I Was Vermeer

by Frank Wynne

  As Han busied himself with the glasses of jenever, his visitors talked amongst themselves. A cursory investigation had told them that he was an eccentric, a sometime painter and occasional art dealer, living with his ex-wife, the actress Joanna Oelermans. They knew, too, that Han was rich, though the source of his wealth was mysterious. Neighbours said that he had won the French national lottery – some said he had won it twice.

  Han returned with the Bols and a box of fine Havana cigars and sat, waiting for them to speak. He had been waiting half his life for this moment, for a knock on the door, a tap on the shoulder, a voice from the heavens which would acclaim him as a genius or expose him as a fraud.

  ‘Maître,’ one of the officers began.

  The honorific surprised van Meegeren. In Dutch, ‘Maître’ is a title routinely bestowed on lawyers, but accorded otherwise only to great artists. It was a title he had long coveted, a mark of deference.

  ‘Maître, we are members of the Dutch Field Service working with the Allied Art Commission. It is our job to trace and repatriate items looted by the Nazi occupying forces. Works of art, jewellery, gold, furs – even the factory supplies stolen from warehouses and shipyards. We have been asked to speak to you about a painting which our colleagues recently discovered in Austria. They say it is an important painting, a national treasure. A Vermeer.’ At these words Han must surely have relaxed. He lit a cigar and passed the box around, sipped his Bols and doubtless smiled. Whatever the officers knew, it was clearly not what he most feared.

  ‘Some days ago, we were contacted by colleagues in Austria who have found a cache of paintings stolen for the collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in an abandoned salt mine at Alt-Aussee. Major Anderson has also recovered a number of paintings from the castle at Zell am Zee, where Mijnheer Göring’s wife is staying.’

  In Salt Mines and Castles, Thomas Carr Howe described the find:

  Frau Göring’s nurse handed over a canvas measuring about thirty inches square. She said Göring had given it to her the last time she saw him. As he placed the package in her hands he had said, ‘Guard this carefully. It is of great value. If you should ever be in need, you can sell it, and you will not want for anything the rest of your life.’ The package contained Göring’s Vermeer.

  Han nodded and refilled his glass, thinking quickly.

  ‘The painting is a religious work,’ the officer continued, ‘Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery. Our colleagues could find no mention of such a painting in the catalogue of Vermeer’s work, but it is clearly a Vermeer and bears a striking resemblance to his masterpiece, The Supper at Emmaus, in the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam.’

  ‘Yes, yes . . . I remember the painting.’ Han put down his cigar and leaned conspiratorially towards the officers. ‘As I’m sure you know, aside from being an artist in my own right, I am an occasional art dealer, though I cannot always bear to part with such treasures.’ He gestured to the paintings that towered over them.

  ‘The Reich kept very detailed documentation,’ the officer interrupted, ‘so we know that Göring’s adviser Walter Hofer bought the painting through a member of the Nazi occupying forces in Amsterdam, a banker named Alois Miedl. His records indicate that the painting was purchased from you.’

  ‘I sold the painting, certainly,’ Han blustered, ‘but I did not sell it to anyone named Miedl – I don’t even know the man. In any case, I have always been adamant that no painting should ever go to a German agent. No, I believe I offered the painting to the respected Dutch art dealer Rienstra van Strijvesand.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ The junior officer nodded eagerly. ‘We were not accusing you of anything, Maître. We have already traced the painting to van Strijvesand, so there is no reason to suppose you would have known that it was sold to the enemy. We simply need to know how you came by the painting so that the commission might restore it to its rightful owner.’

  ‘It was part of the estate of a lady of Dutch origin. The family had moved to Italy many years ago, and when they later fell on hard times she asked if I would sell a number of paintings which her grandmother had brought with her, though only on the strict condition that I did not reveal the family’s identity. Embarrassed by their reduced circumstances, you understand.’ His panic over, Han felt entitled to become a little testy now. ‘Since they retained me to act for them strictly on the basis that I preserve their anonymity, I can tell you only that they left Holland some sixty years ago, and the painting was among their effects. Since the death of her father, Mavroeke – the lady I represent – has been compelled to sell some of her family’s heirlooms. I can tell you no more than that.’

  Han’s indignation and integrity sounded heartfelt, his voice quavered with concern for this once-proud Dutch family, and his protestation that his source must remain confidential seemed genuine. In fact, the story was one he had invented a decade earlier for an altogether different occasion and he had told it so often now, he almost believed it himself. No one had ever questioned it. Nor did they now. The senior officer closed his notebook and the men finished their drinks and cigars in companionable silence. They shook his hand warmly on the doorstep, thanked him again for the Bols and the cigars and walked back towards their office on the Herengracht.

  Han was surprised and irritated when the following morning he opened his door to find the same officers – slightly abashed – inquiring if they might ask him one or two more questions. Han brusquely waved them in, his previous courtesy exhausted.

  ‘I’m afraid, Maître, we must insist on seeing the painting’s document of sale. It’s simply that, well . . . as I’m sure you know, it has been illegal to export works of art from Italy for many years.’

  ‘Of course I know.’ Han was peremptory; ‘This is precisely the reason why I cannot reveal the identity of the family. If the fascisti were to discover that Mavroeke had smuggled the painting out – who knows what might happen to her?’

  ‘Indeed, indeed . . . but for that very reason we need to be sure that the painting was not looted or confiscated by the fascisti and sold to the Nazis.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I have acted as a go-between for Mussolini and Hitler?’ Han snorted a derisive laugh. ‘The very suggestion is monstrous!’

  ‘Even so, we must insist on verifying that the documentation is in order.’

  Han fumed on behalf of the unfortunate if imaginary family whom he had so gallantly aided. He had a duty of honour, he insisted, to respect the confidentiality of his clients. Unmoved, the officers insisted that if he could not produce documentary evidence to prove that he had obtained the painting legitimately from its owners, together with any supporting papers to confirm their ownership, they would reluctantly be forced to place him under arrest. Since such documentation had never existed, Han could only refuse.

  ‘Then I am sorry, Mijnheer van Meegeren,’ Joop Piller stood and laid a hand on Han’s shoulder, ‘I must arrest you on suspicion of collaborating with the enemy, to wit knowingly selling a national treasure to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. I’m afraid you will have to come with us to the station.’

  Dazed and disoriented, Han may have asked for a moment so that he could talk to Joanna, his ex-wife, who still lived in his Keizersgracht home. But neither she nor his influential friends could help: within twenty-four hours Han was charged with treason and incarcerated.

  Now, six weeks later, van Meegeren was still languishing in prison and refusing to co-operate with his interrogators. Joanna visited him regularly, and must surely have tried to persuade him to explain himself. She alone knew that Han did not sell a Vermeer to Hermann Göring, and that he could prove his innocence if he would only speak. Meanwhile the reputation of this little-known painter, art dealer and landowner was dragged through the tabloid press.

  In the bright, postwar weeks after the Allied liberation, the Dutch were pitiless in their pursuit of those who had collaborated with the Nazis. With liberation came a smouldering anger; a hunger for justice.<
br />
  If the occupation had taken its toll on the Netherlands, freedom when it came had been slow in arriving. Six months earlier, on ‘Mad Tuesday’ – Dolle Dinsdag – as Allied forces marched across the southern border of the Netherlands it seemed that the war was over and the Dutch people celebrated in the streets. From her exile in London, Queen Wilhelmina called for a general strike in order to prevent German troops from reaching the front. In retaliation, the German authorities halted all shipments of food and essential supplies to the western provinces and began a savage, systematic looting of cattle, machinery, food and clothing. When the advancing Allies were halted at Arnhem, after the disastrous failure of Operation Market-Garden, there followed what the Dutch still call the ‘Hunger Winter’. Deprived of supplies by the occupying forces, 20,000 civilians died of starvation or hypothermia. ‘It was horrific,’ a Dutch journalist wrote at the time. ‘The whole day was spent eating, eating, talking about eating. It began as soon as we got up. Should we eat this piece of bread now or save it until later.’ By the time the Allied forces arrived, there was no bread, the hastily erected soup kitchens had long since closed, even the tulip bulbs had been eaten by the starving populace.

  It was hardly surprising, then, that the people of Amsterdam read in stunned disbelief the newspaper accounts of how van Meegeren – the newspapers referred to him as a ‘Dutch Nazi artist’ – had lived the life of a millionaire while his compatriots starved. The press described lavish parties at van Meegeren’s opulent Keizersgracht home where the guests gorged themselves on black market food and wine. It was rumoured that there had been exhibitions of van Meegeren’s paintings in Germany during the war. Han quickly came to symbolise the traitor within and the papers bayed for his blood.

  Han was hardly an innocent – he was a liar, a swindler and an adulterer. In addition to his crimes, he had amassed a gratifying catalogue of vices: he was an alcoholic, a morphine addict, and regularly consorted with local prostitutes. To this, it might be added that his mental health was tenuous, he was a veteran hypochondriac and in all probability suffered from paranoid delusions. But of the charges against him Han van Meegeren was innocent: he had never sold a Dutch national treasure to the Nazis, a fact he could have proved at any time with four simple words. And still he said nothing. For the inveterate fabulist, the truth which might set him free was a long time coming.

  There seems to be only one plausible explanation for Han’s continued silence. He was wrestling with immortality. For six weeks, sweating, sleepless, shaking and delusional from the enforced withdrawal from alcohol, cigarettes and morphine, Han worried about his artistic legacy. As John Groom has it, ‘Death stalks the forger, either literally as capital punishment or culturally as censorship.’ This was Han’s dilemma: if he told the truth, his life would be spared, but his paintings – The Supper at Emmaus, the most celebrated and admired painting in the Boijmans Gallery, The Last Supper in the collection of D.G. van Beuningen, The Footwashing in the Rijksmuseum, and half a dozen others cherished by public and private collectors as priceless treasures – would be derided and, in accordance with Dutch law, destroyed. If he said nothing, though he were dead, his work would live on. Through the haze of panic, sickness, fear and frustration, he wrestled for six weeks with his decision, trying to mouth the words that would transform him from a Nazi sympathiser to a national hero: ‘I am a forger.’

  A PORTRAIT OF THE FORGER AS A YOUNG ARTIST

  1

  THE LION TAMER

  Every child is an artist.

  The problem is how to remain

  an artist once he grows up.

  Pablo Picasso

  Han van Meegeren was born to be a painter; unfortunately, he was fifty years too late.

  With due solemnity on 19 August 1839, Paul Delaroche, one of the most popular and respected French painters of the nineteenth century, solemnly reported: ‘After today, painting is dead.’ Paradoxically, he made this statement while working on a twenty-seven-metre painting for the École des Beaux Arts depicting the history of art. The death knell came in response to the most spectacular event in the history of figurative art: the gift to the world by the French government of a dazzling new patent: the daguerreotype.

  Across Europe, the new technology of painting in light dubbed ‘photography’ was greeted with excitement and awe. Exhibitions were held in the great cities of Europe celebrating this magical process which could freeze time and create a perfect likeness. Viewing an early daguerreotype, the elderly J.M.W. Turner is said to have remarked that he was glad he had had his day.

  Though Louis Daguerre’s process was too expensive and cumbersome to supplant painting immediately, the fear that painting was dead was real and palpable. At the 1860 Paris Exhibition, Charles Baudelaire denounced photography as ‘the refuge of failed painters with too little talent’. ‘It is obvious,’ the poet railed, ‘that this industry has become art’s most mortal enemy. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.’ While many artists dubbed photography the foe-to-graphic-art, others were more sanguine: when asked by Queen Victoria whether photography was a threat to the painter, her miniaturist Alfred Chalon quipped dryly, ‘No, Ma’am: the photograph cannot flatter.’

  In fact, photography, far from destroying painting, was a major factor in its evolution. The traditional subject matter of the artist had been circumscribed by history, religion and mythology, photography, however, insinuated itself into every area of human experience, chronicling the lives of labourers and factory workers, capturing chance unposed moments, forever changing what was appropriate for observation. As photography struggled to mimic fine art, using soft focus and multiple exposures to ape romantic realism, artists began radical reconsideration of their subject and techniques, abandoning realism as the acme of artistic achievement in favour of strange and unfinished ‘impressionistic’ sketches.

  By 1889, when Han was born, though realism was indeed in steep decline, painting was thriving. It was in 1889 that Gauguin turned away from Impressionism towards something less naturalistic, which he called ‘synthetism’; that Georges Seurat made his pointillist sketch of Gustave Eiffel’s new Tower as men laboured to complete this iron folly for the Exposition Universelle. This was the year in which an unknown Dutch painter voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum of St Paul in Arles where he painted the stone bench and the swirls of cypresses in the hospital gardens; the year in which the young Henri Matisse, a court clerk who had never set foot in an art gallery, enrolled in a painting class in his native Saint Quentin. And it was in 1889 that Picasso, barely eight years old, painted what is considered to be his first work: Le Picador. Something almost magical was happening in Western art, some spark of madness, of genius, was at large, fuelling argument and controversy in Paris and London. Nothing of this had made its way to Deventer.

  Han van Meegeren was born in the historic Hanseatic city of Deventer which then, as now, offered a comforting glimpse of the glories of Holland, a thousand years of history frozen in stone. From a distance, it seemed little changed from the city that appears in the riverscapes of Salomon van Ruisdael. Ringed about by a landscape of windmills, thatched houses, ancient forests and paddocks where sheep may safely graze, it was a bucolic idyll. Han came to loathe it. From his earliest years he had a taste for the high life, in later years a penchant for low life; Deventer offered neither. Its quaint medieval streets bristled with bourgeois common sense, but a short stroll to the outskirts of the soft centre reveals the hard industrial shell: nineteenth-century chemical plants, textile factories and machine shops, as dark and satanic as any Blake imagined, girdle it with their staunch Dutch work-ethic.

  Henricus van Meegeren and his wife Augusta Louise christened their third child Henricus Antonius van Meegeren following the Dutch custom of giving their children Latinate names, but since the Dutch can rarely resist a diminutive
, Henricus was shortened to Han, which became Hantje – ‘Little Han’ – to distinguish him from his father.

  Henricus senior was the epitome of doughty, hard-headed pragmatism. A teacher at the Rijksweek school, he held degrees in both English and mathematics from Delft University and was the author of a handful of dry textbooks. In the family home, an elegant three-storey house with bay windows and a mansard-roof, Henricus governed his five children as he did his pupils. He was a good man: upstanding and honourable, without a whit of imagination. A zealous Catholic, he marched the family five miles in crocodile formation every Sunday to the church where Henricus’s brother was parish priest. The children, Hermann, Han, Joanna, Louise and Gusstje, were forbidden to play with Protestant children. Han and his siblings quickly learned that to deviate from the future their father had mapped out would lead to heartbreak and disappointment. Henricus senior had already decided that Hermann, his eldest son, would enter the priesthood; Han, who was an able student, would follow in his father’s footsteps as a teacher. The girls, he presumed, could hope only to marry someone of breeding and education, a man with a profession.

  As a boy, Han drew lions. By the time he was eight, the margins of his schoolbooks had become rolling plains and circus rings where prides of great cats fought and played. His mother had taken him to see them. Augusta Louise nurtured in her son the same creative spark she had once felt in herself until marriage had snuffed it out. She took Han through the intricate tangle of medieval streets where Erasmus had dawdled as a schoolboy. She told him about Ter Borch, a great artist and Deventer’s most famous son. She took him to see the gabled houses overlooking the Ijssel, to St Lebuinuskerk and the Bergkerk, but Han always begged her to take him to De Waag, the medieval Weigh House which dominated the town square with its curious octagonal tower and turrets at each corner. Han would sit with his sketchbook and stare at the carved lions. Two of the beasts sat upright on pillars which flanked the great double staircase, others seemed to slink along the stone balustrades, crouched, menacing, waiting to pounce. Sometimes, on his way home from school, he would come just to stare.