The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [175]
* Lazarus’s stretcher consisted of two parts. The first and more important was a wooden rectangle with essentially the same dimensions as the picture itself. The canvas was stretched over this rectangle and nailed in place. The stretcher also included four additional pieces of wood, for sturdiness, arranged in a diamond shape with its corners at the centers of the rectangle’s four sides.
* The Girl with a Red Hat seems to be an exception to the rule. It is the only painting by Vermeer with someone else’s work beneath it (and one of only two Vermeers on a wooden panel, not on canvas; the other is the controversial Girl with a Flute). X-rays of Girl with a Red Hat reveal a portrait of a man with a big hat and long, curly hair (Vermeer flipped the panel upside down). Arthur Wheelock says that the man’s portrait is not in Vermeer’s style and suggests that it may have been the work of Carel Fabritius.
* Two hundred fifty degrees sounds surprisingly low for an oven—it is not hot enough to bake a cake or a loaf of bread—but Van Meegeren had found by trial and error that a long baking at a low temperature was the only way to avoid scorching his paint and making his canvas dangerously fragile.
* Emmaus would eventually sell for the equivalent of about $3.9 million in today’s dollars.
* One notable exception was J. H. Huizinga, the eminent Dutch historian. Huizinga had an abiding interest in art, but he was not an art historian. In 1941, before Van Meegeren’s unmasking, Huizinga wrote that “it may be rather bold of me to say that Vermeer fails precisely when he depicts holy scenes, for instance Christ at Emmaus.”
*On July 18, 1945, when the authenticity of Emmaus was still in doubt, Luitwieler told the Dutch newspaper Het Parool that he had studied and worked on the painting over the course of three months and guaranteed it was genuine. A week later Newsweek quoted an unnamed “restorer who had recently transferred the painting to new canvas” as saying that if Emmaus was indeed a fraud, then the forger was a genius.
* Most writers today use the spelling De Hooch.
* It is a rule with a worrying amount of elbow room. Some forgers, like the goldsmith Reinhold Vasters, flourished for Decades and were found out only by a fluke. Vasters worked in the late 1800s, specializing in elaborate productions supposedly from the Renaissance. He went undiscovered for nearly a century. More generally, as the Met’s Theodore Rousseau once remarked, “We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls.”
* In 1977, a prankster demonstrated that the expectations game works the other way around, too. Writing under a pseudonym, he submitted a typed copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s National Book Award–winning novel Steps to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents. Every single one turned it down, including Random House, who had published the novel in the first place.
† To cry “fake!” is, moreover, to make a very serious charge. The art world holds to a belief analogous to the legal view that it is better to let a dozen guilty people go free than to imprison a single innocent person.
* “Even before the war [Hitler] had forbidden ‘warning memoranda,’” one biographer writes, “[and] now he regarded all sober assessments of the situation as a ‘personal insult.’”
* The eminent astronomer Percival Lowell explained in 1895 that the reason he could see that the canals on Mars were manmade (or Martian-made) was that he, unlike other observers, understood what he was looking at. “The expert sees what the tyro misses,” Lowell wrote, “not from better eyesight but from better mechanism in the higher centers. A very slight hint from the eye goes a long way in the brain of the one; no distance at all in the eye of the other.”
* Friedländer had a daunting