The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [16]
Carelessness is an occupational hazard for forgers, because every successful scam leads them to overestimate their own cleverness and their rivals’ gullibility. (The acclaimed Elmyr de Hory once tried to sell a forged Matisse on which he had spelled the artist’s name without the e.)* Van Meegeren was a creature of boundless vanity, which made for the occasional slapdash folly, but he had a methodical streak that helped balance his self-regard.
He knew, for example, that Vermeer’s favorite blue was the rare, expensive ultramarine (so called because it came from far away, “across the seas”). In 1931, according to the records of the London art supplies firm Winsor and Newton, Van Meegeren bought as much ultramarine in a span of two months as the shop normally sold in five years.
But even the most finicky preparation could achieve only so much. Van Meegeren and every other forger of centuries-old masterpieces faced a built-in dilemma. He could, with enough trouble, replicate the materials of a seventeenth-century painter’s studio. He could fashion (or buy) brushes like those the old masters had used, made of hair from a badger or marten. He could grind his own pigments and follow age-old recipes for making them into paint. What he could not do was cause three centuries to pass.
AS TIME INFLICTS its toll, oil paintings change in two different but related ways: the paint hardens, and the painting’s surface develops a network of miniature cracks. For Van Meegeren, the first problem was the more difficult. Solving it took him almost four years and countless failed experiments. When he finally succeeded, he burst into tears.
Watercolors dry in a straightforward way. Time passes, and the water evaporates. Oil paint is a diffent story, for although we still talk about the paint “drying,” the true process is more complicated. A dab of red oil paint, say, is made by adding droplets of oil to a mound of ground-up red particles—the mound has the texture of a heap of cinnamon but the hot, intense color of arterial blood—and then working the oil and the pigment together with a palette knife. (In Vermeer’s day, the red particles might have come from a lump of vermilion, made by heating mercury and sulfur. Dishonest apothecaries sometimes diluted the miraculous powder with brick dust.) The paint is ready when its consistency is that of butter that has been sitting on the kitchen counter.
Over the course of months and years, as a result of a series of chemical and physical changes, that paint will not dry so much as harden. The hardness is key. The easiest test of an old master—and the one test almost certain to be carried out—is to dab the surface with rubbing alcohol. In a genuinely old painting, the surface will be hard, and the alcohol will have no effect. If the painting is new, the alcohol will dissolve a bit of paint, and the tester’s cotton swab will come up smudged with color.
The test could hardly be simpler, but it poses a giant hurdle that every forger must leap. The forger’s problem is that the hardening process drags on with excruciating slowness. It takes somewhere between twelve hours and three weeks for a painting to become dry to the touch but perhaps a century before it hardens fully.
In London not long ago, I spent a day at the National Gallery. In an always-crowded room lined with Impressionists and Van Goghs, I wriggled my way into the scrum in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, one of the museum’s great treasures. The next day, I held the painting in my own two hands. Not Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, in truth, but a stunning copy (complete with “Vincent” signature) by an English painter named Leo Stevenson. I could never have told it from the real thing (except, perhaps, that this version looked a bit better than the original, because Van Gogh used a paint called chrome yellow that has turned slightly gray-green over the years. Stevenson’s yellow retains the freshness that Van Gogh’s has lost.)
If somehow I could sneak into the National Gallery and replace the real Sunflowers with Stevenson’s copy, not one visitor in