The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [67]
All that was left was a resounding wrap-up: “A picture, in short, which may indeed be called a masterpiece of the Great Man of Delft.”
SO BREDIUS PROCLAIMED, using one of the art world’s biggest mega-phones. No other expert seconded him. Lady and Gentleman at the Harpsichord disappeared from view almost at once, and it has never returned. Even books on Vermeer that make room for controversial paintings accepted by some authorities and rejected by others (such as Girl with a Flute and Saint Praxedis) pass over Harpsichord without a word.
The few references to the painting in today’s art literature are little more than digs at the foolishness of connoisseurs past. “Stripped of his cloak and clothes,” one modern writer observes, “the cavalier would demonstrate a frightening case of anorexia nervosa.”
The experts of Bredius’s own day were evidently just as disdainful, though they did not publish their opinions. In a memo dated October 19, 1932—the same month that Bredius’s article appeared—Edward Fowles, one of the leading figures at Duveen Brothers, wrote that “it is common talk in Berlin that the picture is wrong.” The eminent Parisian dealer Nathan Wildenstein, who had been offered the painting at the beginning of September, rejected it as “quite modern and not worth anything.” Allen Loebl, from the Kleinberger gallery in Paris, traveled to Budapest to see the picture for himself—what it was doing in Budapest is a mystery—and complained that he should have stayed home and saved his train fare.
The first major books on Vermeer after Bredius’s discovery both appeared in 1939, seven years after Bredius found Harpsichord. Both authors were authoritative figures, one the German art historian Eduard Plietzsch, the other the Dutch historian Arie B. de Vries. Each looked closely at Vermeer’s entire output. Neither mentioned Harpsichord, not even to reject it. This was no oversight, the present-day Vermeer scholar Albert Blankert remarks, but a demonstration that Bredius’s opinion was considered so misguided that it was better ignored than refuted.
Not everyone got the word. The German banker and art collector Fritz Mannheimer purchased Harpsichord for himself in the fall of 1932, at exactly the same time the great art dealers were snickering to one another. Mannheimer was a man of colossal wealth and flamboyant taste—he drove a Rolls-Royce and he gave one of his mistresses a gold bathtub—and it seems he found Vermeer’s name irresistible.
But soon after his purchase, Mannheimer apparently caught wind of the rumors and removed Harpsichord from his wall. Bredius could hardly contain his indignation. He suggested that his one-time protégé Schmidt-Degener had poisoned Mannheimer’s mind. “The Vermeer at Mannheimer…is pure as gold too and is stored away (on S.D.’s advice?) in the safe,” Bredius fumed in a private letter.
THE ART WORLD’S rejection of Bredius’s newest Vermeer marks a crucial turning point in our story. All the standard accounts of Van Meegeren’s career paint Bredius as a figure who commanded universal respect. His word was law, we read again and again. Once he delivered a verdict, everyone in the art world trembled and fell into line. Bredius “knew himself to be supreme,” writes one Van Meegeren biographer, “his reputation unshakable, his authority unchallenged.”
It makes for a tidy tale, but it is not so. Had it been true, Van Meegeren’s task would have been far easier. All he would have had to do was fool