The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [52]
The Frans Hals forgery ensnarled a Dutch art historian named Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, a dry stick of a man with a great reputation as a connoisseur. De Groot had the prissy, pedantic manner of a small-town librarian, but he knew the works of the great Dutch painters intimately.† The author of countless articles and a ten-volume opus, Descriptive and Critical Catalogue of the Works of the Most Outstanding Dutch painters of the Seventeenth Century, De Groot’s specialty was a kind of pruning of the artistic garden. The masters of Holland’s Golden Age had attracted a great many imitators and pupils. De Groot focused much of his energy on sorting out whether a particular painting was a genuine Rembrandt or Hals, say, or whether the supposed masterpiece betrayed the hand of a mere follower. It was work that called for deep knowledge and unshakable faith in one’s judgment.
In 1924, De Groot published a short article with the enticing title “Some Recently Discovered Works by Frans Hals.” The first of these newfound paintings was a Merry Cavalier, a bleary-eyed, laughing man of the kind Hals painted so often. But this particular painting was not just another Hals, according to De Groot, but a “genuine and extraordinarily beautiful” example of his work, “magnificent in the contrast of colors and in a perfect state.”
De Groot happily recalled his first sighting of the painting. “This little gem was shown to me in April, 1923,” he wrote, “by a collector at The Hague.” That supposed collector was Theo van Wijngaarden. After their meeting, De Groot’s life would never regain its previous tranquillity.
In 1924 an auction house bought the Merry Cavalier, which came accompanied by a certificate of authenticity written by De Groot. Soon after the purchase, the auctioneers contacted De Groot with disturbing news—it appeared that the Hals was a modern forgery! They had paid a great deal of money for the painting, they went on, and they wanted De Groot to reimburse them for one third of the cost. De Groot refused. He had vouched for the authenticity of the painting, that much was true, but he was “not responsible for the amount paid by other parties.”
The case went to trial: on one side, the auction house; on the other, the middleman who had sold them the painting. The charge: fraud. De Groot declared, as his expert opinion, that the painting was a genuine seventeenth-century work, in fact a masterpiece, by Frans Hals.
That anyone would question De Groot’s opinion was insulting; that he would find himself caught up in a trial was unthinkable. The great man bellowed in outrage. If he was wrong, he roared, he would take all the paintings he owned and give them away, free, to Holland’s museums. All he asked from his challengers was that they agree, if they were wrong, to present those same museums with a check for a mere one tenth the value of De Groot’s art collection. And not only that. If he was wrong, said De Groot, then he promised “never to express another word, either in writing or verbally, about the genuineness of an unknown Frans Hals.”
But he could not be wrong. He had studied art for forty years, he proclaimed (and he noted, in Latin, that those forty years had been “not without glory”). If he was wrong, “I should have to admit that all art history and stylistic criticism are mistaken and that there is no basis for their existence.”
OF COURSE, HE was wrong. An array of scientific tests carried out in the course of the trial left no doubt. Chemical analysis of flecks of paint showed that the blue in the merry cavalier’s coat was artificial ultramarine, first used in 1826. A different blue used in the picture’s background dated from 1820. The