The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [89]
On October 4, at the bank, Boon unveiled Emmaus to two of Duveen’s best-regarded art experts. Edward Fowles would one day run Duveen Brothers. Armand Lowengard, Duveen’s nephew, had the reputation of having “an almost infallible eye.” The two men took one glance and gasped in astonishment. “The moment we looked at it we knew it was a forgery,” Fowles recalled later. The supposed masterpiece looked like “a poor piece of painted up linoleum.”
For the rest of his life, Fowles looked back on the Van Meegeren affair with bafflement. “The thing I never can understand,” he wrote in a letter more than a Decade later, “is how anybody who has ever seen a Vermeer can be taken in by the one that I saw. It was so dead, without any of the sparkle or life which is so prevalent in pictures by the master.”
Fowles and Lowengard immediately sent a telegram to Duveen’s New York branch, on Fifth Avenue. In case of prying eyes, they put several key words in code—Vermeer became villa, Bredius became bruin, pounds became south, picture became Peter, among others—but there was no missing their meaning. “BOTH SEEN TODAY AT BANK LARGE VILLA ABOUT FOUR FEET BY THREE,” the telegram began. “CHRISTS SUPPER AT EMMAUS SUPPOSED BELONG PRIVATE FAMILY CERTIFIED BY BRUIN WHO WRITING ARTICLE BUSBY BEGINNING NOVEMBER STOP PRICE SOUTH NINETY THOUSAND STOP PETER ROTTEN FAKE.”
Boon made no attempt to keep the news from Bredius. The stakes were enormous—£90,000 was roughly $5.5 million in today’s dollars—but Boon passed along the disastrous news as if he found it of no great interest. It was, he allowed, mildly puzzling. Could it be a bargaining ploy on Duveen’s part? Had Duveen’s men truly hated the painting, or were they scheming to knock down the price so that later they could grab it for less?
Bredius responded with fury and indignation and doubled his efforts on Emmaus’s behalf. The problem, he wrote in an anguished letter to Hannema, lay with his former protégé Schmidt-Degener, who was now director of the Rijksmuseum. “Fortunately you have seen the wonderful, authentic Vermeer!!” Bredius wrote, scattering italics and exclamation points with even more vigor than usual. “Schmidt-Degener seems to be campaigning against it, and especially against me! I am said to be over the hill and unable to see. He, who can’t see, who can’t admire this authentically signed!! untouched Vermeer, which has hung in a dark room for almost fifty years without being recognized, should keep his trap shut.”
As he contemplated the depths of Schmidt-Degener’s treachery, Bredius grew angrier still. Just think of his long career and its many triumphs. Now contrast that with the record of the pygmies who presumed to criticize him. Bredius tormented himself with the thought of Lady and Gentleman at the Harpsichord, his Vermeer discovery of five years before. That great find had fallen victim to a whispering campaign. Probably Schmidt-Degener had been behind that, too. “Of course I wouldn’t be human if I hadn’t been mistaken a few times in 82 years. And once or twice very badly so. But what discoveries I also made!”
In case Hannema had forgotten those coups, Bredius listed them. “How many Vermeers did SD discover???” he demanded, so overcome with emotion that his usually impeccable handwriting degenerated into a scribble. Bredius composed himself and signed his name, and then added, as a kind of postscript, “Pen dipped in bitterness.”
FOR BOON AND Van Meegeren, a rejection as vehement as “rotten fake” by a dealer as eminent as Duveen might have doomed Emmaus. At the least it could have derailed Van Meegeren’s hope of making a fortune from the painting, because with Duveen gone, the American tycoons might well be gone, too.
For Bredius, the stakes were nearly as high, though in his case it was the reputation built up over half a century that was at risk.