The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [130]
Jan J. van Waning, Rotterdam
Hondius, Hunting Scene
Vermeer and Hondius were contemporaries, so in theory Vermeer might have painted a picture on top of a Hondius. But certainly he had not painted over this Hondius, because the gallery’s records (complete with a photograph of the painting) proved that Van Meegeren had purchased it on May 29, 1940.
By March 1947, the Coremans commission had proved beyond any doubt that Van Meegeren’s tale was true. He had indeed forged the “Vermeer” he sold Goering, and all the others. He could not be accused of selling off Holland’s heritage since he had not enriched Goering but had cheated him out of millions. The collaboration charge was dropped. Van Meegeren would go to trial, but only for fraud.
58
THE TRIAL
In many ways Han van Meegeren’s day in court was the greatest of his life. He had been praised in public before, as a young man just finishing college when he won a gold medal for a drawing of a church interior, and far more dramatically when the Boymans unveiled Emmaus. But the gold medal prize had been a local affair, and in 1938 Van Meegeren never had the chance to step forward and bow to all those applauding Emmaus.
The trial date was October 29, 1947, and a crowd had gathered outside the Palace of Justice long before the doors opened at 9:45. The day before, a van under close police guard had pulled up to the court house late in the afternoon. Then a team of armed uniformed men had unloaded Van Meegeren’s forgeries as if they were delivering a fortune in cash from an armored car. Over the course of ninety minutes, while the Rijksmuseum’s chief curator supervised, the paintings were hung in place. Finally, with the courtroom transformed, forty guards settled in for the night.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Van Meegeren walked to court, the better to prolong his time in the spotlight. A gaggle of eager reporters scribbled down the forger’s bon mots. Photographers snapped off picture after picture, and a newsreel cameraman recorded the stroll for posterity.
The press had been admitted to the courtroom an hour early and had spent much of that time gazing at the forgeries and staking out their territory. Photographers shoved against one another, fighting for a clear shot when Van Meegeren finally arrived. The judge had decided to permit newsreel filming inside the courtroom, too, which made for more cameramen and more jockeying. The world’s press had turned up, and the locals gawked at the international stars. Over there, in the fur collar and green glasses, that’s Charles Wertenbaker. Time’s star had come up from Paris. When Wertenbaker whispered to a neighbor that the trial was “big stuff,” Dutch reporters beamed and jotted the words down in their notebooks. (Wertenbaker’s presence was itself a sign of Van Meegeren’s celebrity. Wertenbaker had covered the previous year’s most notorious trial, the case of a French serial killer named Marcel Petiot, who had thrived during the war. Petiot had promised desperate men and women that he could smuggle them out of France to safety and then killed them, some twenty-six in all.)
At five minutes after ten, Van Meegeren entered the courtroom. The sound of scores of cameras in near unison, one reporter wrote, called to mind machine gun fire. Van Meegeren wore a dark blue suit and black glasses that seemed more prop than necessity. He had taken considerable care with his appearance, but his friends noted that he seemed even thinner than usual, almost