The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [61]
IF ANY FORGER had been paying attention, the story would have put a large grin on his face. As we have seen, Thoré-Bürger, the historian who rediscovered Vermeer, had assigned a great number of unlikely works to him. But that had been Decades before. The discovery of Christ in the House and Diana in 1901 showed once again that Vermeer had sides to him that no one had ever suspected. In time, that uncertainty would open the door to all sorts of mischief.
Half a century later, the eminent scholar P.T.A. Swillens still refused to believe that either Diana or Christ in the House was by Vermeer. “Diana never can have been his,” and Christ in the House was even worse. Everything about it was wrong—the subject, the light, the shadows, the folds of the cloth, the gestures. “In no single part, conception, composition, treatment, size or technical execution is there a single similarity to be discovered with any authentic work of Vermeer what ever. The whole is born of a completely different spirit which has nothing in common with Vermeer.”
But at the time of Bredius’s discovery, no one voiced doubts like that. Instead, they hailed Bredius. And then, only five years after his discovery of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Bredius struck again. In 1906, he had gone to Brussels to look at a private collection of Rembrandt drawings. Bredius happened to glance up.
“Suddenly my eye fell on a small picture, hanging up high,” Bredius recalled. “Am I permitted to take this down once, as it appears to be something very beautiful?”
His host gave permission.
“And yes!” Bredius concluded his story, for once making his point in a whisper rather than a shout. “It was very beautiful.”
Bredius attributed the unknown painting to Vermeer. The world (including Bredius’s archrival De Groot) raced to second his judgment. In the first Decades after its discovery, the painting’s price increased ten thousand-fold. The picture, now known as Young Girl with a Flute, eventually ended up in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today its status is in doubt. The National Gallery labels it “Circle of Johannes Vermeer.” In 1989 the great scholar J. M. Montias suggested that Vermeer began the painting but abandoned it for some reason, and a later artist finished it.*
But in 1906, the Young Girl reigned unchallenged. Bredius’s newest triumph puffed him up in the eyes of the world and in his own mind as well. Young Girl with a Flute was just the latest proof of his unmatched intuition. Not only had he found three Vermeers (he did not claim credit for Diana, which would have brought the tally to four), but his discoveries had been different from one another. Though Young Girl with a Flute looked like a Vermeer, Allegory of Faith and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha did not. The identification of the two religious works wasperhaps more impressive because they were so strange, so unlike the common notion of a Vermeer. Here was irrefutable testimony to the power of Bredius’s eye.
But all three discoveries dated from around 1900. Bredius had been young then, just entering his prime. What could be better, thirty years later, than to cap his career with one final announcement that would amaze the world?
27
THE UNCANNY VALLEY
Han van Meegeren, a methodical man when it came to forgery, gave serious thought to which old masters best suited him. After his arrest, police found four finished but unsold paintings in his studio in Nice, all four presumably experiments.
One of the four was a portrait, meant to evoke Vermeer’s contemporary Gerard ter Borch. Another was a picture of a tipsy woman, signed FH, for Frans Hals, and two were “Vermeers.” Each fake was a near copy of an authentic painting or a pastiche built of pieces plucked from several paintings. It turns out to be no great feat