The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [53]
There was other evidence, too. The nails that held the canvas to its wooden stretcher were modern, quite unlike the nails used in the 1600s. (Cheap, machine-made nails came into common use only around 1850. Careful forgers reuse nails salvaged from antique furniture.) The nails were not decisive in themselves—a modern restorer might have replaced old nails with new ones, which is precisely what De Groot claimed that Van Wijngaarden had done. But the nailheads turned out to be paint-spattered, and that was telltale. Why? Because it meant that the twentieth-century nails had been hammered into position before the forger set to work.
The scientific tests revealed, as well, that the forger had devised an audacious, but easily detected, way to give his paint the hardness of a centuries-old work. Knowing that the standard test for hardness was dabbing a painting with alcohol to see if any paint came off, the forger had concocted a gummy, glue-y paint that dried quickly and passed the alcohol test with ease. The problem, it soon turned out, was that this new paint failed an even simpler test—if you dipped a cotton swab in water, the paint came off on the swab as soon as you touched it. An authentic old painting would never soften in that way. The forger’s gamble was that if anyone tested his painting at all, they would stick with the one test in standard use.
Like the James Thurber character who huffed that “mere proof won’t convince me,” De Groot found himself unimpressed by the evidence. He could not explain how modern paint had turned up in an old painting, he conceded, but no matter. “As I am firmly convinced of the authenticity and antiquity of the picture, I feel confident that a solution for this problem will be found.” The so-called evidence, De Groot insisted, merely demonstrated “the inexpertness of the experts.” He was the victim of an injustice “so enormous…that it could be compared only with that committed in the Dreyfus case.”
Seeing where things were heading, De Groot settled the case before a verdict could be handed down, by buying the Merry Cavalier for himself. Then he did two even more remarkable things. First, in 1924, the same year as the Merry Cavalier fiasco, he bought and authenticated another newly discovered Frans Hals. This one, a picture called A Boy Smoking, showed a cheerful long-haired boy with a pipe. It was “probably painted about 1625–30 in the master’s freest style,” according to De Groot. “The picture has great attractiveness as a subject and marvelous handling of the brush, every stroke of which can be counted.”
De Groot purchased A Boy Smoking “from a dealer at The Hague,” just as he had purchased the Merry Cavalier from “a collector at The Hague.” Three guesses.
De Groot’s second surprise emerged the next year, in 1925. He might have gritted his teeth and waited out the embarrassing publicity that the trial had stirred up. Instead, De Groot gave the controversy new life by publishing an angry booklet attacking his critics and defending his own expertise. It was entitled True or False? Eye or Chemistry? and proclaimed that the only way to resolve questions of artistic authenticity was by relying on the connoisseur’s eye. Scientific investigations were beside the point at best and misleading at worst. “In the art of painting,” wrote De Groot, “the eye must be the benchmark, as in music it is the ear. Neither the tuning fork nor the test tube will do.”
A forger could scarcely imagine a more welcome message.
24
A FORGER’S LESSONS
Even a man less cynical than Han van Meegeren might have pricked up his ears when his chum Theo van Wijngaarden bragged about his latest scams. Perhaps the two con men worked in tandem; perhaps Van Wijngaarden showed the way. (The author of one of the best essays on Van Meegeren, Hope Werness, declares outright that it is “all but certain that the two ‘Hals’ were painted by Van Meegeren.”) In any case, Van Wijngaarden’s younger, more ambitious colleague quickly