The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [76]
Van Meegeren took fanatic care, as we have seen, in his Bakelite experiments. But finding a paint that would harden quickly was only one of some half-dozen technical challenges that confronted him. He began with a trip to Holland, where he haunted galleries in search of genuine seventeenth-century paintings. He took not the slightest interest in the paintings themselves. The picture was not the point. It was the canvas beneath it that he needed, because canvas could be dated.
Eventually he found a painting called The Raising of Lazarus. It was “badly painted,” Van Meegeren recalled years later, but that was all to the good because it kept the price to a reasonable 200 guilders (roughly $1,400 in today’s dollars). The canvas was big, about forty-five inches high by seventy wide, which was appropriate for the grand sort of picture Van Meegeren had in mind. For an elegant jewel of a painting like The Lacemaker, Vermeer had chosen a canvas that measured only nine inches by eight. By seventeenth-century standards, though, the dignity of a biblical scene called for a more imposing scale.
Lazarus was a bit too big, in fact, since the biggest painting Van Meegeren could slide into his oven was about fifty inches by fifty inches. That was a nuisance, since it meant that he would have to cut the canvas down to size, but as he turned Lazarus over to examine its back, his eyes lit up.
He saw that the stretcher—the wooden framework behind a picture that holds the canvas taut—was the seventeenth-century original.* That was rare. One modern-day expert estimates that fewer than one painting in a hundred from Vermeer’s day still has its original stretcher. The nails that attached the canvas to the stretcher were original, too. Van Meegeren didn’t need old wood and old nails—in the course of three centuries, it would make perfect sense to anyone questioning a work’s authenticity that one restorer or another had seen fit to replace an old stretcher with a newer, sturdier one and had hammered it in place with shiny new nails. But he knew that the antique bits and pieces would make a good first impression.
With Lazarus safely home, Van Meegeren’s first task was to remove the picture from its stretcher. He put aside the stretcher and nails to reuse later. Then came a bit of tailoring—the canvas had to be cut down about twenty inches in width so it could fit in the oven (allowing for a little extra fabric to fold around the stretcher). Next, carpentry. The old stretcher had to be cut down so that, when the time came, it would fit the newer, smaller picture. To disguise the new saw cuts, Van Meegeren rubbed a bit of grime into the exposed surfaces.
After those small jobs came a chore that called for little more than elbow grease and long hours of tense tedium. Van Meegeren could not simply paint over Lazarus. That meant he had to remove the paint and—this was the tricky part—do so without harming the canvas.
He might have gone to such trouble partly for the artistic reason that he preferred to paint on a perfectly smooth surface. But Van Meegeren’s main motive was strategic. If someone X-rayed his forgery and saw another painting beneath it, there could be trouble, even if the newly revealed painting was suitably old. Art historians know from X-rays of paintings by Vermeer that he sometimes changed his mind as he worked—the famously bare white wall behind The Milkmaid, for example,