The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [174]
* In a discussion of the Smiling Girl and the Lacemaker, Mellon’s forged Vermeers, the historian Ben Broos remarks that “it appears that there was a kind of Vermeer factory in operation at that time.”
† There is no formal convention for shortening double-barreled Dutch names. Hofstede de Groot’s Dutch peers would have called him Hofstede. Duveen and American art dealers called him De Groot, as have I.
* The English painter Leo Stevenson claims that “art history is the only branch of history where opinion carries the same weight as fact.”
† Bode was the mentor of the art historian Wilhelm Valentiner, whose enthusiastic endorsement of Mellon’s forged Vermeers we discussed in chapter 23.
* Bernard Berenson’s dismissal of A Lady Professor of Bologna, by Giorgione, perfectly captured the sought-after tone. The portrait, said Berenson, was “neither a lady, nor a professor, nor of Bologna, and least of all by Giorgione.”
* The prince had a reputation as a playboy and a lush. In a popular joke of the day, Queen Wilhelmina was reviewing the troops one summer day and fainted in the heat. An officer hurried to the rescue, raised the queen’s head, and held a flask of brandy under her nose to revive her. The queen took a sniff and opened her eyes groggily. “Hendrik,” she whispered, “is that you?”
* The industrialist Henry Frick bought The Polish Rider in 1910. Today the painting is one of the great stars of the Frick Collection in New York. In recent years, the Rembrandt Research Project has created immense controversy by suggesting that the painting might not be by Rembrandt after all. The issue, which is still unresolved, is brilliantly explored in Anthony Bailey’s Responses to Rembrandt.
* Nor do many other Vermeer lovers. Arthur Wheelock, for one, called Allegory of Faith Vermeer’s “one mistake.”
* Vermeer experimented with a number of different but closely related signatures. The I stood for Iohannes, an alternative spelling of Johannes.
* Van Beuningen refused suggestions that he install his collection in specially designed rooms and explained that he thought of his paintings as friends he liked to keep close by. One horrified house guest watched Van Beuningen fry his bacon and eggs only inches from Brueghel’s Tower of Babel.
* Albert Blankert thinks it means that Girl with a Red Hat is not a Vermeer and was instead painted by someone unfamiliar with seventeenth-century Dutch furniture. (Blankert has a host of additional objections to the painting.) Arthur Wheelock believes it means that Vermeer thought his composition worked better with the lions turned around.
* One of the three fakes endorsed by Bode was the much-admired Smiling Girl, discussed in chapter 22, that Andrew Mellon would later donate to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Bredius correctly rejected the painting, and was the first to do so, in this 1932 essay. The casual tone of his dismissal—“a very intriguing Vermeerish laughing girl…inspired by the famous girl in the Hague Gallery [i.e., Girl with a Pearl Earring]”—was as characteristic as the passion of his many endorsements.
* De Groot had treated Bredius just as sharply. When Bredius called Rembrandt’s Portrait of an elderly Man a nineteenth-century forgery, for example, De Groot described how “sad” it made him that “a man like Bredius should not immediately recognize such a picture as a masterpiece of the very first order.”
* Van Beuningen refused suggestions that he install his collection in specially designed rooms and explained that he thought of his paintings as friends he liked to keep close by. One horrified house guest watched Van Beuningen fry his bacon and eggs only inches from Brueghel’s Tower of Babel.
* Perhaps the most famous trial in Britain in the nineteenth century centered on precisely such a case. The heir to one of En gland’s largest fortunes vanished at sea in 1854. He was presumed dead. Thirteen years later, the drowned man—or was it an imposter?—reappeared. The newcomer, a massive man who had been working as a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia, seemed far different