The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [95]
So Schmidt-Degener knew when a painting was not what it purported to be. More to the point, he knew a masterpiece when he saw one. Emmaus was a masterpiece. And now Hannema saw the purpose of the meeting he had been asked to join. Surely the proper home for a painting of such stature, the arts minister suggested, was the nation’s best-known and most important museum? Surely Emmaus belonged in the Rijksmuseum.
Schmidt-Degener turned to Hannema. The art world owed a great debt of gratitude to the Boymans Museum, and to its illustrious director for his efforts to obtain Emmaus for Holland. How unfortunate that those efforts had fallen short of their goal. Perhaps he could take the liberty of making a suggestion that would honor Hannema’s investment of time and energy, and also work to everyone’s benefit? Schmidt-Degener offered up his idea: the Rijksmuseum would buy Emmaus for itself, and as a gesture of gratitude to the Boymans for stepping aside, it would hand over two gems from its Dutch seventeenth-century collection, Pieter de Hooch’s Woman with a Child in a Pantry and Vermeer’s Love Letter.
Hannema listened politely and then dropped his bombshell. It was too late! He had, just the night before, bought Emmaus for the Boymans, thanks to a generous gift from Mr. Van der Vorm. He thanked the gentlemen for their kind offer.
Hannema strode away in triumph. Schmidt-Degener slunk off, to console himself as best he could with a De Hooch and a Vermeer that did not quite measure up.
41
THE LAST HURDLE
Hannema knew Vermeer and he knew blockbusters, and he began at once to prepare a show that would present Christ at Emmaus to the world. The exhibition would open in 1938, as part of the celebration of Queen Wilhelmina’s Jubilee, honoring her fortieth year on the throne. For once, all eyes would be on the Boymans Museum.
In the meantime, there was much to be done. Hannema set to work negotiating the loan of paintings for his exhibition. Bredius continued to beat the drums for Emmaus. He talked the painting up incessantly, and he prepared yet another article proclaiming Emmaus’s greatness, this one for the art journal Oud Holland. He began by comparing his feelings on first seeing Christ at Emmaus with his feelings on finding Christ in the House of Mary and Martha three decades before.
Even to make such a comparison was to proclaim his own authority. Who else could reminisce about the different Vermeers he had found? But in truth, Bredius explained, there was no comparison. The earlier painting was a Vermeer, true, but there was Vermeer and then there was Vermeer. “What a difference,” Bredius exclaimed. In Emmaus, the “depth of grief” in Jesus’s face would “stay forever with anyone who is receptive to the exalted in art!”
The question that troubled Bredius was not why Vermeer had painted this uncharacteristic work but why he had not probed those depths again and again. “Why only those few biblical paintings? Why never again a canvas where he expressed so deeply the stirrings of his soul?” The answer, Bredius surmised, must have been that Vermeer found it easier to sell small domestic scenes than large biblical ones. But Bredius was in too good a mood to linger on such melancholy topics. “Let us rejoice that his greatest masterpiece, Christ at Emmaus, has been obtained for the Netherlands,” he concluded, “with feelings of gratitude for everyone who helped make it possible.”
Then Bredius heard distressing news. Almost as soon as it had begun to look as if Emmaus really would end up with Hannema, Bredius had started agitating against the chief restorer at the Boymans. “If only it doesn’t get into the hands of that destroyer of paintings Luitwieler,” he had fretted in early December 1937, and he continued to hammer away at the same theme for months. Luitwieler “murdered” the pictures entrusted to him. “Do you know what I’m scared to death of?” Bredius asked Hannema, who knew perfectly well. “Of that killer of paintings, Luitwieler, ‘cleaning’ the Vermeer.”
Despite his fretting, Bredius had little