The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [91]
Bredius had looked at Emmaus on two consecutive days, Boon wrote, and on the first day the light had not been good enough to reveal the signature. Even so, Bredius had recognized Vermeer’s hand at once. Boon had watched the old connoisseur’s performance, spellbound. Out of the blue, he had been asked to evaluate a painting he had never heard of, and he had not hesitated even for a moment. “I still remember with admiration Dr. Bredius’ immediate response,” Boon declared.
BREDIUS FOLLOWED UP at once on his signature comment with another chess move, this one in the nature of a preemptive strike. Emmaus, Bredius declared, stood apart from the rest of Vermeer’s work; it was “quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.” This was simultaneously an endorsement and a warning. Bredius knew, he was saying, that skeptics would come along to argue that Emmaus had elements that looked nothing like Vermeer. By making the point himself, he hoped to undercut its force. He had taken the picture’s surprising features into account and still concluded “Vermeer.” This painting was different, and the differences only made it better.
After the gamesmanship, Bredius returned to his hymn of praise. Emmaus’s colors were “magnificent” and “splendidly luminous” and “in perfect harmony,” the expressions on the various faces “wonderful” and “marvelous,” the picture as a whole “unique” and “magnificent.”
Bredius cited the depiction of Jesus as perhaps the most impressive of Vermeer’s many achievements. “Outstanding is the head of Christ, serene and sad, as He thinks of all the suffering which He, the Son of God, had to pass through in His life on earth, yet full of goodness.” Here Vermeer had truly outdone himself. “In no other picture by the great Master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story—a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of the highest art.”
Then Bredius interrupted himself for a moment to deal with a practical question. When had Vermeer painted this picture? “I believe it belongs to his earlier phase—about the same time (perhaps a little later) as the well-known Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.”
EUREKA! HERE IS the very spot, we might think, where we see Van Meegeren grinning maliciously, confident that his master stroke has just hit home. For it was Bredius himself who had discovered Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, back in 1901. What could be more natural than to assume that Van Meegeren chose Christ at Emmaus as his subject precisely because he expected Bredius to take one look at this new biblical Vermeer and immediately think of the biblical Vermeer he had found Decades before?
This is precisely the line taken by Van Meegeren’s most serious biographer, Lord Kilbracken. In Kilbracken’s telling, Christ in the House was the key to Van Meegeren’s strategy. The forger’s “conscious and deliberate decision,” writes Kilbracken, was to seduce Bredius by providing “enough similarities of composition and brushwork to make comparison [between the two paintings] certain.”
It makes perfect sense, and it may indeed have been Van Meegeren’s plan. But the delicious, ironic truth is that he need not have bothered. Bredius embraced Emmaus and fell for Van Meegeren’s scam without ever linking the new painting to his earlier find. Bredius’s reference to Christ in the House was an afterthought he inserted in his essay when he had declared himself finished writing. It was an improvisation to satisfy a pesky editor, not a reflection of a deeply held belief. “I notice that you do not say anything about the date of the picture and its place in the evolution of Vermeer’s work,” Herbert Read, editor of The Burlington Magazine, had complained when he received Bredius’s Emmaus essay. “If you would care to add a sentence about this, I think it would increase the value of the article.”
Probably, in fact, Van Meegeren had not meant for Emmaus instantly to evoke Christ in the House. If it had