The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [134]
Van Meegeren leaped to his feet. “That is a lie!” The judge hammered for silence. The photographers clicked off more pictures. Unperturbed, the prosecutor ran through the highlights of Van Meegeren’s criminal résumé. The recitation inspired not anger or dismay from the spectators but applause, laughter, and appreciative whistles. The judge could scarcely set down his gavel before he had to take it up again.
“Now the defendant began to produce his ‘Vermeers’ on an assembly line. The Head of Christ sold for 475,000 guilders. The Last Supper sold for 1,600,000 guilders. The Washing of Christ’s Feet sold for 1,300,000 guilders, Isaac Blessing Jacob sold for 1,270,000 guilders, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery sold for 1,650,000 guilders.”
Even the judge shook his head and smiled in disbelief at the string of colossal sums. Then, more grudgingly than before, he took up his gavel again.
“Emmaus was called ‘a masterpiece,’” the prosecutor went on, “‘more beautiful than any other work by Vermeer,’ ‘a pure expression of a deeply religious emotion with no equal in Dutch art.’”
More laughter. The judge threatened to clear the courtroom.
“Hopefully this history will teach the experts modesty.”
Applause in the courtroom. Gaveling. “The courtroom is not a theater,” the judge insisted.
“Now,” said the prosecutor, “we arrive at the question, What is the appropriate punishment for the defendant? In my opinion, the seriousness of the crimes he committed leaves us no other choice than imprisonment. I ask the court to sentence the defendant to a term of two years in prison.”
The court adjourned for lunch. Van Meegeren and two friends went to a small restaurant. Van Meegeren drank a good deal.
VAN MEEGEREN’S LAWYER spoke next. He read approvingly from a court-ordered psychiatric report. The psychiatrists had found that Van Meegeren had an “amiable” and “kind-hearted” side, but also a “special vulnerability” to criticism and “an abnormal need to avenge himself” on his enemies.
Then the defense lawyer read aloud passages in which the critics heaped praise on “Vermeer” but condemned Van Meegeren’s work in his own name as “kitsch.” The spectators, who had apparently forgotten that they were not in a theater, cheered so vigorously that the lawyer had to raise his voice to be heard as he read out particularly ripe passages about “miracles” of art and “heights that only the greatest of artists can scale.”
If there was blame to be assigned, Van Meegeren’s lawyer went on, it attached less to his client, who had done his best to create beauty, than to those buyers who had let themselves be taken in by a name. Still, he conceded, “the law protects those who are willing to pay a hundred times more for a painting when it has the name Vermeer on it than when it has the name Van Meegeren.”
But for so minor a misdeed, what punishment was appropriate? The prosecutor had asked for a two-year sentence. “Allow me to ask you to give my client a more lenient, more humane punishment. You can be certain that the deeds he is charged with today are ones he will never repeat. Any incentive to do so has long since vanished, and my client is now an obsolete man, a man with no proper place of his own on this earth. On his behalf, we plead for mercy.”
The judge asked Van Meegeren if he had any last words. He stood up, thanked the judge, and said he had nothing more to say. The judge told the courtroom that he would announce his ruling in two weeks.
59
THE PLAYERS MAKE THEIR EXITS
On November 12, 1947, the judge sentenced Van Meegeren to one year in prison. The maximum allowable sentence was four years, and the prosecution had asked for two, but many observers had predicted little more than a scolding. Van Meegeren showed no emotion. “I think I must take it as a good sport,” he told reporters afterward.
No doubt Van Meegeren knew that by this time anything a judge might say was beside the point. He was only fifty-eight, but he looked and felt years older. In the summer before the trial he had been diagnosed