The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [92]
But questions of “early” or “late” were secondary. Either would do. What Van Meegeren needed above all else was that experts believe the new painting was a Vermeer, of what ever era. The strategy Van Meegeren adopted was not to choose between early and late. He threw in some easy-to-spot allusions to the late works (the light, the pointillé, the blue and yellow) and, to hedge his bets, some obvious nods to the early works (the religious subject, the large size, the Caravaggio influence). That way a critic might still say “Vermeer” even if he didn’t say “late Vermeer.”
But it was a gamble. Putting all those Vermeer markers into one painting risked making it seem incoherent and clumsy. When art lovers discuss Vermeer, after all, they speak of “harmony” and “balance”; they do not use the term “hodgepodge.” When the Duveen experts denounced Emmaus as not merely a fake but a rotten one, its grab-bag messiness was one of the problems they had in mind.
Astonishingly, most experts had no such qualms. With the exception of Duveen and a tiny handful of others, the leading scholars of the day all shared Bredius’s opinion that Emmaus was a masterpiece.* They focused their attention on the Vermeer touches they liked best and ignored or downplayed the others. Nearly everyone glided past the allusions to Christ in the House of Mary and Martha; the great majority of connoisseurs attributed Emmaus not to Vermeer’s early years, the era of Christ in the House, but to his middle or late career. The enthusiastic judgment of the critic Cornelis Veth was typical: “Emmaus is from the painter’s late period, the period of his highest abilities, from which we know only the classically beautiful interior scenes.” If Van Meegeren really had meant to evoke Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, his trap worked even though his victims never touched the tripwire.
Bredius responded to Emmaus in a way that almost no one else did—he judged it to be an early work and he called attention to virtually all the clues that Van Meegeren had planted, early and late alike. If Van Meegeren had been there to watch Bredius check off one Vermeer quotation after another, he would have trembled in fear. Where could this be heading but to the Duveen verdict of “Fake!”? How could one painting be both early and late?
But if he could have kept his cool, Van Meegeren would have heard Bredius deliver startling news: the reason Emmaus combined early and late elements, Bredius explained triumphantly, was that this painting came at the precise moment in Vermeer’s career when the painter demonstrated, for the first time, that he was in full command of all his powers.
For Van Meegeren, this was a completely unexpected response, and the best one imaginable. Bredius’s verdict was far more than a reprieve. At what could have been the moment of his execution, Van Meegeren had been handed the keys to the kingdom.
WHY DID BREDIUS respond to Emmaus so oddly? The legend has grown up that Van Meegeren fooled Bredius by delivering a forgery tailor-made for him. The story is that Bredius had famously forecast that someone, someday would find a Vermeer with characteristics x, y, and z, and then Van Meegeren came along and painted it for him.
And so he had, in a manner of speaking. The odd part is that Van Meegeren almost certainly never encountered Bredius’s forecast. He painted Emmaus as he did for the long list of reasons we have been considering, having to do with such things as the high status of biblical paintings. Those reasons had nothing to do with Bredius. If Bredius had never existed, Van Meegeren would still have tried to evoke Caravaggio (because conventional wisdom in the art world favored a Caravaggio-Vermeer link), he would still have chosen to depict