The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [146]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE UNCANNY VALLEY
Under the headline “Art as Dung”…Gerritsen’s article appeared in the NRC Handelsblad on Feb. 19, 1996. The letter to the editor from the director of the Kunsthal, Wim van Krimpen, ran on Feb. 21, 1996.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge once saw…Richard Holmes, “The Passionate Partnership,” New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007, p. 44.
Albert Blankert thinks it means…Blankert, Vermeer of Delft, p. 73, and author interview with Wheelock, Dec. 19, 2005.
The writer Clive Thompson spelled out…Thompson’s article appeared online at www.slate.com on June 9, 2004.
A painstaking, seemingly perfect depiction…Gombrich explored this topic in great depth, especially in Art and Illusion. The chapter of that book called “The Beholder’s Share” is a marvelous essay, stuffed with examples, on precisely this question.
“an old shoe is easier”…Franzen, “Growing Up with Charlie Brown,” The New Yorker, Oct. 29, 2004. In a similar vein, the film critic A. O. Scott once wrote a meditation on “why certain faces haunt and move us as they do.” The face he had in mind was not that of Mona Lisa or the girl with a pearl earring but Gromit, a cartoon dog who “has no mouth, and yet his face is one of the most expressive ever committed to the screen.” See “A New Challenge for an Englishman and His Dog,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2005.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: BETTING THE FARM
“Vermeer was the painter Van Meegeren”…Doudart de la Grée, p. 14.
“a blessed terrain lay fallow”…Ibid.
“But with Rembrandt, everything”…Author interview, Aug. 22, 2005.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: LADY AND GENTLEMAN AT THE HARPSICHORD
“one of the finest gems”…Bredius, “An Unpublished Vermeer,” The Burlington Magazine, Oct. 1932, p. 145.
The Hague had an active…The source for this paragraph and the next is Werness, p. 17, quoting Van den Brandhof. could strut standing still…Charlie Dressen, one-time manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, supposedly used the phrase to describe the flamboyant star Big Ed Walsh.
“No more intense detective work”…This quotation, and all the others in this section of this chapter, are from Bredius’s “An Unpublished Vermeer.”
almost certainly Van Meegeren’s work…Many writers simply assert as a matter of fact that it is Van Meegeren’s. See, for example, Van den Brandhof, p. 93, or M. Kirby Talley, Jr., in Jones, p. 240. Albert Blankert notes that Duveen’s Edward Fowles disagreed. See Blankert, “The Case of Han van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeer Supper at Emmaus Reconsidered,” p. 52, in In His Milieu, ed. A. Golahny et al. As discussed in chapter 37, Fowles’s judgments on Van Meegeren warrant respect. Blankert’s essay is the best and most thoughtful look at Van Meegeren and the art connoisseurs he befuddled.
De Groot had treated Bredius…Blankert, Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact, p. 184.
“Stripped of his cloak”…Talley, in Jones, p. 240.
“it is common talk”…Blankert, “The Case of Van Meegeren,” p. 52.
The eminent Parisian dealer…The comment on Wildenstein and Loebl comes from a letter written on October 19, 1932, by Edward Fowles, in the Paris office of Duveen Brothers, to Joseph Duveen in New York. The letter is in Duveen Brothers Records, Box 315, Folder 1, Special Collections, Archive Division, J. Paul Getty Trust.
Each looked closely…The books in question were Eduard Plietzsch, Vermeer van Delft, and Arie B. de Vries, Jan Vermeer van Delft.
This was no oversight…Blankert, “The Case of Van Meegeren,” p. 52.
Mannheimer was a man of colossal…“Post-war Story,” Time, Aug. 21, 1939.
one-time protégé…The reference to Schmidt-Degener as Bredius’s protégé is from an essay by Wilhelm Martin, deputy director of the Mauritshuis under Bredius and later director in his own right. See http://www.maatschappijdernederlandseletterkunde.nl/mnl/levens/46–47/bredius.htm.
“The Vermeer at Mannheimer”…The art historian Jim van der Meer Mohr has dug deeper into the archives in quest of Bredius than any other researcher and has graciously shared many of his findings with me. The comment