The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [43]
Hellman explained. He spoke briefly about Vermeer’s place in Dutch art and a bit more expansively about how few Vermeers there were and how coveted they were.
The price, Hellman said, was $100,000 (roughly $2 million in today’s dollars).
“I’ll take it,” said Morgan.
VERMEER’S REPUTATION CONTINUED to soar in the early Decades of the new century. In 1909, as if to highlight the new world’s claim to the old world’s art, the Met put together a show of Dutch masterpieces. Vermeer was outnumbered—among its 149 works, the show included 37 Rembrandts and 20 Halses, compared with only six Vermeers—but the art-loving public had found a new favorite.* “The rare and incomparable artist Vermeer,” one newspaper reporter wrote, “…might be called the revelation and the bright, particular star of this grand collection.”
Next came the critics and the book-buying public. In 1913, a painter named Philip Hale published the first American book on Vermeer. No superlative was too much. Vermeer was “the greatest painter who has ever lived,” not just a “painter’s painter” but “the supreme painter.” He had “more great painting qualities and fewer defects than any other painter of any time or place.”
By 1916, Vermeer had moved past renown and on to full-fledged stardom. Ladies’ Home Journal, the most popular magazine in America, published color prints of two Vermeers—Woman Holding a Balance and A Lady Writing—for its 1.5 million readers. The prints came complete with framing instructions. For the price of a magazine, your home could have something in common with J. P. Morgan’s mansion.
FROM THE AMERICAN side, the boom in the Vermeer market seemed like just another display of vitality in a proud new era. Europe took a less cheery view. As early as 1907, the Dutch press had rallied in support of Vermeer, their native son, and against the upstart Americans. The debate centered on whether Holland could raise the money to buy Vermeer’s Milkmaid, which had come on the market when its longtime owner died. Editorial cartoons showed the milkmaid in her famous pose, stolidly attending to her work, while a lascivious Uncle Sam tried to drag her off with him.
A Dutch art expert named Abraham Bredius, the director of the Mauritshuis Museum, took a prominent role in the debate. Bredius, a wealthy collector and connoisseur as well as a museum official, talked about Vermeer as if the painter had been his personal friend. J. P. Morgan had designs on Holland’s best-known milkmaid, Bredius warned, and the Dutch had to hang on to her. Eventually Bredius managed to get parliament involved. The state purchased the Milkmaid, and today she is one of the great stars of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
But despite one or two such setbacks, the battle over art seemed to be going the Americans’ way. All six of the Vermeers in the 1909 show at the Met belonged to Americans, for example, and five of the six had been purchased within the previous dozen years.
And the trend was bound to continue, for the new collectors believed firmly that art had two astonishing, paired virtues—it advertised its owner’s merits, and it was guaranteed always to increase in value. When Henry Frick wanted to praise an investment, he could conceive no higher praise than to compare it with art. “Railroads,” Frick declared, “are the Rembrandts of investment.”
THIS WAS A seller’s market such as few had ever seen. The Americans had bottomless resources; they had a willingness, verging on eagerness, to pay record prices; they were desperately competitive; they all sought the same few brand-name artists; and they combined utter faith in their own judgment with a pristine and unsullied ignorance of art.
The frenzy of that market, which peaked in the 1920s, lured both dealers and forgers. The tricks they learned would come in handy a Decade later, in the next episode of art mania, this one orchestrated by the Nazis.
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A GHOST’S FINGERPRINTS
By now scholars have devoted