The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [127]
At first Piller tried to keep visitors away, but it soon became clear that there was no need for rigorous security. The point was to see what kind of painting Van Meegeren could produce; there was no reason to make his working conditions unpleasant. In any case, the end of occupation had lifted everyone’s spirits, and the mood inside 458 Herengracht was informal and cheery. When Van Meegeren needed to get the folds of a cloak right, one of the secretaries gladly posed for him.
Once they talked their way inside, journalists and photographers and the merely curious wandered upstairs to see the little man who had created all the fuss. He seemed small and tired, but he retained the good manners that had drawn clients to him in his days as a society painter. One particularly enterprising reporter even managed to wangle an off-the-premises interview, in a café.
“He is a simple, rather small man with gray hair and sharply cut features, always ready for a drink and a chat,” the writer noted with relief. “So much so that when chatting and drinking with him, one wonders which of the two he likes best.” Van Meegeren had nothing in common with “one of these important-looking bragging artists…who make everybody who isn’t an insider feel like a blundering yokel.”
The reporter asked admiringly about rumors that an American millionaire had offered to buy all the forgeries for eight million dollars (about $80 million today). The tone of the interview, which came three months after the story broke, reflected an important shift in the public mood. Many of the first news stories had spilled over with rage. Van Meegeren’s painting career hadn’t won him much attention, but during the occupation he’d made friends in all the wrong places, and the Dutch had noticed that. “Forgery of Paintings Discovered,” read the July 17, 1945, headline in De Waarheid. “Han van Meegeren, Swindler and Nazi.”
But by the time the café interview appeared, much of the anger seemed to have drained away. (Van Meegeren had managed to create enough confusion about the Hitler dedication to dampen down that controversy. His story was that he had signed many copies of his book; someone else, perhaps a “German officer,” must have added a dedication and given Hitler the book.) In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all. “Well, I have seen the paintings and I have had a drink or two with the painter—and I like him,” wrote the reporter who had met Van Meegeren at a café. “And I wonder if eight million dollars—if he would really get them—could possibly make a more charming man of him than he is now.”
FOR HIS LAST “Vermeer,” Van Meegeren chose a religious subject, Jesus Teaching in the Temple. Like several of its predecessors, the painting was on a grand scale, roughly five feet by six feet. This time Van Meegeren painted Jesus as young and rosy-cheeked, with a kind of overdone earnestness that calls to mind a middle-school valedictorian. Jesus is bathed in light and clothed in a blue robe just like the one in Goering’s picture. He holds a Bible open in front of him—this was a little joke on Van Meegeren’s part—while six robed figures, three on each side, look on.
The painting took two months to complete, and most of Van Meegeren’s visitors seemed quite taken with it. “Experts have hailed the picture as magnificent in parts,” The Illustrated London News reported, “not only as giving the colour scheme of Christ at Emmaus, but as containing something of the serenity of Vermeer’s works…. The face of Jesus—portrayed from memory of a woman’s face—has a certain serenity, found also in Van Meegeren’s other works.” The inclusion of the Bible, the News wrote, would “prevent the picture being taken for a Vermeer in the future.”
More important, Jesus Teaching in the Temple certainly looked like a Van Meegeren. The