The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [54]
Van Meegeren drew three lessons from those early days peddling fake old masters. The first had to do with provenance, the history of a painting’s passage from the hands of the artist who created it through all its successive owners. Or so it works ideally, though in practice the record may have long gaps.
As we have seen, the British con man John Drewe took considerable trouble in preparing histories for his forgeries. That is a time-honored strategy, for mundane details like bills of sale and identification numbers on a frame often seem objective and authoritative in a way that a connoisseur’s opinion cannot. In 1799, for example, the city of Nuremberg agreed to lend a famous self-portrait by Dürer to a painter named Abraham Küffner so that he could make a copy. Dürer had painted himself looking straight at us, a handsome, self-assured young man, twenty-eight years old, with lovingly tended hair cascading down to his shoulders. The painting was on a wooden panel about half an inch thick.
Küffner sawed the panel in half by cutting parallel to the picture plane, as if he were slicing a thick slice of bread into two thin slices. That left him with two pieces of wood, one with the Dürer portrait on its front and the other with various seals and identification marks on its back. Then Küffner turned his attention to the panel with the authenticating seals. He forged a copy of the Dürer on its front side and sent it to the owners, with heartfelt thanks for their generosity. He kept the real Dürer for himself.
Nuremberg put its forged Dürer on display. No one noticed anything odd. The scheme might never have been uncovered if, six years later, Küffner had not sold his genuine, stolen Dürer to a collector. That buyer promptly resold the picture, and the new owner put his prize on exhibit in Munich. The proud burghers of Nuremberg soon learned, to their dismay, that their cherished Dürer was on display in two places at once.
Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany
Dürer self-portrait detail;
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
forgery
The first lesson to be learned from the Hals trial was that there was no need to go to all that trouble. Detail work was not Van Wijngaarden’s style. He preferred the grand gesture. His account of how he had come into possession of the Merry Cavalier, the Frans Hals forgery at the center of the De Groot court case, was so vague that it might as well have begun “Once upon a time, in a land across the sea…” Van Wijngaarden’s story, in the prosecutor’s summary, was that “he had had the good fortune to discover a collection of seventeenth-century paintings in the possession of an old family to whom he was distantly related, and this painting had come from that collection.”
It should never have worked. For obvious reasons, the rule of thumb is that the more expensive the painting, the more important its provenance. But Van Wijngaarden had proved that you could take the opposite route and succeed beautifully, provided you could find a buyer too eager or too sure of himself to bother with paperwork and background checks. Rather than spell out every detail in a fanciful pedigree, Van Wijngaarden outlined a fairy tale and let his eager-to-buy, eager-to-believe audience conjure up its own fantasy.
When the time came, Van Meegeren would recycle almost exactly the same strategy.
THE SECOND LESSON Van Meegeren drew from the Hals case was to pay attention to the science. He and Van Wijngaarden had been far too reckless. To try to palm off a painting that could be unmasked by anyone with a damp rag was just silly. Van Meegeren threw away tens of thousands on parties and call girls and he drank himself into oblivion, but in some ways he was a serious man. Van Wijngaarden’s strategy, such as it was, depended on the experts’ carelessness. As his Bakelite experiments showed, Van Meegeren preferred a more active role. He could cross his fingers and hope that no buyer would perform a test that would unmask him. He chose instead to do his best to ensure that his forgeries would pass the