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By Root 1571 0

LIKED to tell a long, detailed story about the Boymans show. He had blended into the crowd, he said, and patiently waited his turn for a close look at the museum’s new masterpiece. For all the other museumgoers, the exhibit meant a pleasant day out and perhaps a respite from the dire political news. For Van Meegeren, who had put up with endless sneers, the Boymans show was redemption at last. The magnificence of the setting, the size of the crowd, the connoisseurs’ praise and the painting’s astronomical price, the endless references to “genius” and “a masterpiece”—the thought of all these made the forger almost dizzy with joy. He leaned a bit closer to his painting, admiring his handiwork in a happy trance.

A guard hurried over. “Please, sir, step back. It’s a very valuable painting.”

Sometimes Van Meegeren added a coda. In this version, he would turn to one of the swarm of spectators gathered near Emmaus and excitedly discussing its merits. Van Meegeren would say that he didn’t think much of the painting. His shocked listeners would ratchet up their praise. Van Meegeren would counter. Vermeer never painted pictures like this, he would explain. His listeners would enlighten him. Van Meegeren would go further still. This so-called “Vermeer” was probably a fake. Ridiculous, he would be told, and then his new acquaintances would launch into a heated rebuttal.

Perhaps it happened, though the story smacks more of an outcast’s revenge fantasy than of an actual event. But unadorned reality provided Van Meegeren with revenge aplenty. The ecstasy over Emmaus was nearly universal. In smothering Van Meegeren’s forgery in praise, Bredius and Hannema were in the best of company.

PHYSICISTS TALK of parallel universes, an infinity of worlds each cut off from all the others, some totally different from the world we know and others like ours in almost every way up until one particular fork in the road. Somewhere, for instance, is a world in which a weary Abraham Lincoln decided not to attend the theater on an April evening in 1865. To look at the art world in the 1930s as it appeared to the greatest connoisseurs of the day is to plunge into one of these alternative realities.

In the parallel universe that came into being when the Boymans Museum unveiled Emmaus, Vermeer commands all the admiration he does in ours, but the name “Vermeer” conjures up something far different. In that world, Vermeer’s greatest achievement was not The Milkmaid or Girl with a Pearl Earring but Christ at Emmaus. “The discovery of Emmaus is the most important art historical event of this century,” declared one scholar. “The painting shows Vermeer at his best.”

To flip through the pages of art books from the thirties is almost dizzying. Perhaps the most authoritative early work on Vermeer was a thick tome published in 1939, titled simply Jan Vermeer of Delft. The author was the eminent Dutch scholar A.B. de Vries. (Later, De Vries would be in charge of recovering Dutch art looted by the Nazis, including Hermann Goering’s “Vermeer,” painted by Van Meegeren.)

The book’s cover is solid black with no decoration but a thin gold border and Vermeer’s monogram in gold. The text is sober and intelligent. Christ at Emmaus is emphatically proclaimed a masterpiece, a standout even in comparison with the rest of Vermeer’s work, “since it strikes a hitherto unknown chord.” The painting itself rates a full-page reproduction. So does a detail showing Jesus’ hand raised in blessing, and so does a detail of the servant girl’s face.

Duveen and one or two others had called Van Meegeren’s bluff, but De Vries’s view was the standard one among those best qualified to express an opinion. It seems impossible, but if not for the knock on Han van Meegeren’s door in 1945, perhaps we, too, would still be making pilgrimages to Rotterdam to pay homage to Johannes Vermeer’s greatest work.

And then, also in 1939, a far more important bit of good fortune came Van Meegeren’s way. For Europe, this was the dreadful year when war began. In August 1939, the Boymans Museum decided that it had