by Noah Charney
It would take a formidable team of European military superpowers, assembled and reassembled in five different incarnations, to stop the spread of the French army and ultimately lead to the return home of the central panels of The Ghent Altarpiece.
In 1809 the Fifth Coalition—international powers assembled to stop Napoleon’s goal of world conquest—finally succeeded. The Coalition vastly outnumbered and outclassed Napoleon’s army, but the great general’s tactical superiority evened the playing field. He assumed direct control over his troops for the first time in years, but the Coalition swarm proved too much. By January 1814, Napoleon had lost Italy, the Rhineland, and the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands).
After successful battles against the Austrian and Prussian armies in early 1814, Napoleon’s forces were battered, and it was clear that the end was imminent. The Coalition armies entered Paris on 30 March 1814. Napoleon’s marshals deserted him in the first days of April, and on 4 April Napoleon abdicated.
In the Treaty of Fontainebleau of 11 April 1814, Napoleon was exiled to the Italian island of Elba by the victorious Fifth Coalition. In this treaty, Napoleon took particular pains to state that the art collected at the Louvre, which included both works owned by France and works looted by Napoleon, should be “respected” as “inalienable property of the Crown.” In other words, the Fifth Coalition should not be permitted to do what Napoleon had done and “steal back” what France had looted, nor to exact art as reparations. Most of the art would remain at the Louvre. But the Duke of Wellington insisted, as Napoleon had, that art constituted a legitimate trophy of war, and much of the looted art was returned to its countries of origin (although the quick-handed English managed to sequester the Rosetta Stone for themselves).
Even the return of looted objects had a profound effect on how we understand art today. The restituted art was not reinstalled in churches, which were the major victims of looting; rather it was installed in newly established museums, with the idea that such institutions could better protect, preserve, and present a nation’s masterpieces. This was perhaps an inadvertent but potent legacy of Denon’s that is still dominant. National cultural heritage would migrate into the museum, to be displayed in a manner, though removed from its context, that would best educate the museumgoers and preserve the works themselves.
Distraught at the dissolution of his carefully curated collection, Denon resigned. In retirement, he would open up a private museum in his Paris apartment along the Quai Voltaire—a cabinet of curiosities, more a reliquary than an art gallery, which displayed everything from the moustache hairs of King Henri IV to Voltaire’s teeth to a drop of Napoleon’s blood. Through a combination of diplomatic efforts, intentional misadministration, and a lack of coordination on the part of some of the looted countries, more than half of the art looted by Napoleon and by the revolutionaries remained in the Louvre. Much of it is still there today, including seminal works like Titian’s Crowning with Thorns, Veronese’s Marriage at Cana, and yet another of van Eyck’s great works, Madonna with Chancellor Rolin, stolen from a church in Autun in 1800.
With Napoleon deposed, Royalist factions back in Paris reinstated the French Bourbon monarchy, in the person of Louis XVIII. Always ambitious, he was unhappy with his position as king-in-exile, and welcomed the reinstatement. He was an avid collector of books and curiosities as much as art, and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, although this was tempered by his rationality. The one thing about which he could not be reasonable was his food intake—he was a passionate gourmand and bon vivant of the highest rank, with the predictable results for his waistline. Louis proved an intriguing combination of some of the characteristics that led to the deposition of his ancestors: He was selfish, pompous, luxurious, and indulgent, but with Enlightenment characteristics of rationality, impeccable manners, and an awareness of the sociopolitics of the world around him.
Louis XVIII had been living safely abroad throughout the Revolution. The younger brother of the beheaded Louis XVI, Louis XVIII became heir upon the death of his elder brother’s ten-year-old son, Louis XVII, who died while in prison during the Revolution on 8 June 1795. Louis XVIII then declared himself king and set up a court-in-exile in Venetian-controlled Verona, until he was expelled at the request of the Directory in 1796. He was a wandering monarch, self-declared as king of France, but he had no power nor any subjects beyond his immediate retinue. He lived briefly in Russia, England, and Latvia during this time. There is a pathos to this ghost of a king, inheritor of an overthrown, intangible throne.
Louis XVIII strategically corresponded with Napoleon during Napoleon’s time as consul. He offered to pardon regicides, to give titles to the Bonaparte family, and even to maintain the changes Napoleon and the revolutionaries had made since 1789. But Napoleon replied that the return of the Bourbon monarchy would lead to civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Napoleon would not play second fiddle, even if he could be the puppet master behind the throne.
Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, Louis XVIII was granted the French throne by the victorious Allied powers. His rule was more symbolic than actual, as he was forced to implement a newly written constitution, the so-called Charter of 1814, guaranteeing a bicameral legislature that would prevent monarchic abuses of power.
Louis’s reign was interrupted by Napoleon’s dramatic escape from Elba on 26 February 1815. News of his flight quickly reached the king, who sent the Fifth Army to engage Napoleon at Grenoble. On 7 March 1815, Napoleon dismounted from his horse and approached the army on foot, eyeing his former soldiers. His words are recorded for posterity: “Soldiers of the Fifth, you recognize me. If any man would shoot his emperor, he would do so now.” There was a cold silence. Then the army shouted, in unison, “Long live the emperor!” And that was that. He retook the leadership of the army, gathered a force 200,000 strong, and marched on Paris.
King Louis XVIII fled and took shelter in the city of Ghent. He remained in Ghent for less than one year. When Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Louis returned to Paris and was restored to the throne by the victorious powers for the second time. In an interesting side note, Citizen Barbier contrived to get himself employed by Louis XVIII. He was briefly engaged as chief administrator of the king’s private libraries, before he was fired from the job and deprived of all offices in 1822—perhaps only then did the king realize that he had hired one of Napoleon’s master thieves.
The fleeing king’s brief stay in Ghent proved of vital importance to his host city. Had they not sheltered him, the central panels of The Ghent Altarpiece would almost certainly still be on display at the Louvre today. Grateful to the city, Louis took measures to repay the kindness he was shown. Indeed, he made more of a positive impact on the history of Belgium and the Netherlands than he did on his own kingdom of France. Louis XVIII officially united with Holland the newly French Netherlands (the former Flanders and the future Belgium) in late 1815. The result was the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. He then returned the stolen central panels of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb to the city of Ghent. A long-time sufferer of gout, Louis remained wheelchair-bound until his reign ended with his death on 16 September 1824.
The central panels of van Eyck’s masterpiece were among at least 5,233 indexed looted objects that were returned to their places of origin during the reign of Louis XVIII. How many were stolen in total, between the ravages of the revolutionary French soldiers and Napoleon’s confiscators, will never be known.
The Ghent Altarpiece was whole once more, proudly displayed in the cathedral of Saint Bavo. And it would remain there—for barely a year.
CHAPTER FIVE
Illicit Collectors’ Paradise
No sooner had The Lamb returned to the cathedral from its imprisonment in France than it was stolen in the night. Yet another kidnapping would follow, and The Lamb’s nomadic existence was not even halfway over. This time the thief would be an insider, stealing on commission from a wealthy criminal dealer
who exploited the turmoil of the war-torn period for personal profit.
Jan van Eyck’s art achieved the zenith of its international popularity when The Ghent Altarpiece was displayed at the Louvre. This launched a century of van Eyck mania among collectors, viewers, and critics, during which time his works sold for significantly more than anything by other star artists like Michelangelo, and legends grew up around him. Grand Tourists, artists, and intellectuals traveled out of their way to see his paintings, most of all The Ghent Altarpiece. In 1876 the French painter and art critic Eugene Fromentin wrote, “As long as van Eyck stands on the horizon, a light shines to the edges of the present world; under this light, the present world seems to awaken, recognize itself, and grow brighter”—a sentiment shared by all. An examination of the nineteenth-century obsession with van Eyck offers important insights into the history and psychology of art collecting.
During this time, various factions claimed van Eyck as the exemplar of their own national styles. For the nineteenth-century Germans, the artist’s archaic quality harkened back to German Gothic art, but perfected it as never before. The celebrated writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and a cavalcade of German art historians were among those who traveled expressly to see the altarpiece, in a kind of pilgrimage of art appreciation.
The French saw van Eyck as the inventor of Realism, a mid-nineteenth-century art movement of their own. During Napoleon’s time, the many stolen van Eycks on display at the Louvre enraptured the greatest painter of the period, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who visually quoted God the Father from the upper central panel of The Ghent Altarpiece in his portrait Napoleon on the Imperial Throne. Ingres’s appreciation of van Eyck fueled popular and artistic sentiment. And the market for van Eycks in England ran wild, particularly after the purchase by the National Gallery of his Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (also called The Marriage Contract) in 1842. This was further augmented by the 1851 acquisition by the same museum of the Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, itself likely stolen from the Bruges painters’ guild a century before.
This popularity, both scholarly and commercial, coincided, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a lively market in fake van Eycks. An early such example came from noted English forger William Sykes, referred to gently by the novelist Horace Walpole as a “noted tricker.” In 1722 he conned the Duke of Devonshire into buying a painting by forging an inscription on the back that suggested it was painted by van Eyck on commission from the English king Henry V. Today the work in question, the Enthronement of Saint Romold of Malines (circa 1490, now in the National Gallery of Ireland), is attributed to an unknown artist. Most van Eyck fakes were like this one—not wholesale forgeries but rather legitimate fifteenth-century Flemish paintings attributed to Jan van Eyck in order to command top prices.
The nineteenth century was a time when art collectors, through legitimate and illicit means, built up enormous collections, profiting from the turbulent political climate and the newly impoverished aristocracy, who sold off their art collections to a new class of nouveau riche with aristocratic aspirations. Art became a trophy for the nouveaux riches to show off their wealth and social standing. This century also saw the evolution of The Ghent Altarpiece from a work of art, capable of inciting religious outrage and prurience, and representative of the city of Ghent, into the battle standard of the fledgling nation that would become known as Belgium.
In the years preceding the next theft of The Mystic Lamb, the city of Ghent featured prominently on the world’s stage—not for a shift in its own fortunes, but because of the role it played in U.S. history.
On 24 December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent was signed, officially ending the War of 1812 between the young United States under President James Madison and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The United States had hoped to conquer Florida and Canada but failed to make much headway. The British had little retaliatory success of their own, beyond the burning of Washington, DC. The Treaty of Ghent, a site chosen because of its neutrality, resulted in almost no alterations from the prewar situation. The slow lines of communication between Ghent and the United States meant that the celebrated Battle of New Orleans took place two weeks after the official treaty had been signed, because the participating generals, including the fabled American Andrew Jackson, had not received word in time of the war’s end. News of the treaty finally reached the United States and was ratified by President Madison on 15 February 1815.
On 19 December 1816, barely a year after the restitution of the central panels, The Lamb was dismembered again. While the bishop of Ghent was out of the city, the vicar-general of Saint Bavo Cathedral, a Monsieur Jacques-Joseph Le Surre, stole the six panels comprising the wings of the altarpiece. Tantalizingly few details remain about this theft as a result of the disappearance, over a century later, of files from both the cathedral archive and the Ghent city hall.
It is known that Le Surre was a French-born priest, a nationalist, and an imperialist, as were the bishop of Ghent, a French nobleman called Maurice de Broglie, and a possible henchman in the theft, the cathedral’s canon, Joseph Gislain de Volder. Le Surre disapproved of the reinstatement of King Louis XVIII and looked with dismay upon the exile of Napoleon and the return of much of the Louvre’s looted art collection. Napoleon was a great man, the greatest France had ever known. The art was the symbol of French victory and should remain in France. More than all this, Le Surre recognized that there was profit to be had.
It is not known how thoroughly premeditated was Le Surre’s theft of the wing panels or how many other people were involved, though Canon de Volder has been suspected as a probable accomplice. Some answers may be inferred from the limited information that survives.
Vicar-General Le Surre could not have acted alone, for the simple reason that the six wing panels are too heavy for one person to move, even one panel at a time. Each panel weighs approximately sixty to a hundred kilograms. It would have been extremely difficult to “shop” the wing panels from The Lamb, easily one of the ten most important and recognizable paintings in Europe. The theft would have been futile if there was no one to whom one could sell the panels without questions being asked. Logic points to a premeditated, opportunistic crime, one that was at least encouraged—and probably commissioned—by a wealthy and influential pirate among art dealers. The theft was almost certainly commissioned by the buyer who appeared on the scene: a thoroughly unscrupulous man and notorious profiteer of the French army’s confiscation and sales of artworks from across Europe.
As a wealthy dealer based in Brussels, Lambert-Jean Nieuwenhuys had already proven himself a war profiteer. Portly and regal, but with a sharp and merciless eye for opportunities both legal and questionable, Nieuwenhuys handled an astonishing number of major Flemish works during this period. Once he had established an art dealer dynasty in Brussels, scores of paintings passed through his hands, as he took full advantage of the chaos of the French invasion and occupation, and the redistribution of art that accompanied it. His influence extended from Germany to Spain, and he was involved in dozens of legitimate and illegitimate acquisitions and sales, along with knowing misattributions and the dissemination of forgeries. His name and the name of his son, C. J., may be found in the provenance of works around the world—an indication of the power and influence of opportunistic dealers during this period of political turmoil.
During the French occupation of what was then called the French Netherlands, a window of opportunity was open for wily dealers like Nieuwenhuys to buy prime artworks from the ignorant French confiscators. In Brussels alone, fifty churches and seminaries were plundered by the French Commission. So much art from this area entered the market, almost every item of which was stolen, that the flood did not begin to recede until after 1815, when hungry English, German, and Russian collectors descended with open wallets on the newly independent United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Nieuwenhuys, the prince of Belgian art dealers, mopped up the lion’s share of
profits from the illicit Flemish art market.
Nieuwenhuys had already been involved in deals with The Ghent Altarpiece —or at least a copy of it. English art dealer W. Buchanan wrote in his Memoirs of Painting that Nieuwenhuys had sold panels from the Michiel Coxcie copy of The Ghent Altarpiece, painted for Phillip II in 1559, after they had been stolen by one of Napoleon’s generals. But Nieuwenhuys sold them as the originals.
The Coxcie copy of The Ghent Altarpiece—its panels were displayed at this time in Berlin, Munich, and Ghent—was considered nearly indistinguishable from the original to the untrained eye. One of Napoleon’s generals in Spain, Auguste-Daniele Belliard, had seized the copied altarpiece from a monastery while serving there in 1809.
We do not know whether Belliard thought that Coxcie’s copy was the original. Most likely he was taken in by the likeness, even though he already knew, or learnt quickly, that the original van Eyck was divided between the Louvre and the cathedral of Ghent. In any case, he surely saw an opportunity.
Belliard brought the Coxcie copy to Brussels, where he sold it through Nieuwenhuys, one panel at a time. Nieuwenhuys passed off each individual panel as one of the originals. His story was that the originals had been captured and dispersed in the turmoil of the period. During the Napoleonic era, there was every possibility that a territory seized by one imperial force would remain within that empire indefinitely. Therefore art taken in war was, for all intents and purposes, the property of the nation that took it. Only in recent decades has there been, among dealers, a widespread reluctance to deal in works with a questionable provenance, partly because of lawsuits brought by descendants of owners whose art was stolen from them in past wars.
So when word circulated that The Ghent Altarpiece had been seized by French forces, it was not inherently problematic for potential buyers to see its panels on the art market. The Nieuwenhuys family thrived on this shift in ownership on a massive scale and benefited from the lack of concrete information as to which works were where and owned by whom. Nieuwenhuys and his son, C. J., who inherited his father’s business acumen and slippery ethics, sold several real van Eycks, including the Lucca Madonna (1436), as well as quite a few fakes and paintings with intentionally enhanced attributions. For instance, Nieuwenhuys sold Rogier van der Weyden’s Triptych of the Nativity as the work of Hans Memling, whose paintings were of greater value than van der Weyden’s at the time.
