The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [60]
Then, in 1892, Bredius, who had taken over as the Mauritshuis’s director, helped reveal something remarkable. When a sharp-eyed observer thought he saw something odd in Maes’s signature, Bredius called in the Mauritshuis’s restorer. While Bredius and his deputy, De Groot, looked on, the restorer dabbed at the signature with a swab dipped in alcohol. The three men saw at once that someone had tampered with the painting. The Maes signature—more accurately, an NM monogram—had been fashioned from a signature lying beneath it. The original signature: IV Meer. That was huge news, for this was how the great Vermeer signed his paintings!* Evidently some duplicitous soul had done his best to remove the signature of the then little-known IV Meer; after that, he converted the traces that remained to the monogram of the more desirable Nicholaes Maes.
But the mystery was not yet resolved. At the Mauritshuis, Diana hung in the same room as A View of Delft, which was indisputably a Vermeer. The two paintings looked nothing alike. Could the same man really have painted both? Moreover, Diana seemed to show Italian influences, especially in the richness and depth of its colors. Vermeer, as far as anyone knew, had never visited Italy. Bredius suggested that perhaps the IV Meer who had painted Diana was not Vermeer of Delft but his less renowned contemporary, also named Vermeer, from Utrecht. (And the Utrecht Vermeer had apparently visited Italy, where he produced paintings similar to Diana.)
Here matters stood, unresolved, all through the 1890s. In the meantime, in Britain, a religious painting called Christ in the House of Mary and Martha had been kicking around barely noticed. It shows Christ seated at a table with Mary on a stool before him, watching attentively, and Martha, eyes downcast as so often in Vermeer, standing at Christ’s shoulder and offering a basket of bread.
Where the picture had been before about 1880, no one knew. In 1884, a furniture and antiques dealer sold it to “an old lady” for ten pounds, according to a collector who acquired the painting years later. We know nothing more of this mysterious elderly buyer except that she quickly resold the painting for thirteen pounds. It turned up a few years later, again without making a stir, in Bristol, En gland, in 1901. There an art dealer threw it in as a bonus to a buyer who had just spent £140 on two paintings.
The new owner brought his three purchases home to London and showed them to a friend and art dealer named Norman Forbes, a partner in a gallery called Forbes and Paterson, on Bond Street. Forbes waved aside the two “finds” and homed in on the religious picture, the afterthought in his friend’s deal. “I told him it was a Vermeer and a very excellent one at that,” Forbes recalled. “He was incredulous, so I told him to get a little spirit and clean off the varnish in one corner. He did so, and found Vermeer’s beautiful signature.”
Word raced through the art world, and Bredius came running to London. The newly discovered Vermeer signature on Christ in the House of Mary and Martha looked identical to the Vermeer signature Bredius had found nine years before on Diana and Her Companions. At Forbes and Paterson, Bredius scrawled an excited note with his usual jumbled syntax and frantic, almost random underlinings. “Exactly as the M[aurits]huis Diana. Very colorful & exactly the same colors without any doubt by the same hand.”
It took one last round of debate to convince nearly all the art world that both Christ in the House and Diana were indeed by the Vermeer, Vermeer of Delft, and not by Vermeer of Utrecht. In the end, Bredius’s deputy, Willem Martin, made the argument that won the day. (De Groot, the former deputy, had moved on.) Everyone agreed, Martin pointed out, that