The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [171]
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Copyright
THE FORGER’S SPELL. Copyright © 2008 by Edward Dolnick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2008 ISBN: 9780061844591
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* Throughout this book I have given addresses in the American style, with the house number first. The Dutch put the number last.
* It was not to be. Oster was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, along with several colleagues, for attempting to assassinate Hitler. Sas died on October 21, 1948, when his KLM flight crashed in the fog near Prestwick, Scotland.
* British author Anthony Bailey tells the story of an art collector who learned that his prized (and costly) Rembrandt could not be genuine because it was painted on a mahogany panel, which was not used in Rembrandt’s day. The collector burned the painting. It now turns out that seventeenth-century painters did use mahogany.
* The list of famous forgers is long and virtually entirely male. Throughout this book I refer to forgers as “he.”
* The comparable figure for France was 25 percent, for Belgium, 40 percent.
* Vermeer did not name his pictures, as far as anyone knows. The names in common use are largely a matter of tradition and vary slightly from writer to writer. Here and throughout the book I have followed the names in Albert Blankert’s Vermeer of Delft.
* Some forgers have been as meticulous as De Hory was reckless. In one recent case, the Italian police seized three hundred fakes supposedly by the artist Mario Schifano, whose authentic work commands prices on the order of $100,000. One duped collector insisted that his painting could not be fake—he had a photograph of himself with his newly purchased painting, shaking hands with Schifano. Both “artist” and artwork turned out to be fake. The collector had shaken hands with a double who had been paid $150 to pose as Schifano.
* In addition to freeing painters from the chore of grinding and mixing their paints, the convenient new tubes made it far more practical to paint outdoors. “Without paints in tubes,” Auguste Renoir observed, “there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.”
* To this day, German tourists in Holland occasionally hear a taunting request to “give me back my bike.”
* In Dutch, the combination ij is used for the letter y. Wijngaarden’s name is pronounced