The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [58]
Bredius believed he saw something modern in the painting and attributed it to a Dutch artist named Derk Jan Van der Laan, whose career spanned the Decades around 1800. To have mistaken Van der Laan for Vermeer was not ludicrous. Van der Laan had talent. He had painted other Vermeer-like works—for his own amusement, as far as anyone can tell—and over the years people had occasionally taken them for the real thing. Once or twice someone had improved a Van der Laan by adding a Vermeer signature. Bredius raged against such ignorance. “What a heresy, is it not, to declare a picture of the 18th or 19th century to be a Vermeer?” he thundered.
IN PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE, though, Bredius’s personality boiled over. He wrote letters by the dozen, and even the most mundane notes sputter with the indignation and impatience of a great man beset by plodders who need to be grabbed by the collar and throttled. Every other word is underlined for emphasis, and nearly every sentence ends with an exclamation mark, or two, or three. Only when he reached the point of adding his signature did Bredius pause for breath. His signature was a work of art, an ornate series of swirls and loops worthy of adorning not merely a letter but a university diploma or a nation’s constitution.
Oddly, for a man so caught up in the gritty gamesmanship of everyday life, Bredius did his most important work in the silence and solitude of a thousand dreary archives. His specialty was the dogged pursuit of facts: Who sold what painting when? For how much? To what buyer? This was magnifying-glass-to-the-ledger work, detail work of the most unrelenting kind.
Facts were an end in themselves. “Rembrandt becomes closer and more precious to us with every detail of his life that we succeed in uncovering,” Bredius declared in a brief essay that came as near as he ever would to spelling out a philosophy. He was the first to try to chase Vermeer into the open by perusing Delft’s endless “notarial archives,” which contained municipal documents drawn up over the centuries—marriage licenses, wills, bankruptcy declarations, and the like. Two generations of Vermeer scholars have followed his lead. Bredius himself had no interest in looking for a larger meaning in those myriad details, but perhaps someday a writer with an eye like Seurat will use them as the basis for a pointillist biography.
THE DETECTIVE WORK that brought Bredius fame was of a more dramatic kind. He had been unearthing old masters and old masterpieces since the beginning of his career. In 1897, he made his way to an obscure spot in what is today eastern Poland. There, in a remote castle stuffed with mediocre French furniture and so-so art, he gazed in rapture at the painting now known as The Polish Rider. “Just one look at it,” Bredius wrote, “a few seconds’ study of the technique, were enough to convince me instantly that here, in this remote fastness, one of Rembrandt’s greatest masterpieces had been hanging for nigh on a century.”*
A few seconds study of Bredius’s technique would demonstrate that the note of certainty and triumph was utterly characteristic. Nearly thirty years later, to choose one example from a host of possibilities, he published a brief report entitled “An Unknown Rembrandt Portrait.” “A short time ago,” Bredius wrote, “I experienced the very great plea sure of coming upon a little portrait in oil which could not possibly be the work of any other artist than Rembrandt…. That the picture is by Rembrandt goes without saying. Indeed, I have very rarely been confronted with a painting before which I was able