The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [50]
Mellon kept the Girl with a Red Hat on the piano in his enormous Washington apartment. In 1936, at age eighty-one, he wrote to President Roosevelt offering to leave his fortune and his art collection—including all three of his Vermeers—to found a new museum, the National Gallery of Art.
Mellon had not revealed any interest in art until about the age of forty, when he made a series of holiday visits to Europe, but when he took up collecting, he went at it with vigor. The major dealers fought to win him as a client. Duveen, never one to wait for business to come to him, bribed Mellon’s servants to keep him informed of their master’s comings and goings. This was not casual eavesdropping. “Duveen,” one biographer tells us, “kept a dossier on Mellon’s movements, his visitors, his art collection, his dinner parties, and what ever thoughts were heard to escape from his lips.” Duveen’s spies hovered at the Treasury as well as in Mellon’s home. One snoop gathered up Mellon’s discarded notes and letters at the end of every workday. By the time Mellon had walked the short distance from the Treasury to his home in Dupont Circle, the contents of his office wastebasket were on the train to Duveen headquarters in New York.
THE FIRST DOUBTS about the Duveen Lacemaker were voiced as early as 1933, but the skeptics took Decades to win the argument. In 1936, when Mellon donated his Lacemaker to the American people, the National Gallery labeled it a Vermeer; in 1973, it was by a “Follower of Jan Vermeer”; in 1978, by an “Imitator of Jan Vermeer.” Mellon’s Smiling Girl turned out to be a fake, too, although half a dozen of the leading experts of the day had endorsed both it and The Lacemaker. In recent years the National Gallery has banished the fake Lacemaker and The Smiling Girl to a “Special Collection,” where the ordinary museum visitor will not see them.
Today the reigning Vermeer authority at the National Gallery, Arthur Wheelock, acknowledges that it is hard to see why these two fakes so impressed his predecessors. Wheelock is a soft-spoken scholar whose natural bent is understatement, but these “Vermeers” bring him as close as he comes to slapping his forehead in astonishment. “It’s just impossible to believe that the two forgeries here could be Vermeers,” he says. “I take first-year students to look at these paintings, and they say, ‘Oh, eeeuw, they’re ugly!’ They really are not very good paintings, and they have nothing to do with the artist as we understand him.
“These students have only been studying art for six months, and they find it inconceivable. But when these paintings were first discovered, people used exactly the same words to describe them that I would use for a painting that I was really passionate about.”
Wheelock, who has done extensive detective work in unraveling the true story of the two fake Vermeers, believes the same forger painted both pictures. That forger, he argues, was none other than Han van Meegeren’s old mentor, Theo van Wijngaarden.
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THE EXPERT’S EYE
Van Wijngaarden did not have as much painterly skill as Van Meegeren, but he did know how to reel in a sucker. His strategy could hardly have been simpler. He sprinkled his forgeries with touches that shouted “Vermeer” or “Hals” and he spun vague but romantic stories about how he had happened on the finds of a lifetime.
The jumble of allusions should have given the game away at once. Just as a person telling a story loses credibility if he drops names by the bucketful, a forger must not copy everything in sight. A single “quotation” is enough. Or so the experts always say when they talk about how forgers reveal themselves. But often they ignore their own warnings. Listen to Wilhelm Valentiner, an eminent art historian and for nearly twenty years the editor of Art in America. In 1928, Valentiner published an essay titled “A Newly Discovered Vermeer.” Despite the title, Valentiner’s subject was not one new Vermeer but two, Mellon’s Lacemaker and his Smiling Girl.
No one knew