The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [151]
On July 18, 1945…“Cheating the Dutch,” Newsweek, July 20, 1945.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: THE UNVEILING
“I can still see the painting”…Pam, “Het onfeilbare oog.”
Time magazine’s art critic…“From a Linen Closet,” Time, Sept. 19, 1938.
Van Meegeren liked to tell…Kilbracken, p. 184.
“The discovery of Emmaus”…F. van Thienen, Vermeer, quoted in Weerdenburg.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: SCANDAL IN THE ARCHIVES
“It’s awful that it’s one of our most”…Author interview, Aug. 25, 2005.
“They sold just the same”…Coremans, p. 33.
“Each new biblical ‘Vermeer’”…Van Beuningen, the Rotterdam collector, said that he expected more Vermeers to turn up after Emmaus and Head of Christ, “because I was convinced that such creations could not stand by themselves.” See Kraaijpoel and Van Wijnen, p. 75.
“What appeared impossible”…Bredius, “Een Prachtige Pieter de Hoogh,” Oud Holland, 56(1939), 126–27.
“women by the dozen”…Joop Piller and Van Meegeren would become friends of a sort, and Van Meegeren regaled Piller with endless tales of debauchery. Author interview with Harry Van Wijnen, Aug. 25, 2005.
In 1942, when the government issued…Kraaijpoel and Van Wijnen, p. 70.
“It looks disturbingly as though”…Werness, p. 41.
“I do not understand”…Kilbracken, p. 180.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: ALL IN THE TIMING
men spent more on a single bulb…Anna Pavord, The Tulip (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 133.
“a nobler creation has, perhaps, never”…Dirk Hannema, “Annual Report of the Rembrandt Society, 1937,” quoted in Van Dantzig, Vermeer, De Emmausgangers en de critici, p. 73.
“After a comparison of both works”…Dr. J.L.A.A.M. Van Rijckevorsel, Historia Boymansnummer: Vermeer en Caravaggio,”…July 1938, quoted in Van Dantzig, Vermeer, pp. 83–84.
“Amidst the anxious and seemingly hopeless”…Blankert, Vermeer of Delft, p. 73.
But when the same sentiment was sanctified…My remark is a paraphrase of Blankert’s observation in Vermeer of Delft, p. 73.
“Because Holland was so sturdy”…Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Jewels of Holland’s Art
Illumine a Cave,” New York Times, December 4, 1944.
Daniel Mendelsohn has looked…Daniel Mendelsohn, “Novel of the Year,” New York Review of Books, Jan. 16, 2003.
If he had lived half a century earlier…Kraaijpoel and Van Wijnen, p. 44.
“With the old masters”…Ibid., p. 43.
“Death seems truly conquered here”…G. Knuttel, De Nederlandsche schilderkunst van van Eyck tot van Gogh, p. 308, quoted in Weerdenburg.
“Forgery is a kind of short-cut”…Kurz, p. 320.
When the critic Kenneth Clark…Jones, ed., pp. 34–35.
“Forgeries must be served hot”…Max Friedländer, “On Forgeries,” in Ronald D. Spencer, ed., The Expert versus The Object, p. 41. (This essay is a chapter from Friedländer’s On Art and Connoisseurship.)
It is a rule with…Rousseau, “Stylistic Detection,” p. 247.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: BELIEVING IS SEEING
“We have a saying”…Author interview, Aug. 22, 2005.
“The main reason why a scholar”…David Hirshleifer, “The Blind Leading the Blind: Social Influence, Fads, and Informational Cascades,” UCLA, Anderson Graduate School of Management, Paper 1156, 1993.
“One of our most prominent scholars”…Rousseau, “Stylistic Detection,” p. 252.
“Before the second world war”…Author interview, Aug. 23, 2005.
In 1977 a prankster…“Polish Joke,” Time, Feb. 19, 1979.
To cry “fake!”…Thomas Hoving remarks that “the worst thing you can do is to stamp a genuine piece with the mark of falsehood,” and he quotes Max Friedländer’s observation that “It is indeed an error to collect a forgery, but it is a sin to stamp a genuine piece with the seal of forgery.” See Hoving, “The Game of Duplicity,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 26 (1967–68), pp. 241, 246.
Connoisseurs, wrote Van de Waal…Van de Waal, “Forgery as a Stylistic Problem.”
the number on our bathroom scale…Daniel Gilbert provided the bathroom scale example in an op-ed entitled “I’m Ok, You’re Biased,” in New York Times, on April 17, 2006. He explored self-deception and related topics at greater length in his intriguing book Stumbling on Happiness.
Half the