The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [49]
For today’s art lovers, these allusions to paintings by Vermeer of curly-haired young men and girls holding cats don’t conjure up anything, for the very good reason that Vermeer never produced such paintings.* Most of the crop of supposed Vermeers that turned up or changed hands in the twenties and thirties were authentic paintings by lesser artists that had been misattributed, sometimes by mistake and sometimes with a wink. Some were outright fakes. One or two may even have been genuine. In such a feverish climate, these discoveries and near-discoveries inspired more hope than cynicism. Every neglected painting in an attic or storeroom gleamed brighter, burnished by the possibility that it, too, might be a long-lost Vermeer.
EACH TIME A new Vermeer appeared, the discovery sparked a round of breathless coverage in the art press. In 1927, for example, the art historian Seymour de Ricci wrote an ecstatic essay about the Vermeer of a “girl doing lacework” that Duveen had just found. (The essay’s title, “The Forty-First Vermeer,” itself testifies to Vermeer fever. As noted earlier, scholars today put the number of genuine Vermeers at thirty-five or thirty-six.) The Duveen Lacemaker shows a large-eyed, timid young woman looking toward the viewer over her left shoulder.
“It was not without emotion that I held, unframed, in my hands, this precious canvas,” wrote De Ricci. He described his slow, loving examination of the painting. “At leisure, I made it reflect the setting sun, and little by little the beauties of detail showed up beneath my eyes. The analysis of a work so complete in its simplicity demands some patience from the collector. The eye is seized firstly by the impression of the ensemble, by the grace of the subject, by the general harmony of the tones.”
Even then, De Ricci had yet to exhaust the splendors of this glorious painting. “Only works of certain great masters stand up under this severe test,” he wrote. “The slightest defect of a painter appears under such profound examination. The artist, in this case, shows himself singularly the master of his tools; even a monochrome reproduction…will permit us to unify the plea sure based on our admiration and the perfect technique of this infinitely charming work.”
De Ricci’s tone was as important as the message. Not a hint suggested the possibility that the “infinitely charming work” might be a fake. All through the twenties and thirties, De Ricci and his fellow connoisseurs turned out similar essays, which moved back and forth between praise of the painter, for his talent, and of the critic himself, for his discernment. The great connoisseurs all had utter faith in their “eye.” All one’s peers were prone to error—that was part of the fun—but no expert ever doubted his own talent. Fakes, like car accidents, were disasters that happened to other people.
But the Lacemaker that so moved De Ricci was a fake, and a poor one. The painting belonged to Andrew Mellon, the leading American collector of the 1920s. Mellon had purchased his first Vermeer, Girl with a Red Hat, in Paris in 1925, for $290,000 (about $3.2 million today). Two years later he bought two more Vermeers, or so he thought: The Lacemaker and The Smiling Girl.
Mellon was an immensely wealthy banker and a major force in Washington—he served as Secretary of the Treasury for presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—but he did not fit anyone’s image of a power broker. A slender man staggering under the weight of a bushy mustache, Mellon looked, according to one contemporary, like “a double-entry bookkeeper afraid of losing his job.” He spoke so