The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [18]
Van Meegeren labored away at his grindstone, his well-worn copy of a German treatise, On Fat Oils: Substitutes for Linseed Oil and Oil-based Pigments, always close by. He would later tell an elaborate story about how he had found the booklet, but he loved tall tales, and the story sounds like a party piece made up for its entertainment value. As Van Meegeren told it, he had been window-shopping one day. “I saw a splendid seventeenth-century mirror in a little antique store. I bought it, and while the salesgirl wrapped it, a nice-looking leather-bound book caught my eye. Impulsively I looked in it. It contained chemical treatises assembled by an unknown writer. It seemed to be whispering a telepathic message to me. A miraculous thing happened. On the page that the book opened to, I read a seemingly unimportant formula, but one that was the missing link for my work!”
The Dutch painter Diederik Kraaijpoel, who wrote one of the best studies of Van Meegeren’s career, has a soft spot for forgers in general and for Van Meegeren in particular, but he discounts all such tales. Van Meegeren, says Kraaijpoel, was a habitual, incorrigible liar. “Never believe Van Meegeren!” His reminiscences are evidence of his charm, perhaps, Kraaijpoel says, but they are not evidence of any other sort.
For a skilled technician like Van Meegeren, persistence was vital. As he pored over the recipes in his German handbook, the notion of the artist as inspired genius communing with his muse must have seemed far away. Curiously, we cannot be sure that Vermeer showed as much doggedness as his modern imitator. He may have left the grinding and mixing to a servant or bought his paints ready-mixed by an apothecary.
All these alchemical chores were necessary, but none helped Van Meegeren with his central riddle—how to make a new painting as hard as an old one. The problem was to find a way to harden paint without harming the picture. Heat, Van Meegeren knew, would play a crucial role. In 1932, he bought a large oven—large enough to swallow up a painting—and set to work baking test canvases. Like some hapless cook in ancient times who had seen a soufflé in a vision, Van Meegeren knew what he wanted but didn’t know if it was possible. He smeared his paints on one test strip of canvas after another and cooked away, but no experiment yielded anything but frustration. Baked at low heat, his test paintings faded and yellowed like an old T-shirt left in the sun. Baked at a high temperature, the paint bubbled and blackened and the canvas scorched.
With too many variables to sort out systematically, Van Meegeren tried endless combinations of oven temperature and oil ratios and baking times. Disaster followed disaster, but the forger kept on. Van Meegeren was “obsessive” and “resourceful” and “indefatigable,” in the words of Sheldon Keck, a New York University conservator and one of the great authorities on the scientific study of paintings. “He was the Edison of art forgers.”
He was like Edison, at least, in his stamina. Before Edison came up with a lightbulb that worked, he tried filaments made of platinum and iridium and silicon and boron and cardboard and linen and wood and cornstalks and two hundred varieties of bamboo. What saved Han van Meegeren was finally stumbling upon an Edison of his own.
TIME MAGAZINE DEVOTED the cover of its September 22, 1924, issue to a mild-looking, now-forgotten man. His round, bald head, thick eyebrows, and droopy mustache gave him the appearance of a balloon that had been decorated by a child wielding a Magic Marker. Under the man’s name, Leo H. Baekeland, Time ran a cryptic caption: “It will not burn. It will not melt.”
Leo Baekeland was a Belgian-born scientist who helped invent the modern world. He made his first fortune, in 1899, with a new kind of photographic paper. With $1 million from Kodak