The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [22]
Wright had made his money in business. His business was manufacturing paint. Perhaps it was Wright who gave Van Meegeren the hint that triggered his experiments with the newfangled plastic invented in America. At any rate, we know that by 1932 Van Meegeren had begun trying to use Bakelite to solve the riddle of making oil paints that would harden in the oven while keeping their color.
But as we have seen, even with that substantial hint Van Meegeren spent fruitless month after fruitless month. This was nasty, tedious work, for nothing seemed to go right and the chemicals reeked. Van Meegeren’s skin was covered with rashes. His red-rimmed eyes teared constantly. (Van Meegeren would later claim that his wife had no idea what he was up to during all this time, but Jo could hardly have missed the stench or her husband’s odd appearance. She put up with it because she shared Van Meegeren’s vision of a giant payday down the road. Her hope, she once confided, was that “a little zero should be added to their capital.”)
Van Meegeren began each round of experiment with a small amount of Bakelite, which he dissolved in turpentine. He added linseed oil, a standard ingredient in the paint recipes of his seventeenth-century forebears, and then he stirred in one or another of the pigments he had laboriously ground. With that newmade paint, he slapped a few strokes on a test canvas, set the oven to a temperature setting that had not already proved useless, and waited.
When he smelled smoke, when he had lost his patience, when he could not think what else to do, he opened the oven door. Usually he found a charred canvas or a bleached and faded patch of color. He never found anything even vaguely like a masterpiece. Even today, in an upstairs room in Van Meegeren’s Roquebrune villa, some of the floorboards bear witness to these failed experiments, the stains of spilled paint impossible to scrub away.
Then, somehow, Van Meegeren decided that maybe linseed oil was the problem. He turned instead to lavender oil and, especially, lilac oil.* Both were known to the old masters, and in using them, Van Meegeren was following up a hint he had found “by chance, in an old book on oils and fats”—or so he later recalled, dismissively, although the “old book” was in fact his trusty and much-consulted German handbook of oil and pigment recipes. Oils made from flowers, Van Meegeren’s handbook explained, are volatile, which is to say they evaporate quickly. Van Meegeren may have reasoned that once the lilac oil evaporated, the paint it left behind would harden more quickly and convincingly. He hoped, in other words, that the best way to simulate a paint made with linseed oil was to steer clear of linseed oil.
That seemed unlikely. Still, Van Meegeren tried some new formulations based on lilac oil. He tried them, because, Edison-like, he tried nearly everything. He was getting nowhere. What could it hurt? He gambled, too, that scientists would not detect the presence of Bakelite in his paint unless they tested for it specifically, which they had no reason to do.
When the momentous day finally arrived, it came without a signal. Van Meegeren had set up yet another test and had then gone to run errands. “On my way home from the doctor,” he recalled years later, “I got a flat tire, which was a great bore because the oven was on. But I thought…, ‘Well, after all the other failures, I can handle this one, too.’”
It took a long while to repair the tire, but Van Meegeren was glad to procrastinate.