The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [51]
Like all the critics who trumpeted their finds, Valentiner radiated smugness. “It seems that it should be an easy matter to recognize with certainty a work by Vermeer,” he went on, and yet, he regretted to say, many of his colleagues had somehow wandered astray. They had little excuse, for “after one knows a few works by the master the others are much more easily recognized than is the case with almost any other great artist of the past.”
Vermeer’s paintings shared an unmistakable family resemblance, Valentiner explained, and he spelled out the features that made identification so easy. The same curtains recurred in picture after picture, and so did the maps on the wall, and the glasses on the table. Vermeer repeated himself so often, Valentiner went on, that “newly discovered works by him frequently seem like puzzle pictures composed of pieces taken from different groupings in known paintings by him.”
Then Valentiner took cart and horse and laboriously harnessed them the wrong way around. He compiled a long list of features that Mellon’s two “Vermeers” shared with an undisputed Vermeer, Woman and Two Men. In all three, for instance, the head of the central figure was turned the same way in relation to the body, and the eyes were large and directed straight toward the viewer. The observations were correct. Only the conclusion Valentiner drew from them—the shared features “make certain that the same master is here at work”—was flawed.*
Valentiner picked out one feature of the fake Lacemaker for special mention.
Here, too, he went out of his way to praise the very thing that should have set off alarms—the painting looked peculiarly modern. For forgers, the greatest stylistic challenge is time-travel. Artists and writers of every generation leave behind countless subconscious signs that reveal the era when they lived and worked. Look at a Dickens novel. The “choices” that Dickens made without thinking—the size of his book, the length of the sentences, the nature of the plot, the topics taken up and the ones scrupulously avoided—all signal “Victorian En gland.” For a modern-day reader (or art lover), it takes a bit of effort to engage deeply with a work created centuries ago. When we find a work of art from long ago that seems so congenial and inviting that it might have been crafted only the other day, we should raise a cautious eyebrow.
And yet, consider the dramatic conclusion to Valentiner’s essay. In his final sentence he highlighted two qualities above all others that made The Lacemaker a masterpiece. First, “The face of the girl is unusually pretty, as the features are smaller than in some of the artist’s other types.” Vermeer had painted a girl, in other words, who suited modern taste. In a second way, too, Valentiner noted approvingly, Vermeer had transcended the bounds of his own era. He had managed “a subtlety in the distribution of light and diffusion of color rarely to be found in the genre paintings of Holland in the seventeenth century.”
It was as if Vermeer lived in the same world as twentieth-century art connoisseurs.
THE TWO MELLON “Vermeers” that ended up in the National Gallery were not Van Wijngaarden’s first old masters. He had begun his forgery career not with Vermeer but with Frans Hals, and he had conned an expert even more eminent, and even more sure of himself, than Valentiner. Han van Meegeren would heed every detail of that early fraud.
Or perhaps he did more than watch and learn. It may well be that the fakes that Arthur Wheelock attributes to Van Wijngaarden were in fact Van Meegeren’s all along. The division of labor between the two forgers may