The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [128]
But now, because of Piller’s experiment, people looked at the string of “Vermeers” and concentrated not on the first picture in line, Emmaus, but on the last, Jesus Teaching in the Temple. Since Van Meegeren had indisputably painted it, and since all the others looked like that one, it stood to reason Van Meegeren had painted them all.
This was not proof, but it was a psychological turning point. Proof would come quickly enough. Van Meegeren made it easy. This was a chase where the fugitive wanted to be caught. With the completion of Jesus Teaching in the Temple, around September 1945, Piller had done his part. Now he handed the case over to a team of official investigators working for the Dutch Ministry of Justice.
57
THE EVIDENCE PILES UP
Van Meegeren had nothing but disdain for the art connoisseurs and critics he had led astray. But he seemed fascinated by the scientists now on his trail and dazzled by the technological arsenal they could draw on. As a young boy growing up in a small town, he had once created a ruckus by locking the door to the police station (from the outside) and throwing away the key, or so he claimed. Then he had looked on with glee while the policemen rattled the door in frustration and finally resorted to climbing out the windows. Now, in similar fashion, Van Meegeren delighted at the trouble he had stirred up. Here were the scientists with their microscopes and magnifying glasses, their X-ray and ultraviolet and infrared photographs, their talk of spectographic analysis and partial solubility, the whole circus set in motion by his own mischievous enterprise.
The team investigating Van Meegeren numbered seven in all, five scientists and two art historians. The chairman was P. B. Coremans, director of the Central Laboratory of Belgian Museums. Coremans had met Van Meegeren already, at Goudstikker’s, where he had studied his forgeries with a dentist’s X-ray machine. That had been an informal probe, at Piller’s request. This was an official inquest, charged with answering two questions: did the Vermeers and De Hoochs that Van Meegeren claimed to have painted date from the twentieth century or the seventeenth? If the paintings were modern, was it Van Meegeren who had painted them?
Coremans’s team was sworn in on June 11, 1946. One group in The Hague and a second in Brussels settled down to a series of painstaking chemical investigations. First they looked into Van Meegeren’s Bakelite story. Knowing what they were looking for, the chemists soon confirmed that Van Meegeren had been telling the truth. The tests were technically difficult, and since no forger before Van Meegeren had ever thought of this particular trick, investigators on their own might have been slow to find him out. But the results were definitive.
The analysis was worth all the trouble, because the ingredients that make up Bakelite could not possibly belong in a genuine seventeenth-century painting. Further tests would merely confirm what the presence of Bakelite had already proved. And so they did. Van Meegeren had bragged to the investigators about how he had used India ink to simulate grime in his pictures’ craquelure, for instance, and the scientists soon verified his account.
Occasionally, they found signs of fraud even without Van Meegeren’s help. In Goering’s forgery, for instance, the blue in Jesus’s robe proved to be cobalt blue, which was first used in the