. Han was a national hero, a pricker of pomposity, a slayer of dragons. A small troupe of the glitterati – poets, painters and authors – had rallied to the cause. Among them, Simon Vestdijk, the most popular Dutch writer of his generation, Lodewijk van Deyssel, a legendary figure on the Dutch literary scene and Kees Verwey, a respected Haarlem-born artist. The unofficial ringleader of this merry band was his biographer, Marie-Louise Doudart de la Grée, but his most vocal advocate was the immensely popular humorist, journalist and author Godfried Bomans, who declared in his daily column, ‘It is not the Vermeers, but the experts who authenticated them that are fakes!’ Bomans proposed that a statue be erected to Han van Meegeren, and set up a foundation to raise money. No statue was ever built.

  International interest in the trial might have faded in the years since Han’s confession, had it not been for Irving Wallace, whose story The Man Who Swindled Goering for the Saturday Evening Post had catapulted Han to worldwide fame. Perhaps Wallace saw in Han a vindication of his own personal maxim: ‘To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.’ Perhaps, as a bestselling novelist and screenwriter, he simply recognised a good story. Whatever his motives, he fashioned a version of events which could have been written by the forger himself. Weaving fragments of Han’s confession with a dash of derring-do, Wallace airbrushed Han’s questionable politics and decadent lifestyle to craft a tale of one man’s wiles and talent pitted against international Fascism. It was so sensational, so partisan, so irresistible that journalists around the world clamoured to attend the trial. It was a story Wallace would tell again and again, adapting it for radio (where Han was played by the Oscar-winning Paul Muni) and later for television.

  Han stood for a moment, gazing up at the Latin inscription carved above the entrance: ‘Under your guiding light, Willem, this almshouse has been rebuilt, sacred to Justice and to the Law.’ His lawyer, Maître E. Heldring, was waiting for him on the steps, and together they walked into the still shadows of the courthouse, leaving the hum of spectators outside.

  Maître Heldring’s advice was simple: say nothing. In a bid to expedite justice (and minimise the embarrassment of all) Han’s trial, which had been two and a half years in preparation, would last less than six hours, the seventeen witnesses for the prosecution averaging less than seven minutes in the witness box. With the exception of his closing argument, Maître Heldring would barely speak. He would call no witnesses in Han’s defence and though he may have wished to venomously grill the experts ranged for the prosecution, he realised that it was pointless. The prosecution could argue either that Han was exceptionally talented or the experts exceptionally stupid. Either amounted to a victory for the defence.

  As the two men entered the empty Fourth Chamber, Han whistled softly. The dark oak-panelled walls of the central court were hung with a retrospective of his finest work. The judge’s bench was flanked on the right by the Emmaus and on the left by The Last Supper, utterly dwarfing the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. Isaac Blessing Jacob hung above the dock where he now took his seat. The remainder of his Vermeers and de Hoochs stared down from the prosecutor’s side. In the brief minutes while H.A. Wassenbergh, the public prosecutor, and his team filed into the room, Han gazed in awe at what he had achieved. The Head of Christ to the left of the magistrate’s bench seemed faded now, the colours less brilliant, The Footwashing and The Adulteress were faintly embarrassing, but his first forgery, which had made him rich and made Vermeer a household name, still seemed to him to be timeless. He half-believed he had discovered rather than created them.

  Shortly before 10 a.m., the public were admitted. Jacques and Inez sat behind him with Joanna. Cootje sat on his right, smiling at him. The paparazzi called out to him, and he dutifully posed like a man born to it: with his glasses and without, against the backdrop of the Emmaus and framed by the royal ensign of the judge’s bench. He waved to his supporters, chatted to the journalists: few self-confessed criminals can have looked so relaxed at their own trial.

  At 10 a.m. precisely, the court rose for Judge W.G.A. Boll. The court was called to order and the judge asked that a summary of the charges be read – the full charge sheet, running to eight foolscap pages, was dispensed with.

  ‘Are you Henricus Antonius van Meegeren?’ asked the judge.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you admit the charges brought against you?’

  ‘I do.’

  The trial might have ended there were it not for the doubts of Decoen and Hannema. The burden of proof, therefore, fell on the prosecution to prove the inveterate liar’s confession true. Han was charged with multiple counts of obtaining money by deception by falsely representing his own works as those of Johannes Vermeer van Delft and Pieter de Hooch; he was further charged with adding false signatures to paintings with the intent to deceive.

  The evidence presented was interesting for what was left unsaid: since the statute of limitations on the Emmaus had been reached, witnesses would not be questioned about its authentication and sale. The Boijmans Gallery would be spared the public ignominy heaped on those who were called to testify. More curious still was the fact that the circumstances surrounding the sale to Reichsmarschall Göring of Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, the incident which had first sparked the investigation, would not be discussed. In part, was because those involved in the sale could not be called: Hermann Göring was dea
d, having cheated his executioners, committing suicide hours before he was to be executed, and his ambassadors Rienstra van Strijvesande, Alois Miedl and Walter Hofer had long since fled. Even so, the questionable nature of the sale and the accusations of collaborating with the enemy were not mentioned. A lone Dutch newspaper would lament that ‘the political nature of the case was not publicly mentioned’. Everything about the trial was arranged to cause as little embarrassment as possible to the experts who had authenticated the works, the dealers who had sold them and the art world which had acclaimed them.

  In concert, like a choir rising for a chorale, the seven members of the Coremans Commission rose as one to be sworn in. To each, in turn, the prosecutor put two questions:

  ‘Are the paintings you have examined, in your considered opinion, contemporary?’

  Each dutifully agreed that they were.

  ‘Do you believe that these works could have been painted by Han van Meegeren?’

  Again, the members of the commission assented.

  Then the judge ordered that the blackout drapes be drawn so that P.B. Coremans could present the findings of the commission. A blaze of white illuminated an enormous screen positioned at an angle to the left of the bench. There was a second of darkness, then the Emmaus appeared, larger than life, luminous, shimmering, and Coremans began to speak.

  ‘I must confess, sir, that we find your oeuvre excellent, indeed it is phenomenal.’

  From the dock, Han smiled in the half-light: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It is not easy to admit you have made fools of us, but your work was so carefully conceived to bridge the chasm between two important phases in Vermeer’s career – a period about which we know nothing. Furthermore, for some of us, your work satisfied a personal, secret ambition to discover once in our lifetime a truly great masterpiece. Knowing our desires, you laid a trap; some of us walked in eagerly, others less quickly, but in the end we were all caught out. It was our devotion, our enthusiasm which allowed us to be taken in, our search for truth and beauty blinded and betrayed us.’

  In a lecture lasting half an hour, Coremans used slides and X-rays of the paintings to illustrate the committee’s findings. Han, he stated, had co-operated fully with the commission’s investigation – in fact, without his help, much that was found would never have come to light. As Coremans flashed up X-rays of the paintings, he referred to the detailed sketches Han had provided of the paintings over which he had created his forgeries. On the Emmaus, X-ray examination had identified the troublesome head of Martha which Han had been unable to remove ‘in the position and of the dimensions indicated by the defendant’ and the patch of lead white Han had tried to incorporate into the tablecloth. Though the underpaintings of the other forgeries generally corresponded with Han’s sketches, Han had claimed that the underpainting of The Last Supper was a depiction of two children in a cart being drawn by a goat. X-rays had, however, revealed sections of a painting of Horses and Riders by an unknown artist. Coremans did not dwell on the discrepancy.

  Showing the magistrates a close-up of the Emmaus, he explained that although the age crackle in the forgeries was superficially similar to that of a genuine old master, X-rays had shown that it was too homogeneous to have occurred naturally and must, therefore, have been artificially induced. Indicating the magnified crackle, he testified that a blackish substance, later identified as Indian ink, had been used to simulate the presence of dirt and dust. On more than one of the paintings, ink had leached into areas of lead white paint, creating a bluish nimbus.

  As to Han’s claim that he had cut down the canvas and stretcher of The Raising of Lazarus before painting the Emmaus, Coremans demonstrated that the left-hand side of the Emmaus canvas was markedly different from the others. On three sides of the canvas, the threads were curved and warped from centuries of tension, on the left-hand edge, the fibres were straight. In addition, the original stretcher had been cut down by 49.5 cm. The rings denoting the age of the fragment of wood found at the Villa Estate in Nice were identical to those in the stretcher (which Luitweiler had had the foresight to preserve for the Boijmans for historical purposes); furthermore, the fragment discovered in Nice showed marks of woodworm which precisely matched the stretcher.

  Coremans summarised the chemical tests performed on the paintings. Traces of cobalt blue – a pigment which had not been invented in Vermeer’s time – had been found in the surface layer of A Woman Reading Music, a painting which had never been offered for sale, and in The Adulteress. Further, the surface of the paintings, unlike a genuine old master, was lustreless and porous. Testing had revealed that the paintings were impervious not only to alcohol, but to caustic potash, a substance which would normally cause even centuries-old paint to desaponify. Traces of phenol and formaldehyde, which the accused claimed to have used as a medium, were found in the surface layers of all the paintings.

  In the commission’s conclusions, only one artistic inconsistency emerged: radiography indicated that Vermeer created the characteristic luminosity of his faces by slowly building a series of thin layers of translucent lakes and glaze over a white lead ground; the paintings examined by the commission displayed no such technique.

  For half an hour, Coremans offered an erudite dissection of Han’s technique, the composition of each paint layer, the details of each underpainting, the impetus and heft of each brushstroke. The import of this analysis was lost on the journalists and observers who heaved a collective sigh of relief when the projector was switched off and sunlight flooded back into the courtroom. Judge Boll asked the defendant if he had any comment to make on the presentation.

  ‘I find this work excellent,’ Han, gently mocking, echoed Coremans’s compliment. ‘Indeed it is phenomenal. In fact, to me this work seems much more ingenious than – say – painting The Supper at Emmaus.’

  There was a ripple of laughter.

  The prosecution called A.M. de Wild, a man in the unenviable position of having enthusiastically advised the Dutch state to purchase The Footwashing only to serve on the commission which denounced it as a forgery. Far from being chastened by his errors, de Wild proved an arrogant witness, eager to claim some shred of glory from the debacle.

  ‘The test required to identify the defendant’s pigments I found rather easy,’ he testified, ‘since it soon became clear that in order to create his quasi-old paints, the accused had borrowed a formula from my treatise on the methods of Vermeer and de Hooch.’

  The judge rapped his gavel to keep the court in check.

  ‘Indeed certain impurities that I mention as being found in Vermeer’s paint are also to be found in van Meegeren’s.’

  ‘And yet you were a member of the committee which recommended that the Dutch state purchase the painting known as The Footwashing? Why did such tests not reveal it to be a forgery?’

  ‘Because de Boer, the art dealer, twice refused to allow X-rays of the van Meegerens in his possession. Such a test would have certainly shown that the paintings were not genuine. Later I would [X-ray the paintings], and it was this which brought me to a different conclusion.’

  The prosecutor did not ask why de Wild and the members of the committee did not think de Boer’s refusal suspicious, nor did he challenge de Wild’s implication that The Footwashing had been X-rayed shortly after it was purchased (at which point the committee were free to conduct any test they thought appropriate). In fact the painting, painstakingly ‘restored’ and elegantly framed, had hung in the Rijksmuseum as a Vermeer for two years before de Wild was moved to have it X-rayed, and then only after Han had confessed to the forgery.

  The other members of the commission filed into the witness box to corroborate the forensic evidence as to the chemical composition of the paintings. Wisely, they said little that might undermine their judgement, cloaking their testimony in jargon and science. During a particularly tedious homily by Professor van Regteren Altena, proud that he alone had dismissed The Footwashing as a forgery (though unable to explain why
he had none the less recommended that the Dutch state spend 1.3 million guilders on the work), Judge Boll intervened to ask Han at what point he added the signature.

  ‘I did that last of all and it was much the most difficult task.’ The court stenographer records that Han sighed heavily. ‘It had to be done all in one stroke. Once I had begun there was no going back.’

  Rens Strijbis, who had earned more than half a million guilders in commission from the sale of four of Han’s forgeries, money he had failed to declare to the tax office, pleaded ignorance:

  ‘I was already acquainted with the accused when, in 1941, he asked if I would sell a painting on his behalf,’ Strijbis testified; ‘I knew nothing about art, but he offered me a handsome commission – one-sixth of the eventual purchase price. I took the work, a Head of Christ, to Hoogendijk.’

  ‘Did you realise it was a forgery?’

  ‘Of course not. The defendant claimed it was a Vermeer. He never told me where he had obtained it. Myself, I would not have given the painting houseroom. Later I sold three others for him, all to Hoogendijk: The Last Supper, a Pieter de Hooch and Isaac Blessing Jacob. He claimed they all came from the same collection.’

  ‘How much was paid for these paintings?’ the prosecutor asked.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Strijbis said prudently, ‘I did not keep records.’

  A case for conspiracy might have been brought against the next witness, D.G. Hoogendijk, the dealer who had sold five of Han’s eight forgeries. Hoogendijk had always firmly denied that he knew any of the paintings were doubtful, and it is likely that the prosecution accepted his word since, after Han’s confession, the Head of Christ – which Hoogendijk had received from van Beuningen in part-payment for The Last Supper – was still in the inventory of his gallery. Had he known it to be a forgery, Hoogendijk would certainly have disposed of it; that he kept it was taken as evidence that he believed it to be genuine and had not yet been able to find a buyer for the painting.