The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [88]
For both men, the overriding goal was to keep this greatest of all Vermeers where it belonged. Bredius had been fighting to keep Vermeer’s best work away from the upstart Americans for thirty years, since his long-ago tug of war over The Milkmaid. Hannema, the director of a museum yearning for a place at a table dominated by haughty Amsterdam and the mighty Rijksmuseum, was desperate to win this one-of-a-kind jewel for himself.
Hannema had an extra incentive, though he hardly needed one. Nearly a century before, Rotterdam had kicked away a chance at one of the best-loved Vermeers of all, The Lacemaker. Through all the succeeding Decades, the pain of that loss lingered on. The story began with the death of a Rotterdam art collector in the 1860s. For a moderate payment to the collector’s heirs, the city could have acquired The Lacemaker and the rest of the collection, but the mayor and town council declined. Art was fine, they agreed, but Rotterdam had its port and bridges to think of, and these cost money. Half a century later, in 1909, the man who was then director of the Boymans Museum recounted the sad old tale as if it had just happened. “These bargains were for somebody else,” he lamented in a history of the museum, “and for 3635 florins The Lacemaker became the property of the Louvre…. The prospect of the Boymans Museum ever acquiring a work by Vermeer is non-existent.”
Two Decades later, Hannema, by now director of the Boymans himself, felt just as aggrieved. “If only those in power in those days had better understood the value of art,” he lamented bitterly, “The Lacemaker could have been hanging in the Boymans from 1869 on.” Throughout Hannema’s tenure as director, the thought of this missed chance gnawed at him. Rotterdam had “lost its opportunity,” he moaned in 1932.
And then, from Boon and Bredius, came news of a second chance.
BOON DANGLED THE prize in front of Hannema and then snatched it away. Hannema’s mood veered from frenzy to despair. “Mr. Boon informed me that he plans to send the painting to America,” Hannema wrote to Bredius on September 21. “I asked him to permit the Boymans Museum to attempt to acquire it, and I fervently hope that he’ll keep that in mind.” Hannema closed his letter with a plaintive request to Bredius to help plead the Boymans’s cause. “Perhaps you could steer things in that direction?”
Then, for Bredius and Hannema, calamitous news. Boon announced that he was off to Paris to show Emmaus to Duveen Brothers, the best-known art dealer of them all! Joseph Duveen had made a fortune—he had recently become Lord Duveen of Millbank—by persuading America’s tycoons to decorate their mansions with acres of old masters, at astonishing prices. They bought and they bought, and when prices rose, they bought even more eagerly. Duveen had been the one to plant in Andrew Mellon’s mind the idea that he should found a national art museum in Washington, D.C., with his own collection as its core. Mellon occasionally resisted Duveen’s advice, but many of the new millionaires treated the art dealer’s suggestions as tantamount to orders. The railroad magnate H. E. Huntington once gestured toward two nondescript andirons in his fireplace. “If Duveen offered me two identical andirons and told me that they were remarkable and asked me seventy-five thousand dollars apiece for them”—three-quarters of a million dollars today—“I would gladly pay it.”
And now Boon was headed to Paris to offer Duveen the greatest prize in Europe. Bredius tore his hair. “Lord Duveen will immediately sell it in America for a large sum,” he moaned. “I’m beside myself.”
Then, in Paris, something astonishing happened.
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1937, Boon sent Bredius a one-sentence letter. He had arrived in Paris with the precious “lamb”—Christ at Emmaus—and had stored it in a vault at the Crédit Lyonnais bank.
This Paris trip was a remarkable gamble