The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [17]
Stevenson, a well-regarded artist in his own right, is not a forger. Among many other projects, he puts together television programs on art for the BBC. He had made the Sunflowers painting for a show on Van Gogh and the Impressionists. He handed his picture to me. I took it gingerly, as if it really were the cult object it looked to be.
“You can handle it,” Stevenson teased. “It’s not a baby.”
I patted the surface with the tip of my index finger.
“Go on. Feel it.” Stevenson waved his outthrust thumb in the air.
I held this near-duplicate of the $50-million or $100-million masterpiece in my left hand and, following Stevenson’s lead, pressed my right thumb against a sunflower. The hardening of oil paint involves chemical changes that require the presence of oxygen. Paintings harden like loaves of bread, from the outside in. Beneath its hard crust, the sunflower yielded to my thumb.
BY THE TIME a painting is three centuries old, roughly the age of a Vermeer when Han van Meegeren came along, it will be hard indeed. How was Van Meegeren to duplicate that hardness?
He began with easier challenges. First he needed to grind his paints, to replicate Vermeer’s palette. This was not a matter of theatrics or establishing a mood, like dressing up in seventeenth-century garb, but a question of strategy. The particles in hand-ground pigments vary in size; the particles in modern, commercially-made paint are uniform. Forgery plays out as a kind of board game, where each player tries to anticipate his rival’s next move. Van Meegeren had to be ready for an opponent with a microscope.
Until the advent of metal tubes for paint, invented in 1841, an artist’s studio looked like a cross between an apothecary shop and a natural history museum.* (A house hold inventory carried out after the death of Vermeer’s widow listed such possessions as “a stone table to grind paints on, with a grindstone as well.”) In Vermeer’s day, the pigments for black paint, for instance, came from charred peach pits or burned bones or ivory or even soot gathered from a smoky flame. Each material had its own merits and drawbacks.
Vermeer’s dazzling blue, ultramarine, posed countless difficulties to its seventeenth-century admirers. Not least was obtaining the raw material, lapis lazuli, a vivid blue semiprecious stone found, in the 1600s, only at a single location in what is now Afghanistan. Next came the grinding and then a long series of filtrations to separate the blue grains from impurities in the stone.
In centuries past, the oils stirred in with the pigments also came in various forms. Linseed oil was the most widely used, but that left endless decisions about whether it should be boiled (which rendered it clear rather than yellow and therefore better suited to delicate blues and whites), and for how long, and whether boiled oil should be thinned with ordinary oil, and if so, in what proportions, and so on. And what about poppy oil and a dozen others?
Oil painting derived its prestige not only from the beauty of the finished pictures but from the degree of know-how it demanded. In modern times, that specialist knowledge has faded away and artists today make their forebears sound almost like sorcerers. “More than with any other Vermeer,” one twentieth-century painter and critic wrote, “The Girl with a Pearl Earring looks as if it were blended from the dust of crushed pearls.” In reality, the task of preparing paints was less glamorous but nearly that difficult.
Every color called for its own finicky formulation; each had to be stored in a particular way. (Browns and yellows could be safely stored in bulk, in parchment-covered jars, but such costly preparations as ultramarine had to be prepared in small quantities and stored airtight, in a pig’s bladder. The precious paint was squeezed out of the bladder through a tiny