The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [99]
Part Four
Anatomy of a Hoax
43
SCANDAL IN THE ARCHIVES
Today, visitors to the Boymans Museum will not find Emmaus in a place of honor. For years they would not have found it at all. Its banishment now past, it hangs high above the ground—the bottom edge of the painting is perhaps six feet above the floor—on a wall with such miscellaneous objects from the museum collection as a toy truck inside a glass box and an ordinary metal chair that looks as if it came from a sixties dining room. The painting bears a label, but it is mounted on the frame’s top edge and cannot be read from ground level. The museum’s audio tour skips over Emmaus. So does the postcard collection in the gift shop.
But to the dismay of the Boymans’s curators, Emmaus is the picture that most visitors want to see. “It’s awful that it’s one of our most famous paintings,” laments Jeroen Giltaij, a specialist in the Dutch Golden Age. Out of politeness, Giltaij forces himself to stand in front of Emmaus and discuss it for a minute. Does it make sense that connoisseurs once believed this was a Vermeer?
He winces. “It’s rubbish; it’s a terrible painting. It’s astonishing that anyone ever thought it was by a seventeenth-century artist.”
When you look at Emmaus, what stands out?
“You see these sickly faces, with the huge eyelids. That was the image of beauty in the thirties, but if you look at it now you think that everyone had a terrible disease.” Looking harder now, Giltaij rattles off failing after failing. “The tone of the skin, the bulging eyes, the way the hair hangs so limp and dead. The left arm—you see a hand coming from the sleeve, but where does it come from? And what about the sleeve! Cloth is supposed to hang, but the sleeve is stiff and completely hollow, like a drainpipe.”
But if the painting is that bad, how did Giltaij’s predecessors get the story so wrong?
And not only did they get it wrong, but they got it wrong time after time. Emmaus was only the first of six forged Vermeers that Van Meegeren sold between 1937 and 1943. He grew increasingly sloppy and careless through the years—why wouldn’t he, since even the crudest fraud brought him millions?—and each new painting was uglier than its predecessors. “They sold just the same,” Van Meegeren would later marvel, and they sold at once, and nearly every one brought in even more money than Emmaus had.
THAT STRING OF successes testifies to Van Meegeren’s cunning. The forger was right to lavish care on Emmaus, because its acceptance cleared the way for all the fakes that followed. “It’s not what anyone would have called a Vermeer in the past,” the experts reasoned each time Van Meegeren put another biblical forgery on the market, “but the resemblance to Emmaus is unmistakable, and that’s the greatest Vermeer of all.”
His triumph calls to mind the episode, following the French Revolution, when the new rulers created an improved system of weights and measures and designated a particular metal bar as the “official meter.” Enshrined in the National Archives, it lay in precisely controlled conditions of temperature and humidity, like Lenin in his glass casket. The bar was merely symbolic, because no one truly depended on it to know how long a meter was. But Emmaus was more than a symbol. In effect, Van Meegeren had sneaked into the Archives and substituted a false meter for the real one.
With Emmaus as the new benchmark, Van Meegeren no longer had to compete with Vermeer. Now he could churn out forgeries that only had to measure up to his own far more forgiving standard. Even better, each new fake broadened the definition