The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [27]
Two and a half centuries after that auction, the great art historian Kenneth Clark endorsed the idea that The Art of Painting is a self-portrait. The reclusive Vermeer “may have given himself away,” Clark wrote, but the evidence he produced was weak at best. Clark directs our attention to the painter’s eye catchingly elegant waistcoat, with its dramatic sliced back, and reminds us that we have seen it in another Vermeer, The Procuress. In that work, painted about ten years before The Art of Painting, a young man wearing the slashed waistcoat and an artist’s beret looks the viewer boldly in the face.
That cocky youth, Clark proposed, grew to be our reclusive genius. Another Vermeer scholar, Norbert Schneider, suggests that the room depicted in The Art of Painting is in fact Vermeer’s own studio, because “the heavy oak table on the left is mentioned in his mother-in-law’s inventory.” Perhaps. But most authorities agree with Harvard’s Ivan Gaskell, who contends that the proper response to all such suggestions is “doubt or disbelief.”
AS ALWAYS WITH Vermeer, we cannot be certain what he intended. Vermeer’s own wife referred to this work as “The Art of Painting,” and scholars once thought that it represented the artist at work. But what about that mysterious jacket, or the artist’s red stockings, or his white leggings with their folded-over tops? That is the outfit of a dandy, not a working painter—certainly not a working seventeenth-century painter, at any rate, with his linseed oil and his turpentine and his grimy smock and his paints stored in pigs’ bladders.
The painting shows not a day-in-the-life, modern historians feel sure, but an allegory. But an allegory of what? Who is the young woman in blue whom the artist is painting, and what are we to make of her laurel wreath, or the trumpet in her left hand and the large yellow book in her right? Does she represent Fame, or Art, or History, as one generation or another of scholars has contended? Does the inclusion of a mask (on the table) symbolize the competition between sculpture and painting, as some maintain? Why does the large map on the wall, its every wrinkle and shadow stunningly rendered, show the provinces of Holland not as they appeared in Vermeer’s lifetime but as they had been nearly a century before?
Despite so many unanswered questions, the painting conjures up a feeling of calm rather than unease. Even the great Vermeer scholar Albert Blankert, an impatient man with a temperamental allergy to art critics who gush, interrupts his own analysis of the painting and simply marvels. “No other work so flawlessly integrates naturalistic technique, brightly illuminated space, and a complexly ordered composition,” he writes. “Exquisitely worked out details—the chair in the foreground, the crinkled wall map, and the painter’s jacket—may be enjoyed individually, and yet are perfectly integrated with the serenity of the larger sunlit space.”
HANS POSSE, HITLER’S advisor, felt the same way. Now, in 1940, he saw a way to grab The Art of Painting away from the family who had owned it for more than a century. The painting belonged to two wealthy brothers who lived in Vienna, Eugen and Jaromir Czernin. Austria, Posse could not help noticing, was in Nazi hands.
A Czernin ancestor had acquired the painting back in 1813, from a collector who had, in turn, bought it from a saddlemaker. At that time and for Decades after, the painting was attributed not to Vermeer, whose name had been nearly forgotten, but to the far more esteemed Pieter de Hooch.
Lynn Nicholas, whose superlative The Rape of Europa is the definitive account of Nazi looting, picks up the story. Though the Czernin collection was private, the family maintained a gallery that was open to the