The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [66]
Some of these forgeries, Bredius wrote, were little more than old pictures touched up with a streak of Vermeer’s yellow or blue, and many were “shockingly unlike” anything Vermeer might have painted. “But a few are so cunningly contrived by masters, if not of the art of painting then of sleight of hand, as to deceive even very good judges.”
More in sorrow than in anger, Bredius went on to list several of his renowned colleagues who had stumbled into error. “The late Dr. Bode himself” had declared three fake Vermeers authentic.* Then came the turn of Bredius’s old rival De Groot. He had died two years before, but Bredius cuffed him around a bit, too, for attributing a second-rate painting to Vermeer. “An obviously French portrait of an obviously French boy…,” Bredius wrote, obviously enjoying himself, “‘discovered’ by the late Dr. De Groot, enjoyed the advantages of wide and elaborate publicity, but it now seems to have mysteriously disappeared!” The ironic exclamation point, to make sure that no one missed the point, was the academic equivalent of an elbow to the ribs.
Bredius detailed a second blunder by De Groot and happily recalled their “sharp passage of arms on the subject in the Dutch newspapers.” Once again De Groot had called a non-Vermeer a Vermeer, and once again Bredius had proved correct. “In the end, everybody agreed that the picture was spurious.”*
But Bredius had no wish to gloat. “I could name dozens of fakes of this kind,” he went on, “but I prefer to rejoice the hearts of my readers by the production of a very beautiful authentic Vermeer which has recently been discovered.” He did not know who had first laid eyes on the painting, Bredius wrote, but “I was struck with amazement when I first saw the beautiful thing. The splendid harmonious coloring, the true Vermeer light and shade, and the gentle, sympathetic theme proves it to be one of the finest gems of the master’s oeuvre.”
As if that were not enough, Bredius threw in a bonus. Vermeer had painted a picture within a picture. The smaller picture was a landscape, and Bredius thought that it was based on a full-scale painting by Vermeer. “The landscape on the wall [in the painting] is interesting. The form of the trees would suggest that this may be a lost picture by the painter himself.” Bredius had found not one missing Vermeer, but, almost, two!
The painting, Lady and Gentleman at the Harpsichord, is almost certainly Van Meegeren’s work. It shows a young woman in a blue-and-white gown who has briefly interrupted her playing. A gentleman caller in a gray cloak and black hat leans on the harpsichord, his face in shadow but his gaze directed at his shy companion. The landscape with the telltale trees hangs just behind the two figures, dominating an otherwise bare wall.
How did Bredius know that the painting was by Vermeer? He did not bother to explain, because his knowledge was deeper than words. But he did list several features of the painting that delighted the eye. If Bredius had been on guard—if he had heeded his own warning that in Vermeer “the ‘fakers’ have found…a happy hunting-ground”—the sheer abundance of these recognizable-at-a-glance Vermeerian touches would have sent him fleeing.
Instead, Bredius pointed out half a dozen bits and pieces, lifted magpie-style from various Vermeers, that revealed the master’s hand. The curtain matched the one in Allegory of Faith, for instance, and also in The Art of Painting. The blue of the gown’s bodice was unmistakable. So were “the large pear-drop earrings which Vermeer loved to paint.”
Then, having made one error, Bredius turned around and made a mistake of the opposite kind. He found a feature of the painting that seemed unlike Vermeer and seized on it to draw a surprising moral—the