The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [72]
How Vermeer jumped the gulf scholars can only guess. Van Meegeren had to do more than guess. Since he had already decided that he could not imitate a painting from within either group, his task was to invent a plausible transition between two groups of paintings that seemed unrelated.
That mysterious gap was only the first problem in sorting out Vermeer’s career. The second has to do with chronology. Despite Hannema’s glib assignment of paintings to Vermeer’s youth or to his maturity (and the assignment of The Milkmaid to a particular spot in line), there was no agreement in the 1930s about which paintings came early and which came late. For a forger, confusion was always welcome. But it was a complicated gift that posed difficulties of its own. If there had been agreement on which paintings Vermeer did when, then Van Meegeren could have proceeded methodically, by choosing a year and looking at the paintings on either side of it. Then he could have crafted something that resembled both neighbors, and the experts would have delighted in a discovery that fit so perfectly with their expectations.
That was essentially the story of another of the twentieth century’s great hoaxes, Piltdown Man. In 1912, a pair of English scientists announced that they had found the “missing link,” fragments of an ancient skull and jawbone that came from a creature midway between ape and human. En gland’s most eminent anthropologists and paleontologists soon embraced the discovery. They hailed it as monumentally important and staked their reputations on it. Decades later the truth emerged: pranksters had taken fragments of a human’s skull and an orangutan’s jawbone and buried the bits together at a research site where scientists were sure to find them.
Clues that should have given the game away went overlooked for forty years. The teeth, for instance, showed scrape-marks from a file that someone had used to simulate wear and tear. Once the tampering had been pointed out, it was impossible to see how anyone had missed it. On the other hand, every scientist had noticed the skull’s strikingly human-like appearance. No one thought “fraud” because the large brain fit perfectly with scientific theory. The Piltdown find was so important, one distinguished anthropologist explained at the time, precisely because it proved once and for all the long-held belief that “Man at first…was merely an Ape with an overgrown brain.”
VAN MEEGEREN’S CHALLENGE was related but harder. Art scholars of his day did have pet theories that simultaneously focused and narrowed their vision, and which a forger could try to exploit. But that exploitation could not take the form of forging a missing link, since so much of Vermeer’s career seemed to be missing.
Van Meegeren never explained his choice of Christ at Emmaus, which proved to be brilliant, though we can make some guesses. Some of his reasons had to do with art history, and we will turn to them in a moment. But Van Meegeren’s personal history played at least as large a role.
A decade before he set to work on his forgery, Van Meegeren had painted a Christ at Emmaus in his own name. He had included the painting in his 1922 show, and it was one of those works that the critics had damned as insipid and uninspired. What better way to expose the art world’s hypocrisy than to paint a new version, slap Vermeer’s name on it, and watch the praise roll in?
© IRPA-KIK, Brussels
The forger Han van Meegeren was a small, dapper man who raked in tens of millions from fake old masters. He had twin motives—greed and eagerness to avenge himself on the art-world critics who had sneered at the work he produced in his own name.
A vain, elderly, bad-tempered art connoisseur named Abraham Bredius was the greatest authority on Vermeer in the 1930s. Bredius had soared to fame by helping to discover three Vermeers over