The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [30]
The Nazis hunted for the Rothschild masterpieces with particular diligence. They found them quickly and pronounced them “abandoned.” In all, the Germans confiscated 5,009 works from the Rothschild holdings, including paintings by Vermeer, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Goya, Van Eyck, and Ingres.
On February 3, 1941, one of Goering’s private trains set out from Paris to Germany. Its cargo included forty-two crates filled with the Rothschilds’ art. Those crates marked H1 through H19 had been earmarked for Hitler; G1 through G23, for Goering. Crate H13 contained Vermeer’s Astronomer, a special prize. It went to Hitler, not Goering. This marked the second time that Hitler had grabbed a Vermeer that Goering had lusted after. Once again, Goering could only nod politely and hail his Fuehrer’s taste.
THE ASTRONOMER DEPICTS a man absorbed in thought, his gaze focused on a celestial globe (showing the constellations), which he holds in place with the outstretched fingers of his right hand. Like many Vermeers, the painting is small, about twenty inches by seventeen. (Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid and A Street in Delft are virtually the same size.)
Light pours in from a window on the left-hand wall and illuminates the painting’s lone figure, as it does in so many Vermeers. The astronomer may actually be an astrologer—art historians continue to argue the point—but it is utterly characteristic that Vermeer has placed this student of the heavens indoors, in a meticulously rendered space. The astronomer’s face is half in light, half in shadow, and so is his robe, which is a rich green rather than the famous Vermeer blue. (The Geographer, a painting so similar to The Astronomer in theme and composition that many take it to be a companion piece, shows a similar robe in blue.)*
Unusually, The Astronomer is dated, one of only three Vermeers with a date. The year is written in Roman numerals, on a cabinet just above the astronomer’s right hand. His left hand is nearer to us and deserves examination. The astronomer is in profile, with his left side toward us and his left hand resting on a table’s edge. The hand emerges from a roomy sleeve that ends an inch or two above the wrist; there is a gap between the index finger and the other three fingers.
We should look closely at that hand because it is almost certain that Han van Meegeren studied it with the most minute attention.
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INSIGHTS FROM A FORGER
There are only three motives for forgery,” says John Myatt, himself convicted of art forgery in 1999 but for a run of nine years a hugely successful fraudster. “Greed, vengeance, and thrills. Or maybe a toxic soup of some combination of the three.” It is not happenstance that greed comes first on the list. Forgery is usually about commerce, not art. A history of forgery would stretch back in time nearly as far as a history of prostitution.*
But as ancient as forgery is, it was not until Van Meegeren’s day—not until the early Decades of the twentieth century—that the price of art soared to levels beyond that of almost every other luxury. A great painting that suddenly appears on the market, the legendary journalist Janet Flanner once observed, is “inch for inch…the highest-priced newly discovered land known in the western world.”
Myatt, a soft-spoken Englishman, has thought a great deal about forgery in general and Van Meegeren in particular. He considered trying Van Meegeren’s strategy—put all your eggs in one carefully crafted, false-bottomed basket—but could never convince his partner in crime to take that chance. Instead, they opted for endless smaller scams, on the theory that no one transaction would bring full-scale scrutiny.
Perhaps the reason Myatt has spent so much time pondering his fellow forgers is that he found