The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [47]
THE VERMEER REVIVAL began in 1866, with the publication of three articles by a French art historian named Theophile Thoré-Bürger. (The odd name reflected the politics of the day. Thoré had been exiled from France for his part in a failed coup. While in Belgium trying to dodge Napoleon III’s secret police, he adopted the pseudonym William Bürger. The word Bürger, German for “citizen,” was intended as a sly allusion to Thoré’s democratic views.) The long-neglected Vermeer was an “astounding” painter, wrote Thoré-Bürger, so much so that the historian dared to pose an unthinkable question: “After Rembrandt and Frans Hals, is this Van Der Meer…one of the foremost masters of the entire Dutch School?”
Thoré-Bürger’s use of “Van Der Meer” is significant, as a reminder of how little grasp anyone had on Vermeer. (Thoré-Bürger switched, haphazardly it seems, between “Van Der Meer” and “Vermeer.”) In 1816, the authors of a highly regarded history of Dutch painting had known of only three paintings by Vermeer, and they had seen only two: The Milkmaid and The Little Street. Fifty years later, Thoré-Bürger still found Vermeer such a riddle that he dubbed him “the Sphinx.”
But Thoré-Bürger’s dogged hunt for works by Vermeer paid off in find after find. He crisscrossed Europe, burrowing into archives in search of dusty catalogs from forgotten auctions and scrambling up ladders to look at paintings hung in neglected corners. In Amsterdam he found The Milkmaid and The Little Street, both attributed to other painters. In Dresden he discovered The Procuress, attributed to “Jacques Van Der Meer, of Utrecht.” In Brunswick he turned up Woman and Two Men, attributed to “Jacob Van Der Meer.”
AS GOOD AS Thoré-Bürger’s eye was, this was difficult work. It is one thing to rhapsodize over a painting in a gilt frame on a museum wall, conspicuously labeled, and something else to recognize a prince dressed in a beggar’s rags. At times Thoré-Bürger’s enthusiasm for Vermeer led him astray. As he announced find after find, one fellow connoisseur sneered that “nowadays Mr. Bürger sees Delft just about everywhere.”
Thoré-Bürger wrote enthusiastically about a “delightful” outdoor scene called Rustic Cottage, for example, that was “undeniably a landscape by Vermeer of Delft.” But this theory was soon debunked—and Thoré-Bürger held up to ridicule—by a cocky young scholar and collector named Abraham Bredius.
We’ve met Bredius before, agitating to keep The Milkmaid in Holland and out of the grasping hands of the Americans. We’ll meet him again.
Today the Rustic Cottage, no longer assigned to Vermeer, is at most a footnote in art history. Bredius, on the other hand, progressed from this small triumph to a career as one of the most renowned and self-assured authorities on Vermeer.
The Rustic Cottage mistake was easy to make. To go wrong in the opposite way—to look at a Vermeer and say “not Vermeer”—was easy, too. Even when Thoré-Bürger restricted himself to a handful of indisputable Vermeers, he found himself amazed and bewildered by their variety. In the cityscape called A View of Delft, for example, the paint was slathered on thickly, and in the domestic interior called Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, it was almost transparent. “This devil of an artist must no doubt have had several styles,” Thoré-Bürger grumbled.
Nor could mundane considerations like signatures resolve the riddles of brushwork and style. Where his eye told him “Vermeer,” Thoré-Bürger waved signatures aside. (Signatures on paintings don’t count for much with connoisseurs, who are always wary of the shenanigans of crooked dealers and status-conscious collectors.) Thoré-Bürger attributed several paintings clearly signed “J. Vrel” to Vermeer. “Hardly a Dutch name,” he wrote, “nor is it found in any other language. Is it an abbreviation? A contraction? I do not know.” Jacobus Vrel, it turned out eventually, was a painter in his own right, though he was no Vermeer.
Thoré-Bürger made mistakes,