The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [94]
Bredius immediately wrote to the Rembrandt Society, offering to put up 12,000 guilders of his own money (roughly $90,000 in today’s dollars) and reminding them, yet again, that Vermeer was “a master of the utmost greatness.” Nothing could be more important than securing this treasure. “It would be a disaster if it were to leave our country.”
The pressure fell mainly on Hannema’s shoulders. As director of the Boymans Museum and a member of the Rembrandt Society’s executive committee, he spent all his time scheming to solve the money problem. As the clock ticked toward the two-week deadline, he scarcely slept.
And then, on December 24, 1937, with Hoogendijk’s deadline only days away, Hannema announced glorious news. He had found his patron: Van der Vorm, the Rotterdam tycoon, had agreed to donate 400,000 guilders to the Rembrandt Society to purchase Emmaus.
The Rembrandt Society raised another 100,000 guilders. A handful of smaller contributions, including Bredius’s 12,000 guilders, brought the grand total to the required 520,000 guilders. With the world still mired in the Great Depression, this was an enormous amount to spend on a painting. (It was, though, about one third lower than the asking price cited in Duveen’s “rotten fake” telegram; Duveen’s harsh judgment had presumably scared off some buyers.)
Boon and Hoogendijk, the art dealer, divided the equivalent of $1.3 million between them. The lion’s share of the purchase price, $2.6 million, went to Van Meegeren. Bredius exulted in the news that the sale was final. “Do I need to tell you how happy your telegram, and now your letter, have made me?” he wrote to the president of the Rembrandt Society.
Then, in an undated note apparently from Christmas Day 1937, or the day after, Bredius wrote to congratulate his friend and colleague Hannema: “People will talk for a long time to come of Hannema who bought that delightful Vermeer!!”
40
TOO LATE!
Hannema didn’t have to wait long for the talk to begin. The morning after he put together the deal to buy Emmaus, but before he had told anyone about it, the phone rang in his office at the Boymans Museum. The head man at the government’s Department of Arts and Sciences was on the line. Would it be possible for Mr. Hannema to come to an urgent meeting?
Hannema hurried over. There he found J. K. Van der Haagen, the arts minister; Van Hasselt, the vice chairman of the Rembrandt Society; and Schmidt-Degener, director of Amsterdam’s renowned Rijksmuseum. Like Hannema, Schmidt-Degener was a member of the Rembrandt Society’s executive committee. When Hannema had frantically lobbied the society for funds, the executive committee had responded with enthusiastic talk but not much money.
Bredius had spent much of the past few months railing against Schmidt-
Degener (the museum director was “Duveen’s little man-servant”), convinced that he had taken it on himself to badmouth Emmaus. The feud seems to have been largely a product of Bredius’s imagination. Early in the fall of 1937,
Schmidt-Degener had been shown a photograph of Emmaus and had responded halfheartedly. But as soon as he saw the actual painting, he joined the chorus of praise. Bredius continued to nurse his grudge even so. A late conversion was scarcely better than outright apostasy.
But Schmidt-Degener was as forceful a character as Bredius. “A connoisseur’s eye is like a musical ear,” he had once testified in a trial about a painting that might or might not have been by Leonardo. Schmidt-Degener was explaining to the court how he knew the painting was not authentic. “A man who is sensitive to music tells you a certain sound is false and if you ask him why he thinks so he will say: ‘It is false, don’t you hear it?’ So it is that I can look at a painting and