The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [129]
Detective work of a more conventional sort provided still further proof of Van Meegeren’s guilt. On a trip to Van Meegeren’s long abandoned villa in Nice, in 1945, a Justice Department inspector named Wooning found all the signs of what had plainly been a forger’s workshop. Inspector Wooning found the four “test” forgeries—two Vermeers, a Hals, and a Ter Borch—that Van Meegeren had completed but never tried to sell. He found seventeenth-century drinking glasses, plates, and a pitcher, as well as an ancient map hanging on a wall, all of which Van Meegeren had depicted in his forgeries. He found the makings for a new batch of Bakelite paint. He found one of the pieces of wood that Van Meegeren had cut down to make a new stretcher for Emmaus.
This ordinary-looking scrap of wood was especially significant because it tied Van Meegeren, as opposed to some other forger, to Emmaus, the one fake that towered above the others. As we have seen, Van Meegeren had painted Emmaus on the canvas from a larger picture called The Raising of Lazarus. He had taken the wooden stretcher from Lazarus, cut it down to the right size for Emmaus, and tossed aside the leftover bit of wood. By happenstance the restorers at the Boymans had not replaced Van Meegeren’s stretcher with a new one. That made it easy to see if the wooden stretcher from Emmaus matched the sawed-off length of wood Inspector Wooning had found in Nice.
The lines that formed the grain of one piece of wood exactly matched the grain of the other piece. As a bonus, it turned out that in shortening the Lazarus stretcher, Van Meegeren happened to saw through a wormhole in the wood. Back in Holland, the investigators looked at Emmaus’s stretcher and Inspector Wooning’s piece of wood. At the end of each piece of wood was a wormhole sawed in half. The two halves matched exactly.
Why hadn’t Van Meegeren thrown away so incriminating a piece of evidence? He had kept it, he said, precisely so that he could prove beyond question that Emmaus was his work. And perhaps that had once been his intent. But if Van Meegeren had truly wanted to tell the world that he had painted Emmaus, he had missed chance after chance. Why wouldn’t he have announced his role in 1938, for instance, when the painting was the unrivaled star of the Boymans exhibition and the toast of the art world? (For that matter, why would he have chosen to prove himself with something as mundane as a piece of wood? It would have been perfectly easy to rig a camera to snap a picture of himself painting Emmaus.)
Van Meegeren had always had a choice—he could step out from the wings and onto center stage and win fame, or he could stay out of sight but rich. He had made his choice.
In that case, why had he kept the telltale piece of wood in his studio? The painter and Van Meegeren scholar Diederik Kraaijpoel suggests a simple answer: “I think it was just slovenliness,” he says. “In every painter’s studio, including mine, you find amazing amounts of rubbish lying around: ancient newspapers, pieces of cardboard, dried-out tubes of paint, ends of tape, half-empty pots of glue, stiffened rags, you name it. We don’t throw it away because we think that maybe someday we’ll find a use for it. But we never do. As far as I know, Van Meegeren never mentioned this beautiful proof of his genius. I think he just forgot about it.”
In the case of one forgery, The Last Supper, the scientists’ findings and the conventional police-style investigation converged. This was the enormous canvas—at roughly six feet by eight feet, the biggest Van Meegeren ever painted—for which Van Beuningen paid $8.6 million in today’s dollars.