The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [172]
* Rol had the talent to have made trouble, if he had been so inclined. Arthur Wheelock, a prominent Vermeer scholar, met Rol in the painter’s old age. “Mr. Rol was quite a painter. I visited him at the time of the Mauritshuis Vermeer show [in 1996]. If I hadn’t known that the Girl with a Pearl Earring was hanging in The Hague, I would have sworn that was it, hanging in his back room. It was amazing.” Rol’s version was a copy that he had painted for his own pleasure rather than for profit.
* The oils have a heavy, cloying smell. Van Meegeren liked to tell a story about how Jo came in unexpectedly during his lilac experiments and smelled what she took to be another woman’s perfume. Unable to defend himself with the truth, Van Meegeren (supposedly) had no choice but to weather the attack.
* The master race, Jews whispered to one another, would be “slim like Goering, blond like Hitler, and tall like Goebbels.”
* The art historian Willem van de Watering notes that, although this description is generally taken to refer to The Art of Painting, it is possible that it does not. The reference to a “portrait” is odd, Van de Watering remarks, and the asking price seems strangely low, at only 45 florins in comparison with 175 for Woman Pouring Milk or 200 for A View of Delft.
* Hendrickje Stoffels has since been assigned to Rembrandt’s workshop rather than to Rembrandt himself.
* With art as with mass execution, the Nazis kept meticulous records. In Italy, for example, Hitler noted to the penny the amount he spent on art: 40,179,942 lire and 45 centesimi, including freight charges.
* The Vermeer scholar Arthur Wheelock writes that The Geographer and The Astronomer depict the same man. Wheelock believes that Vermeer’s model was Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great scientist and one of the first people to peer through a microscope and describe what he saw. Van Leeuwenhoek lived in Delft at the same time as Vermeer and served as executor of Vermeer’s will. It is hard to think of two men with a deeper interest in light and its properties, but scholars cannot prove that the two ever met.
* Thomas Hoving is fond of a remark of Horace (65 BC–AD 8) that “he who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand frauds.” At about the time of Christ, the poet Phaedrus warned his fellow Romans that statues supposedly carved hundreds of years before by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles were actually modern forgeries.
* Almost always, the owner of a painting that turns out to be a fake responds with the shock and humiliation of a betrayed lover. The fake looks identical after the revelation, but everything has changed. Not so for Bartos. To his credit, he insisted that his defrocked “Giacometti” retained all the visual allure that had drawn him to it in the first place.
* Mary-Lisa Palmer, director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, had immediately recognized that someone was peddling fake, inferior “Giacomettis.” But because Drewe’s fake provenances were so good, Palmer’s warnings went unheeded for years.
* It was in a conversation with Gilbert in Goering’s jail cell, on the night of April 18, 1946, that Goering offered what became a famous observation on mass psychology: “Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” he said. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in En gland nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
Gilbert remarked that in a democracy the people have a say in the decision to go to war.
“Oh, that is all well and good,” Goering replied, “but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them