The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [71]
Christ at Emmaus was unquestionably the greatest achievement of Van Meegeren’s career. Without it, none of the rest of the story would have been possible. With it, the whole complicated fiasco played out like a train wreck choreographed by Rube Goldberg.
In essence, as we have said, Van Meegeren’s challenge was to win acceptance at a family reunion. Harpsichord had proved that it wasn’t enough to fool one of the family patriarchs. Nor did it help to fool some peripheral figure, like the caterer—though that was easy enough to do. (Van Meegeren had conned Mannheimer, the banker, but that shallow triumph hadn’t pulled anyone else along.) In order to succeed, Van Meegeren had to fool the entire family. That ruled out trying to pass as anyone well known. The only hope, he concluded, was to impersonate a long-lost relative, one who had disappeared Decades before and never been heard of again.
No forger had ever tried such a thing. That meant either that Van Meegeren had devised a strategy so brilliant that it had eluded all his predecessors or so foolish that they had all rejected it out of hand.
In real life, how would a con man overcome a family’s suspicions?* He would start with the right family, first of all—unless they had lost track of a few relatives over the years, the scheme would be over before it began. Then he would do a bit of snooping to turn up some family lore and, perhaps, forge a document or two. Maybe an old passport or a driver’s license? Some physical cues. Tinted contact lenses to evoke the family’s famous blue eyes? But in the end a fair bit of nerve would have to go a long way. Maybe a mention of the old days at Uncle Henry’s place on the lake, or a reference to the bad-tempered German shepherd who had to be given away when he bit the mailman?
As he thought it through, Van Meegeren had to know that this was the longest of long shots.
IN CHOOSING VERMEER, Van Meegeren had at least picked the right “family.” It seems plausible that some Vermeers have been misplaced over the years; perhaps that’s why we have so few today. But that still left Van Meegeren in a predicament: if his plan was to put a new “Vermeer” into circulation, and if the whole point was that it looked different from other Vermeers, how would anyone know what it was supposed to be?
A signature would provide a heavy-handed hint, but the art world rarely places much faith in signatures. An expert on Jackson Pollock once explained why. “How long would it take you to learn to sign Pollock’s signature?” he asked, “and how long would it take you to learn to paint like Pollock?”
Even without a signature, Van Meegeren’s challenge might have been manageable if Vermeer’s paintings happened to fall into a tidy sequence except for a few gaps along the way. But to forge a missing link—in either sense of the word forge—you need a chain. Vermeer’s body of work doesn’t lend itself to any such arrangement. There are two problems. First, Vermeer’s paintings fall into two distinct groups: “On one hand there are the rare works of his youth, large in size, with something un-Dutch in their appearance,” as Hannema wrote in a 1936 book on the Golden Age of Dutch painting, “and on the other hand there are the well-known masterworks from his maturity.”
Within each group, the paintings show a family resemblance. In the group of large, early works, for instance, Diana and Her Companions looks something like Christ in the House of Mary and Martha. In the second group, works such as Woman with a Pearl Necklace and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter and Woman Weighing Gold are as close in appearance as their names suggest.
But the great riddle is that the two groups seem to have almost nothing to do with each other. Even today scholars point at the gulf in bewilderment. Many of them cite The Milkmaid as Vermeer’s first masterpiece, the earliest painting in Hannema’s second group. But eloquent as the scholars are in praise of The Milkmaid,