The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [90]
But after Duveen’s verdict, Bredius’s letters took on a desperate, panicky undertone. Perhaps the vehemence was merely the exuberance of a devout believer. More likely, it seems, Bredius talked so loudly and so boldly to reassure himself that he had not made the mistake of a lifetime. He took to writing, next to his signature, “the old man, past his prime!!”
38
“EVERY INCH A VERMEER”
In early September 1937, Bredius completed his article announcing this greatest discovery of all. On September 22, the editor of The Burlington Magazine thanked him and promised to hurry it into print. Then, on October 4, Duveen sent his “rotten fake” telegram.
The “no” vote from Duveen left Bredius at the farthest end of a very shaky, very conspicuous limb. He faced a hard choice—he could endure the humiliation of withdrawing his article (but at least no one outside a small circle would know how close he had come to reliving the fiasco of his Harpsichord endorsement), or he could swallow hard and bet his reputation that this time he had it right.
The Burlington article appeared in November, with a photo of Emmaus. Bredius’s text was bold and rapturous. “A New Vermeer,” the headline proclaimed, and Bredius wasted not an instant. “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art,” he began, “when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio! And what a picture!”
The entire article was only a few paragraphs long, and the tone was ecstatic throughout. If Bredius had wrestled with doubts during the summer, he dropped not the slightest hint of them now. On the contrary, he emphasized how certain he had been, from the first moment that Boon had turned up on his doorstep, that he was gazing at a Vermeer. “Neither the beautiful signature ‘I.V. Meer’ nor the pointillé on the bread which Christ is blessing is necessary to convince us that we have here a—I am inclined to say the—masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.”
The downplaying of the signature (while praising its beauty) looked like a routine remark but was in fact a subtle chess move. Just as Van Meegeren had anticipated, Bredius had been wowed by Vermeer’s signature. “Go and see the painting and the real signature sometime,” he had advised one skeptic who had been unimpressed by a photograph of Emmaus. “There is no arguing with that. And the pointillé, a second signature.”
But Bredius’s reliance on a signature was a sign of weakness, and he knew better than to write about it openly. Neither the presence nor the absence of the artist’s name should have counted for much. Many of the greats, including Michelangelo and Raphael and Vermeer himself, sometimes neglected signatures. Titian, one story has it, signed only paintings that his students had helped with. Work that he had done entirely by himself, he reasoned, shouted out his name without a signature.
The question of the signature was so touchy that Bredius enlisted Boon’s help to tidy up the historical record. To Bredius’s fury, Holland’s leading newspaper had noted that Emmaus carried a handsome signature, which made identifying it as a Vermeer no great feat. This was perfectly accurate. Nonetheless, Bredius immediately set Boon the task of writing a letter to the editor to set the record straight.
Boon dutifully informed the newspaper that its account was “in total disagreement with the facts.” Bredius had been “enthralled” by the painting’s colors and its overall composition; the signature had played scarcely any role in his thinking. Boon claimed to recall the scene vividly. Bredius had stared intently at the picture for a few minutes, then spun around in an unsteady but joyful pirouette. “This is a Vermeer,