The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [57]
For twenty years, from 1889 to 1909, Bredius served as director of the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague. The position provided him both a pulpit and a large cast of colleagues to battle. Bredius undoubtedly had the best interests of the Mauritshuis at heart—over the years he lent the museum twenty-five of his own paintings, including four Rembrandts, and he left them to the museum when he died—but he seemed unable to conceive that anyone could have sincere reasons for disagreeing with him. Those who thwarted him, especially when it came to decisions about buying paintings for the museum, were scoundrels, drunks, Machiavellian schemers.
Even when art was not involved, it did not take a cosmic issue to trigger Bredius’s wrath. In 1906, when he was still living in The Hague, he found himself irritated by the crowd of children in the playground next door. He installed a foghorn and blasted away for hours every week, in the hope of driving his tormentors away.
“Jumpy, agitated, nervous and testy, fierce and enthusiastic,” in the words of the director who succeeded him at the Mauritshuis, Bredius was a man who felt himself perpetually at war. From 1891 to 1896, for example, he clashed continually with his deputy director, our old friend De Groot. Bredius mocked his by-the-book deputy for his schoolmarmish ways, and De Groot curled his lip and called Bredius a dilettante. Bredius delighted in running to the press with every quarrel.
Bredius kept up the feud even after his rival’s death. De Groot had bequeathed his papers to the Netherlands Institute for Art History. Bredius frequently needed to consult with the institute’s director, but out of disdain for De Groot’s memory, he refused to enter the premises. He would proceed only as far as the porter’s lodge, where the director had to come to him.
Bredius’s battles extended beyond the art world. He was a homosexual, and on more than one occasion, conservative Holland showed its disapproval. In 1909 someone wrote a brochure announcing Bredius’s homosexuality to the world and claiming that the art expert had an eye for dashing young soldiers. Bredius sued for libel and won. In 1920, a great tabloid scandal erupted when some forty people, many of them prominent, were arrested for patronizing a “boy bordello.” This was the Heidi Fleiss scandal of its day. Bredius’s name came up, though he was not arrested, and so did the name of Prince Hendrik, Queen Wilhelmina’s husband.* For months the police kept Bredius’s house under surveillance. Two years later, the newspapers screamed out the story of yet another scandal, this one the “murder of the century.” On New Year’s Eve in 1921, on a train from Amsterdam to The Hague, someone murdered an attorney named Jacques Wijsman. The killer was never found. Every kind of rumor swirled around Holland. According to one story, Wijsman had been carrying on with a lover of Bredius, and Bredius had ordered him killed.
None of these accusations had any substance. The Dutch cite a proverb that “the tall trees catch the wind,” and Bredius made a conspicuous target. He never spoke of his private life, but it was an open secret. He lived for Decades with a man named Joseph Kronig, also an art historian and nominally Bredius’s “secretary.” Kronig was thirty-two years younger than Bredius and had, Bredius believed, a superb eye for art. Some of Bredius’s fiercest battles with De Groot turned on the quality of Kronig’s connoisseurship. De Groot refused to see Kronig’s merits; the reason, said Bredius, was that he was “consumed by jealousy.” In the end, Bredius would leave his considerable fortune to Kronig.
IN PERSON, BREDIUS was jittery and touchy, constantly slamming doors and losing his temper. In print, he usually managed to rein himself in. When he could tamp the fury down, he sounded worldly, condescending, not so much indignant as amused by the naïveté of his peers.
By age