The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [59]
Even for an expert, Bredius’s faith in his own judgment was remarkable. He was constantly evaluating art, both formally and informally. “His door was always open,” one biographer wrote. “Every Sunday people could go to him to ask his opinion on a painting.” He handed down his verdicts immediately, secure in the belief that he was delivering not opinions but facts.
At almost the same time that he unveiled his “Unknown Rembrandt,” in the mid-1920s, Bredius wrote an essay on the qualities necessary in the director of an art museum. Academic training was fine but not essential. A love of art was crucial. So was the investment of endless hours contemplating paintings. But nothing was as important as “a shrewd, innate sense of discernment and good taste.” The word innate was the essential one. “Without this natural aptitude,” Bredius declared, “all efforts will be fruitless. Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Those who had not been tapped by a magic wand might accumulate paper credentials, but to what end? “Let us not forget,” Bredius warned, “that the most brilliant summa cum laude cannot guarantee that the aspiring director will be able to tell a copy from an original.”
26
“WITHOUT ANY DOUBT!”
Bredius had discovered Vermeers as well as Rembrandts, three times in all, an astounding record in view of Vermeer’s tiny body of work. The story of the first find, Allegory of Faith, is the most straightforward. The painting, now in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was hidden beneath a double disguise when Bredius spotted it in a Berlin art gallery—the picture bore the signature of one artist, the now nearly forgotten Caspar Netscher, but was thought to be actually the work of the somewhat better-known Eglon van der Neer. Bredius believed he saw Vermeer’s hand, and he convinced the world (which remains convinced) that he was correct. “With this acquisition of the new Delft Vermeer,” one Dutch newspaper crowed, “Dr. Bredius has once again found a bargain with his perspicacious eye.”
The find, in 1899, enhanced Bredius’s already high reputation, and in time it would fatten his wallet, but Bredius never cared much for the picture itself.* “A large but unpleasant Vermeer,” in Bredius’s words, Allegory of Faith is a complicated religious work complete with a crucifixion scene (in a painting within the painting) and an array of such symbolic touches as a fallen apple and a crushed, bleeding snake. Bredius picked up the picture for almost nothing, lent it to the Mauritshuis and then the Boymans Museum for nearly thirty years, and finally sold it to an American collector for $300,000 (roughly $3.8 million in today’s dollars).
The story of Bredius’s second Vermeer find is more of a detective tale. It began in 1876, at an auction in Paris. A buyer for the Mauritshuis Museum bought a dozen paintings, including one by Rembrandt’s pupil Nicholaes Maes. Diana and Her Companions, as it is known, shows Diana, goddess of the night, and four of her attendants. The mood is quiet and somber. One woman bathes Diana’s feet. All the faces are hidden or in shadow, all the women lost in contemplation.
In the 1600s, subjects taken from mythology or religion or history like this one were deemed better suited than any others to serious art. Landscapes, still-lifes, interior scenes with serving girls or ladies reading letters, all took second place, usually a distant second. Two centuries would pass before tastes shifted. In the late 1800s, when the Impressionists claimed Vermeer as an honorary ancestor, they hailed his fascination with color and the play of sunlight, but just as important, they endorsed his focus on everyday life. The Vermeers they liked best—as we do today—were the domestic interiors. But Vermeer seems to have begun his career as a more-or-less conventional painter of “important” subjects, as in this scene from Roman mythology.
The director of the Mauritshuis